Nostradamus

This is the man who comes into limelight whenever there is a big news happening or happened in the world. Be it September 11th catastrophe, Iraq war, Afghan war or news related to world's highly acclaimed people, or even the news of when the world is going to end. There are lot of books circling around time to time telling us about the predictions for the future written by this person. Well, yes I remember once (more than a decade back) reading a book about him but I hardly understood the way it was written, eventually I gave up reading it at that time.

Just like a spark I got interest in reading about him and the first thing I did was hit the library. Seriously I love the way I get books on anything and everything under the sun here. I took some six books written about him by various authors (Just a random pick by me) and here I am reading about this man, but to my surprise I found each one describing different predictions. Believe it or not most of the predictions are for some insane publicity. Most of which are created just in the spur of the moment and those are nothing to do with Nostradamus.

Nostradamus was a medical professional, astrologer and also a highly talented person who had an incredible talent of foreseeing the future. It was by his own interest and also encouraged by his grand dad, he became an astrologer. Later he started writing quatrains (a stanza consists of four lines). It was through this quatrains he started producing Almanacs (detailed events or predictions). He published these almanacs every year, sometimes twice or thrice each year, until he passed in 1566 at the age of 62.

During his time, many people tried to seek information through him for their life or about the place or for their kingdom and there were some royal people who kept him in high esteem for his predictions. And there were also few who badly criticized him for his predictions and called him names as they thought he's manipulating with his future predictions.

Here is a book named "The Further Prophecies Of Nostradamus 1985 and Beyond" by Erika Cheetham. The author was an Oxford scholar who had researched Nostradamus's life and work for many years. In her book she lets us know her research on his quatrains and almost comes up with every single important event he predicted that had happened in the past. Be it from Napoleon, Hitler, Mussolini, Hiroshima and Nagasaki disaster, World war II, death of John Paul I, assassination of John .F. Kennedy, Freedom of India and partition, etc. Interestingly, many of these were never predicted by Nostradamus. Mrs. Cheetham misread his quatrains and delivered it in her book.

"Fueling the September 11 frenzy, which was intensified by the mostly uncritical media attention, was of course an outright lie, in the form of the undoubtedly deliberate adulterations of verses of the prophecies by persons unknown."

The above words are taken from the book "Nostradamus - The Man Behind the Prophecies" a biography by Ian Wilson. In his book Mr. Wilson quotes verses from English Jesuit scholar Father Herbert Thurston as some of Nostradamus's predictions didn't materialize and turned out to be plain wrong. In Thurston's words:

"Nostradamus provided an ingenious system of divination in which the misses can never be recorded and only the hits come to the surface."

Mr. Wilson ends his books by these words: Nostradamus in his final verses of the prophecies, he solemnly predicted: "As time elapses after my death, my writings will have more weight than during my lifetime." No one, whatever their views on Nostradamus, can deny that he was right on that one.

Here is an example of double predictions explained in the book "The Secrets Of Nostradamus" by David Ovason.

"Beast, wild with hunger, swim across rivers,
The greater part of the field will be against the Hister,
The great one will be dragged in an iron cage,
When the German child will see the Rhine."

Many predicted the above verse to be the fate of Adolf Hitler but Nostradamus referred the word "Hister" to the longest river in European union, River Danube. Similarly there are various examples such as Royal divorce of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, Facts about UFO (Unidentified Objects) and so many other misinterpreted verses which are explained by Mr. Ovason. He also added that Nostradamus himself admitted that he wrote his quatrains in a strange language, a Scabreux language, as he called it, which is now called as Green language. This is the language which teaches the mystery of things and unveils the most hidden truths, and it is also known as Language of Birds. Even for those who are efficient in the research of this language find it hard to understand the quatrains of Nostradamus. So beware of the innumerable books which carry his modern day predictions, most of it are untrue.

"The walls will be reduced from brick to marble,
Seven and fifty peaceful years,
Joy to humans, renewed the aqueduct,
Health, great fruit, joy and sweet times."

by this above quatrain Mr. Ovason admits that "it is notoriously difficult to interpret a Nostradamus Quatrain which deals with futurity, yet we feel on secure ground in this interpretation of Quatrain X.89 as referring to a period of peace, lasting 57 years and starting in 2020."

May the world be in peace for now and forever. God bless.