MICHEL DE NOSTREDAME, OCCULTISM & 'LES PROPHÉTIES'

Michel de Nostredame

Today, The Grandma is under the effects of a second heat wave in Barcelona. It is terrible. She has decided to stay at home, continue studying her Ms. Excel course, and read about Michel de Nostredame, the famous Provençal astrologer and physician also known as Nostradamus, who wrote the famous Prophecies and died on a day like today in 1566.

Before reading about this incredible scientist, The Grandma has continued studying a new chapter of her Ms. Excel new course. It is easy to start with Ms. Excel and she has been reading the theory carefully. In a few days, she is going to start practising with Ms. Excel exercises, but before, she has to know the theory perfectly.

Chapter 1. Introductions. Elements of Ms. Excel (Spanish Version)

Michel de Nostredame (depending on the source, 14 or 21 December 1503-1 or 2 July 1566), usually Latinised as Nostradamus, was a Provençal astrologer, physician and reputed seer, who is best known for his book Les Prophéties, a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events. The book was first published in 1555 and has rarely been out of print since his death.

Nostradamus's family was originally Jewish, but had converted to Catholicism before he was born. He studied at the University of Avignon, but was forced to leave after just over a year when the university closed due to an outbreak of the plague. He worked as an apothecary for several years before entering the University of Montpellier, hoping to earn a doctorate, but was almost immediately expelled after his work as an apothecary, a manual trade forbidden by university statutes, was discovered.

More information: Live Science

He first married in 1531, but his wife and two children died in 1534 during another plague outbreak. He fought alongside doctors against the plague before remarrying to Anne Ponsarde, who bore him six children. He wrote an almanac for 1550 and, as a result of its success, continued writing them for future years as he began working as an astrologer for various wealthy patrons. Catherine de' Medici became one of his foremost supporters.

His Les Prophéties, published in 1555, relied heavily on historical and literary precedent, and initially received mixed reception. He suffered from severe gout toward the end of his life, which eventually developed into edema. He died on 2 July 1566. Many popular authors have retold apocryphal legends about his life.

Michel de Nostredame aka Nostradamus

In the years since the publication of his Les Prophéties, Nostradamus has attracted a large number of supporters, who, along with much of the popular press, credit him with having accurately predicted many major world events.

Most academic sources reject the notion that Nostradamus had any genuine supernatural prophetic abilities and maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus's quatrains are the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations, sometimes deliberate.

These academics argue that Nostradamus's predictions are characteristically vague, meaning they could be applied to virtually anything, and are useless for determining whether their author had any real prophetic powers. They also point out that English translations of his quatrains are almost always of extremely poor quality, based on later manuscripts, produced by authors with little knowledge of sixteenth-century French, and often deliberately mistranslated to make the prophecies fit whatever events the translator believed they were supposed to have predicted.

More information: Express

Nostradamus was born on either 14 or 21 December 1503 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Provence, where his claimed birthplace still exists, and baptized Michel. He was one of at least nine children of notary Jaume or Jacques de Nostredame and Reynière, granddaughter of Pierre de Saint-Rémy who worked as a physician in Saint-Rémy.

Jaume's family had originally been Jewish, but his father, Cresquas, a grain and money dealer based in Avignon, had converted to Catholicism around 1459–60, taking the Christian name Pierre and the surname Nostredame (Our Lady), the saint on whose day his conversion was solemnised. The earliest ancestor who can be identified on the paternal side is Astruge of Carcassonne, who died about 1420.

Michel's known siblings included Delphine, Jean (c. 1507–77), Pierre, Hector, Louis, Bertrand, Jean II born in 1522 and Antoine born in 1523. Little else is known about his childhood, although there is a persistent tradition that he was educated by his maternal great-grandfather Jean de St. Rémy -a tradition which is somewhat undermined by the fact that the latter disappears from the historical record after 1504, when the child was only one year old.

At the age of 14, Nostradamus entered the University of Avignon to study for his baccalaureate. After little more than a year, when he would have studied the regular trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic rather than the later quadrivium of geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy/astrology, he was forced to leave Avignon when the university closed its doors during an outbreak of the plague.

After leaving Avignon, Nostradamus, by his own account, traveled the countryside for eight years from 1521 researching herbal remedies. 

Les Prophéties, Nostradamus

After another visit to Italy, Nostradamus began to move away from medicine and toward the occult, although evidence suggests that he remained a Catholic and was opposed to the Protestant Reformation. But it seems he could have dabbled in horoscopes, necromancy, scrying, and good luck charms such as the hawthorn rod.

Following popular trends, he wrote an almanac for 1550, for the first time in print Latinising his name to Nostradamus. He was so encouraged by the almanac's success that he decided to write one or more annually.

Taken together, they are known to have contained at least 6,338 prophecies, as well as at least eleven annual calendars, all of them starting on 1 January and not, as is sometimes supposed, in March. It was mainly in response to the almanacs that the nobility and other prominent persons from far away soon started asking for horoscopes and psychic advice from him, though he generally expected his clients to supply the birth charts on which these would be based, rather than calculating them himself as a professional astrologer would have done. When obliged to attempt this himself on the basis of the published tables of the day, he frequently made errors and failed to adjust the figures for his clients' place or time of birth.

More information: Business Insider

He then began his project of writing a book of one thousand mainly French quatrains, which constitute the largely undated prophecies for which he is most famous today. 

Feeling vulnerable to opposition on religious grounds, however, he devised a method of obscuring his meaning by using Virgilianised syntax, word games and a mixture of other languages such as Greek, Italian, Latin, and Provençal.

The quatrains, published in a book titled Les Prophéties (The Prophecies), received a mixed reaction when they were published. Some people thought Nostradamus was a servant of evil, a fake, or insane, while many of the elite evidently thought otherwise. Catherine de' Medici, wife of King Henry II of France, was one of Nostradamus's greatest admirers.

By 1566, Nostradamus's gout, which had plagued him painfully for many years and made movement very difficult, turned into edema.

On the evening of 1 July, he is alleged to have told his secretary Jean de Chavigny, You will not find me alive at sunrise. The next morning he was reportedly found dead, lying on the floor next to his bed and a bench.

 

Nostradamus

In The Prophecies Nostradamus compiled his collection of major, long-term predictions. The first installment was published in 1555 and contained 353 quatrains. The third edition, with three hundred new quatrains, was reportedly printed in 1558, but now survives as only part of the omnibus edition that was published after his death in 1568. 

This version contains one unrhymed and 941 rhymed quatrains, grouped into nine sets of 100 and one of 42, called Centuries.

Given printing practices at the time, which included type-setting from dictation, no two editions turned out to be identical, and it is relatively rare to find even two copies that are exactly the same. Certainly there is no warrant for assuming -as would-be code-breakers are prone to do- that either the spellings or the punctuation of any edition are Nostradamus's originals.

The Almanacs, by far the most popular of his works, were published annually from 1550 until his death. He often published two or three in a year, entitled either Almanachs, detailed predictions, Prognostications or Presages, more generalised predictions.

More information: Sacred Texts

Since his death, only the Prophecies have continued to be popular, but in this case they have been quite extraordinarily so. Over two hundred editions of them have appeared in that time, together with over 2,000 commentaries.

Their persistence in popular culture seems to be partly because their vagueness and lack of dating make it easy to quote them selectively after every major dramatic event and retrospectively claim them as hits.

Many of Nostradamus's supporters believe his prophecies are genuine. Owing to the subjective nature of these interpretations, however, no two of them completely agree on what Nostradamus predicted, whether for the past or for the future. Many supporters, however, do agree, for example, that he predicted the Great Fire of London, the French Revolution, and the rises of Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, and Donald Trump, both world wars, and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Popular authors frequently claim that he predicted whatever major event had just happened at the time of each book's publication, such as the Apollo moon landings in 1969, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. 

This movable feast aspect appears to be characteristic of the genre.

Download The Compleat Works of Nostradamus

Indeed, the hereditary gift of prophecy

will go to the grave with me.

Nostradamus