Was he the real deal? I think he probably was but in ways different than you might think.

In his time, the fifteen hundreds, he was widely acclaimed for applying his considerable apothecary skills to saving thousands of lives in France and Italy during the Black Death. However, today, to millions around the world, he is more readily known for his astonishing prophesies.

In 1554 he published a long series of prophecies called Les Propheties.

From what I have read of Nostradamus’s original quatrains, despite my feeble grasp of 16th-century French, I can clearly see he had a penetrating insight into human nature. He possessed a rare ability to envisage how the evolution of innate human behaviours might provoke certain future situations (climate crises, conflicts etc.). And, it is relatively easy to see how his predictions for the impacts of these situations and events could be interpreted as prophetic.

What I’m saying is that he explored the likely trajectory of civilisation taking into account the worst, and the best, of human nature.

Whilst critics invariably suggest that the words used in his prophesies could mean anything, that they are indefinite and circumspect, I’m inclined to be more forgiving not simply because, for the most part, they draw their conclusions based on unreliable translations. Archaic French is a slippery fish to translate.

He wrote in French, a language that everyone could understand not just scholars and the clergy. He wanted everyone to share the messages in his revelations. It isn’t surprising, then, that Les Propheties focuses on common people and the impact that poverty, plague, famine, conflict and natural disasters have upon them. Of course, he didn’t ignore prominent figures but alluded to them only in so far as such a character would cause or precipitate a historic event. He never mentioned by name the likes of Napoleon, Hitler or J. F. Kennedy, no, it is we who inject these historical personalities into the allusive prophecies he made.

As for our modern interpretation, we must bear in mind that he was restricted by the limits of his lived experience. Above all else, in the 1500s, he had to be extremely careful to avoid language the Church might interpret as heretical. His life was at risk for this very reason many times. Secondly, and of equal importance, he could only employ words, and the definitions of them, that were available in the 16^th Century. What we, in our time, consider to be archaic language was all he had to describe modern paraphernalia within complex future events. For example, there were no words for nuclear, holocaust, car, bomb, electricity, skyscraper, jet plane, or television. Remember, he was writing for the common man to whom the concepts of computers, and the internet were incomprehensible, and to speak of manned space exploration was not only heretical (risking execution) but impossible to even imagine. Similarly, future global geopolitics was beyond their grasp; America was a wild and empty place; China and Japan were mystical lands undiscovered by European travellers, and Australia did not exist. Yet, Nostradamus wrote about all these places and phenomena the only way he could, using the only words he knew.

To gain anything of relevance to us, in the 21st Century, from his monumental and scholarly work, we must explore the themes of his writing. He regularly examined such subjects as greed, ego, prejudice, injustice and inequality. He foresaw that unless these, and many other, human proclivities are eliminated, or at least controlled, civilisation will decline, driving the world’s present and future events from which no one can escape the cataclysmic consequences.

I offer the idea that it is not so much that Nostradamus made predictions but that he revealed footprints in the sands of our future history.

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© Rod McRiven 2021

Pictures: “Assassination of Ghandi” by Feliks Topolski