1 Q1

Being seated at night in secret study

Meditating alone upon the brass tripod:

A minute flame comes forth from the solitude

Making successful that which should not be believed in vain.

The first two quatrains lauch les propheties with a cryptic story of Nostradamus’ nocturnal occult ritual in which he sets aside his normal mental and emotional limitations to awaken his prophetic powers. The ritual is similar to the rite of the ancient Greek sibylline oracles of Branchus. He is alone at the dead of night in his secret study on the top floor of his house in Salon, sitting in deep meditation on a brass tripod. At last he becomes aware of the gap of consciousness, the slender flame of divine witnessing.

1 Q2

The divining wand in hand is placed in the middle of Branchus;

With water he moistens the hem (of the robe) and foot.

Fear! A voice quivers through his long sleeves:

Divine splendor. The divine one sits near by.

The following words with Nostradamus’ magical bible De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum, best describes the customized ritual used here. He has taken the role of the prophetess being possessed by a God and has incorporated aspects from the oracular traditions of both Delphi and Brachidae. Our prophet sits upon a tripod in front of a brass browl filled to the brim with streaming water made pungent with stimulating oils and perhaps lightly narcotic herbs. This is done to imitate the vapours from the volcanic fissure that the Delphic oracle imbibed to prepare for her possession by a God. Between deep inhalations of perfumed vapor he chants magic incantations and feels the minute flame of divine fire penetrate his soul. At the right moment, Nostradamus dips his wand, a laurel branch, into the brass bowl. He anoints his foot and hem of his robe. A sudden rush of paranormal energy into his body is at first frightening, but he surrenders himself to it and is transported by ecstasy. The voice of a higher entity vibrates inside him. Is it his own inner consciousness, or is it the spirit of Branchus himself, come to do our prophet’s bidding? The prophet does not record an answer. He lowers a consecrated pen to parachment and begins to write a history of the future, as it is told by the hushed voice of his divine messenger.

1 Q3

When the litter is overturned by a whirlwind

And the faces are covered by their cloaks,

The republic will be troubled by new people:

Then whites and reds will judge wrongly.

Many of Nostradamus’ finest predictions are about the period of the French Revolution. We can feel, in the languages and tone of revolution quatrains the prophet’s horror and disbelief as well as his struggle to understand the visions of chaos and blood that has come to him. Twice he refers to is as a whirlwind, a description that may not be just a metaphor but an attempt to date the revolution. On 13 July 1788, exactly one year before the storming of the Bastille, France was visited by a violent sandstorm, one of the worst ever recorded. Named the Great Tornado of 1788 by contemporary journals, this cyclonic storm rained hail the size of acorns and unleashed a phalanx of tornadoes that cut a swath of destruction from Tours, Chartres, and Paris, through Lille and into Belgium. If Nostradamus had intended the meteorogical and social whirlwind to be one and the same, he can be excused of blending two events into one. His vision of the common people overturning the litters of the aristocracy was recorded 235 years earlier. The irrestible storm of revolution would force the aristocracy to leave France as refugees, their faces covered by cloaks on the windy passage across the English Channel, or leave life with their heads covered by cloaks carried away from the guillotine within a bloody wicker basket. Whites are the Bourbons, whose cockade was white. They ignored the needs of their people and brought disaster upon themselves. Reds signifies the revolutionaries, for that color as symbolic of rebellion in Nostradamus’ time as it is in our own.

1 Q4

In the whole world there will be one monarch,

Whose life and peace will not be long,

Then the fishing bark [of Peter?] will be lost,

It will be ruled to its greater detriment.

The monarch is the pope. Not of Nostradamus’ time but of ours, and he could be the last pope before doomsday. His reign is short and his portion of inner peace far shorter. The fishing bark symbolizes the papacy. It is the bark of the first pope, the fisherman from Galilee, St Peter. In this case it could stand for the Vatican or indirectly clue us in to the name of the last pope, named after the first, who will steer the ship of the Holy See into the rocks of Apocalypse in our near future. This is the first of several prophecies in which Nostradamus echoes a medieval seer he never met or read, St Malachy of Ireland. The tone of this quatrain written in 1554 parallels a prophecy recorded 415 years earlier, when St Malachy was on the last leg of his pilgrimage to Rome in 1139. On first sighting the Eternal City stretched out below, he immediately fell to the ground in an estatic trance. He lay there for hours murmuring cryptic Latin phrases, which his attendant recorded of posterity. Each of Malachy’s phrases signifies either the name, heraldic device or background of all the 111 popes, from his contemporary, Celestinus II, until Judgement Day. He close with a paragraph on the tragic reign of the final pope, of whom he said:

                    During the last persecution of the Holy Roman Church, these shall sit Petrus Romanus [Peter of Rome], who shall feed the sheep amid great tribulations, and when these have passed, the City of the Seven Hills shall be utterly destroyed, and the awful Judge will judge people.

After Pope John Paul II passes away, only two popes will follow, according to Malachy’s list. Nostradamus, writing at a time a little closer to the latter days perhaps uncovers one or more important detail: Peter of Rome is partly responsible for guiding the papacy to its ruin (it will be ruled to its greater detriment ).

1 Q5

They will be driven away an account of a long battle;

They will be very much overpowered in the countryside,

Town and city will have greater struggle,

Corcassonne and Narbonne will have their hearts tested.

Although the prophecies Les Propheties are out of time sequence, Nostradamus would have ensured that his contemporary readers would soon encounter the visions he had risked his life to publish. They are the French people, who are a few years away from fighting the first of the nine civil wars know as the Wars of Religion. This conflict would pit Huguenots (French Protestants) and Catholics in a long battle for the sacred throne of God and the temporal throne of France from 1562 through 1598. They in line 2 are his contemporary readers, the literate and upper – class country gentry, who will not be able to travel safely in the countryside without risking their life and limb as well as their goods from roving bands of Catholic or Protestant thugs. They are also his readers and their children in cities throughout France who is in the years to come would suffer a greater struggle in which many would die in waves of nationwide massacres. In the final line of Nostradamus accurately cites Carcassone and Narbonne as targets for future civil strife. These are the same cities where as a young man he healed the sick. History tells us that when the Catholic majority in Carcassonne declared itself for the Catholic League, the Huguenots siezed part of town. Narbone would become another center of religiously inspired massacres.

1 Q6

The eye of Ravenna will be impoverished,

When the wings will give way at his feet:

The two of Bresse wil have made a constitution,

For Turin, Vercelli, which the French will trample.

Nostradamus offers here a geography lesson in French occupation of Italian kingdoms. Ravenna has belonged to the Papal States since 1509. All the other localities were under French occupation 1555, although they belonged to the Duke of Savoy. Bresse was occupied from 1535, lost in 1559, recaptured in 1595, and finally ceded to France 1601. Turin found itself a captive host of the French 1506-62, 1640, and 1798-1814. Vercelli was occupied 1553-56, 1704, and 1798-1814. With all this data repeated by numerous Nostradamus scholars, still living and long dead, not much more can be made of it, except that Edgar Leoni believes the eye of Ravenna must be whoever was pope if 1555. This makes things more confusing because the year contained three popes: Julius III died in March, Marcellus II lasted 26 days from 9 April to 1 May before dying of a stroke, then Paul IV was chosen on 23 May.

1 Q7

Arrived too late. The act already done.

The wind was against them. The letters intercepted on the way:

Fourteen conspirators of a party,

By Rousseau [the red-haired one] the enterprise will be undertaken.

Before America had its Watergate, France had its “Dreyfus-Gate”. In 1894 the noble mask of French chauvinism slipped, revealing its anti – Semitic face in the sensational conspiracy and trial of the unjustly accused Jewish army officer Alfred Dreyfus. The conspiracy, which haunts the French legal system to this day, haunted Nostradamus 340 years before it happened. He gives an accurate account of the trial and was a better judge of Dreyfus’ innocence than the avowed anti-Semite judge of the case, Waldeck Rousseau, whom the prophet names outright. We can only wonder what Dreyfus’ staunch defender, the eminent writer and thinker Emile Zola, would have thought of this quatrain had he been aware of it and had he been as avid a fan of Nostradamus as his near contemporary, Victor hugo. After the first trial convicted Dreyfus of espionage and treason and sent him to the notorious prison of Devil’s island, new evidence arrived that proved Dreyfus had not sent secret documents to Germany. Zola and others pressed for a retrial and eventually in 1899, the government appointed Waldeck Rousseau to reexamine the Dreyfus case. Details of the second conspiracy or “Waldeck-Gate” surface in the lines of this quartrain. Line 1: Arrived too late. The act already done. The evidence has come too late to save Dreyfus from Devil’s island. Both trials were famous for their anti-Semitic overtones. There may be a hidden pun in the first phrase arrived too late. It implies a missed “schedule” namely a bordereau, as the infamous letter disclosing French military secrets to the German military attaché in Paris was called. Line 2’s cliché describes the difficulties of his defence attorneys. The wind was against them. Waldeck Rousseau found Dreyfus guilty a second time, but on the strength of Emile Zola’s crusade for justice, Dreyfus was pardoned by President Loubet. A new investigation uncovered the true criminals and proved the letters incriminating Dreyfus were forgeries. Line 3 may refer to the number of conspirators, although it is not know exactly how many there were. In line 4, Nostradamus, the christinaized jews and prophet, may be accusing the noted anti-Semitic judge of being part of the conspiracy: By Rousseau the enterprise will be undertaken.

1 Q8

How often will you be captured, O city of the sun?

Changing the laws that are barbaric and vain:

Evil times approach you. No longer you be enslaved,

The great Hadric will revive your viens.

Paris, the city of the sun, as it would be named a century after the grim event foreshadowed by this quartrain, has known many conquests and sieges. In 1590 it faced the most crippling siege of any city in Europe since the siege of Constantinople in the 15^th century. Between May through August royalist forces under Henry IV surrounded the city. Within a week bread disappeared from the diet. Contemporaries estimate that 5,000 to 12,000 people died of starvation. Some people were reduced to eating candle wax; others considered milling bones from cementeries to make their bread. There were reports of cannibalism. The gift of foresight may allow the melancholy prophet to see that evil times eventually do pass. He correctly forecasts the end of Parisian suffering when the barbaric and vain laws belonging to the Seize (sixteen) Parlimentaries are overturned. In the 1580s the ministers of the sixteen districts of Paris joined together to make the first of several attempts in Parisian history to establish a cult republic by commune – a concept the royalist prophet found horrifying. Good fortune would come for Paris and all of France in the double meaning of revive your viens. Towards the end of the six-month siege, Henry – pained by the suffering of its starving citizens – sent food to Paris. Later, as undisputed king, he would revive the French people with peace and prosperity.

1 Q9

From the East will come a treacherous act

To vex Hadrie and the heirs of Romulus [Italy]

Accompanied by the Libyan fleet,

The temples of Maltese [trembling] and its islands emptied.

Interpreters target this dual prophecy for various times. The near contemporary would review the treacherous act in the East to be the fall of Famagusta, the Cypriot capital, the Ottoman Turks in 1573, 18 years after this quatrain was published. Hadrie in that case is cryptogram for the Adriatic Sea, and by extension Venice, whose galleys, along with those other seafaring Italian kingdoms, will end their war with the Turks in 1573. The final two lines move backwards to events eight years closer to the publication of this quatrain, when the Ottoman Turks laid siege to Malta in 1565. Much of their fleet and transports were galleys supplied by their allies the Barbary ( Libyan) Corsairs. Nostradamus diviners of the following French generation would pin this quartrain to Henry IV sometime between 1589 and 1594 during the climax of the ninth and final War of Religion. This time the easter threat is not against the Adriatic Venice but against Hadrie, the seer’s anagram of Henry IV, who is forced to lift the siege of Paris in 1590to face a Spanish relief army marching from the east out of Flanders, comanded by the Duke of Parma. This Spanish maneuver annoyed at least one heir of Romulus, the pope, who was warning to the idea of Henry IV on the French Throne. But even the future generation agree that the final two lines fit with the siege of Malta in 1565. Modern Nostradamus watchers would stretch his prophetic reach much further. A number of them such as Jean-Charles de Fontbrune see a future Muslim invasion coming from the East that will trigger World War III. However, the idea that great hordes of neo-Ottoman Turks and neo-Barbary/Lybian Corsairs will invade European Christendom in the early 21^st century seems a little far fetched. I would at least agree that the eastern threat should remain Middle Eastern, since the Old French meaning for Orient denoted the lands of the Eastern Mediterranean. But as far as I see it, no Islamic fundamentalist hordes are amassing to vex future popes or deposit millions of soldiers on the shores of the Adriatic Sea. Rather, the invasion is less ambitious, less pan-Arab and monolithic, and more the activity of a handful of fanatics armed with weapons of mass destruction. In modern terms this Libyan fleet consists of several Soviet-style submarines in Muhammar Quadaffi’s navy making a nuclear terrorist attack on Italy’s shores. Nostradamus’ astrological clue set this potential event for either 1996 or 1999 or in the 2020s and 2030s, when the sun and Saturn are undergoing their annual opposition – a pretty general call which has already missed several predicted windows in time.

1 Q10

The serpent’s coffin is put in a vault of iron,

Where seven children of the King are held:

Their ancestors will rise from the depths of hell,

Before dying lamenting at seeing the fruits of their line dead.

After the death of her husband, Henry II, in 1559, Catherine de’ Medici changed her heraldic emblem to a serpent with its tail in its mouth. Ever the occult student, she was aware of the symbolic message of the serpent ring to power. If great power corresponds to temperance and wisdom balanced, the serpent holds it tail – but if the balance is lost, the serpent devours itself. By choosing his emblem Catherine showed herself aware of the dangers ahead as matriarch of her seven notorious children:

Francis II (1543-60): Francis died of the fainting sickness six weeks before his eighteenth birthday.

Elizabeth (1545-68): Married to Philip II of Spain, she showed signs of being a great queen but died while giving birth at 22.

Claude (1547-74): This hunchbacked princess also died at childbirth at 28.

Charles IX (1550-74): A king who delighted himself during royal hunts by hacking off the heads of donkeys and pigs with single blow. He transferred his cruelty to humans by sanctioning the St.Bartholomew’s Day Massacre two years before his death at 24 from a cold. During the massacre he was seen shooting fleeing Protestants for sport.

Henry III (1551-89): He was king of Poland as well as France. The universally unpopular bisexual ruler was assassinated in his bed chamber by a Franciscan monk named Clément.

Marguerite (1553-1615): “Little Margot” grew up in disgrace. Her husband Henry de Navarre spurned her for her rampant nymphomania. She died childless at 53, therby extingushing the House of Valois.

Hercules (1554-1584): The brutish Due d’Alencon was the laughing stock of Europe for courting the “virgin” Queen Elizabeth I of England. He conspired to kill his brother Henry but died – to even his mother’s relief – from a sudden illness.

1 Q11

The motion of sense, heart, feet and hands,

Will be in accord[between] Naples, Leon, Sicily:

Swords, fires, waters, then the noble Romans,

Drowned, killed or dead because of a feeble mind.

A contemporary interpretation has Naples, Leon and Sicily all belonging to the Spanish Habsburg Empire. Spanish and Sicilian troops exploit the feeble-brained leadership of the pope and launch an attack on Rome. This is an example of what we often find in Nostradamus an essentially accurate prophecy cloaked in exaggerations. The Duke of Alva would make a demonstrational march on Rome a year after the publications of this quatrain, but the magnitude of death and destruction is more the product of Nostradamus’ melancholic mirror-gazing then that actually happened.An interpertation that better suits the exaggerations is Fontbrune’s applicationof this quatrain to Garibaldi attack on Rome via Naples in 1867, and his defeat by the hands of the Noble Romans of the Franco Papal Army at Mentana. Fontbrune makes this work by turning Lyon into the British “Lion” who was in accord with Garibaldi’s falied invasion. The “feeble-minded” fellow is Francis II, the last king of the two Sicilies (consisting of the kingdom of Naples and of Sicily), who was banished from Naples in 1860. After his exile, the kingdom of Italy annexed the kingdom of two Sicilies in 1861.

1 Q12

In a short time a false, frail brute will lead,

Elevated quickly from law to high:

Then in an instant disloyal and slippery,

He who will have the government of Verona.

This is about Verona. The generalities can embrace the intrigues of this Italian town from 1555 until terrestial doomsdayin AD 3797. We know that one Jacopo Sebastiani held the post of captain of Verona from 1539 to 1562. This time frame would place him in Verona during any of Nostradamus’ travels through Italy. Perhaps this option of Captain Jacopo is more personal than prophetic. Was he an early debunker of our prophet? Nostradamus sometimes fortells doom and gloom for those who have slighted him; in most of these cases anger gets the better of his augury. We will see him castigate and prophetically pummel John Calvin, but he hardly even score a knockdown.

1 Q13

The exiles because of anger and internal hatred

Will inflict a great conspiracy against the King:

Secretly they will place enemies as a threat,

And his own old ones, sedition against them.

Another prophecy fulfilled in Nostradamus’ lifetime, five years after publishing Les Propheties, is that of the Conspiracy of Amboise in 1560. There was no love between France’s three most powerful clans – the Bourbons, Montmorencys and the Guise. The Bourbons, begin a greater noble house equal to the Royal House of the Valois, were in direct line by blood for the throne. The sudden death of Henry II left them licking their lips in expectation as the sickly heir, Francis II, limped into the new decade. The lesser-noble house of Montmorency plotted with the Bourbons and the king, hedging their bets to become chief advisor to which ever grand noble family – whether the current Valois or the ambitious Bourbons – triumphed in the power struggle. Both the Bourbons and Montmorencys detested the even lesser noble clan of Guise which, through luck, guile, and a commoner’s touch, had acquired the most influence on the young king as his protectors and advisors. The Guise were best positioned and least qualified by royal bloodline to take the throne if Francis should fall victim to the fainting sickness. Before that happened the Guise must be physically removed from his side. The Montmorencys and Bourbons joined in a conspiracy to send a army of several hundred selected men to seize the Chàteau Amboise, capture Francis II, and murder the Guise to “save France.” An informant in their camp leaked the plot, allwoing Francois de Guise, the Lieutenant General of France, to summon French military forces to “protect the king from seditionists.” Many of the leaders of the conspiracy were rounded up and executed. An exultant Francois de Guise decorated the Chateau walls with their corpses. The queen Regent, Catherine de’ Medici, who was no friend of the Bourbons or Montmorencys, was equally threatened by the swaggering Guise. She pardoned many of the key perpetrators, such as Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre, and the Prince de Condé. Now they were beholden to her for their lives, and she could use this new allegiance to offset the power of the Guise.

1 Q14

From the enslaved people, songs, chants and demands,

The princes and lords are held captive in prisons:

In the future by such headless idiots

These [demands] will be taken as divine utterances.

Étienne Jaubert (1656) thought this way was a near contemporary predictions of the Huguenots’ attempt during Nostradamus’ time to revolutionize the Catholic ritual, which brought upon them a string of massacres. Anatole Le Pelletier (1867) is the first to apply it to the French Revolution. Leoni and other later day scholars, see this as an intriguing double prophecy for both the French and Russian Revolutions. It appears that Nostradamus heard and saw the tattered Paris mob of a distant century marching through the narrow streets, yelling popular slogans or singing La Marseillaise. Their contemporary rivals called men like Danton and Robespierre maniacs. To Nostradamus they are headless idiots, a pun on their character and on their violent fate. Add to this the indexing of the quatrain as 14, which could stand for the date the Bastille was stormed. 14 July 1789. In the steaming waters of his prophetic bowl, Nostradamus saw the locations changing bu the themes of history repeating themselves. Narrow Parisian streets and alleys gave way to the frozen boulevards of Moscow, and the song of revolutionary fervor changed from La Marseillaise to the L’Internationale. Esclave in the first line now means “enslaved” or more literally, “Slav.” Once again a monarchy and aristocracy is under threat, and a new breed of “headless idiots” imprison and kill a royal family. The new revolutionary leaders – Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolsheviks – are later purged themselves in a new Reign of Terror mastermind by a modern Napoleon/Robespierre, Josef Stalin.

1 Q15

Mars, you menace by the force of war,

Seventy times will he cause blood to be shed:

Increase and ruin for the Clergy,

And more for those who will desire to hear nothing from them.

In early 1995 the Worldwatch Institute reported that the planets has endured 148 wars since the end of World War II. In 1995, there was 34 to 36 wars being fought simultaneously. And the number is increasing. Nostradamus seems to predict a future year when 70 wars will plague Earth at the same time. The pressures these conflicts place upon the priesthood of the Catholic Church will be overwhelming. The last line intimates that the demands for assistance will fall even harder on the Protestant missions in Russia and the developing world, and also sorely tax the charity missions of other mainstream and non-Christian priesthoods of the Hindus, Buddhists and Muslims.

1 Q16

Saturn joined with (Scorpio) transiting toward Sagittarius,

At its highest ascendant,

Pest, famine, death through military hands,

The century as well as the age approaches its renewal.

The themes of plague, famine, drought, war and renewal are repeated throughout Les Propheties. This is the first of 14 quatrains that have one or two lines unfolding this apocalyptic sequence, which also sounds like a present day and near future prophecy. This quatrain, along with 4 Q67 and 2 Q62, provides clues to the start of the final countdown of Nostrdamus’ years of tribulation prior to the new age of peace. The countdown will be triggered by the simultaneous occurrence of three factors on what is a clearly predicted date:

1)     The transit of Saturn from the constellation of Scorpio to Sagittarius, a fire sign (see 1 Q16)

2)     The transit of Mars through a fire sign (Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius) at the same time (see 4 Q67)

3)     Both Saturn and Mars perform their transits when a great comet appears at the end of century or when an astrological epoch is approaching its renewal with the onset of the new Aquarian Age (see 2 Q62).

Saturn transits any constellation once every 29.5 years and Mars every two years. The comet is the key that links these quatrains together. Saturn moved into Sagittarius on 17 November 1985. Halley’s Comet became visible in the skies a few days later. Mars joined Saturn in Sagittarius from 2 February to 29 March 1986, when the comet was at its brightest. This does not rule out a future visitation of a still unknown comet during Saturn’s next transit from Scorpio on 24 December 2014 or again on 22 February 2044. Nostradamus may be telling us to watch for apocalyptic warning signs during his countdown period. We will begin to see world plague, famines and droughts and unparalleled intensity, many wars and raids (perhaps referring to terrorist attacks), the hidden fires of volcanoes, and the invinsible fire of the greenhouse affect (the hot wind of 4 Q67). All these began to exert their terrible infulence from late 1985 through the spring of 1986. The great Ethiopian famine and a rash of some of the world’s worst cases of drought in Africa, Asia, Southern Europe and the North American grain belts all peaked at the sighting of Halley’s Comet in 1985-86. During that time the third world was suffering from over 50 wars, the worst begin the Iran-Iraq conflict, and the AIDS plague was recognized as a threat to world health. The years 1985-86 saw many terrorist raids. Civilians were gunned down by terrorists in two international airports; the United States replied with two retaliatory raids (see 4 Q67) on the terrorist scantioning state of Libya.

1 Q17

For forty years the rainbow will not appear;

For forty years it will be seen every day:

The arid earth will grow more dry,

And great floods when it will be seen.

Nostradamus may be applying to excess a biblical metaphor from Genesis, borrowing from the 40 days and 40 nights theme of Noah’s Ark in the Deluge. He predicts a 40 year cycle of drought followed by 40 years of rain, perhaps for France and most likley for Nostradamus’ native Provence. The final two lines are another lurid description of the cliamtic extremes expected in the 21^st century due to global warming.

1 Q18

Because of French discord and negligence,

A passage to Muhammad will be opened:

With blood soaking the earth and sea of Siena,

The port of Marseilles covered with the sails of ships

Jaubert applies the first interpretation of this prophecy to events of the Hapsburg – Valois Italian Wars in 1555-56. He was Henry II chumming it up with his Turkish “ally,” Suleiman the Magnificent, to send Barbary Corsairs on a raid against the island of Elba to divert the Habsburgs while he continues his invasion of Nothern Italy. It is more likely that the attack was launched to take advantage of the warring Christian states. Whatever the motivation, the Corsairs do besiege Piombino, near to Siena, which itself was a French ally. A French garrison would surrender to the Florentines at Siena on 22 April 1555, just days before publication of Les Propheties in May. Jaubert adds a dubious explanation on line 4: that a fleet of shipshad gathered at the docks of Marseilles to receive supplies for French troopsholed up on Corsica. A whole bevy of latter day Nostradamians navigate through through the prophet’s grammatical ambiguities in the final lines to predict a future invasion of Marseilles, Toulon, and the French Riviera by a huge Muslim armada. This passage to Muhammad leads notable scholars such as André Lamont, Peter Lemesurier, Fontbrune and a number of fly by night Nostradamians of the tabaloids, as well as a few other pot-boiler bookies, to gamble their reputations on a theme that just doesn’t wash not even the gunwales of a Corsair’s poop deck. History records that there weren’t enough galleys in the Sultan’s fleet to deposit an army that could march up the Rhone valley to conquer France, Spain, Italy and western Germany in the 16^th century, or any other century of the Ottoman Empire’s existence. However, Fontbrune believes Islam in our near future will somehow will build a fleet that can carry a great military horde that will not only conquer much of western Europe, but do what Hitler never could and cross the English Channel to threaten London. And somehow the Europen Union, Nato and the United States will look the other way, cap the switch to their overwhelming nuclear, chemical and conventional missile arsenals, and just let the Muslim make a sea passage for Muhammad in broad daylight around the Millenium. What is more feasible is that those sails covering the port of Marseilles were intended for an earlier time. And like so many of Nostrdamus’ vagaries in grammar, the fleet on line 4 can be equally Muslim or non Muslim. It depends on the interpreter’s drift, which often suffers from a lurch in projections. I believe this and hundreds of other quatrains attributed by my colleagues to a Muslim invasion of Europe in World War III can be all applied to past historical events. A few may be Nostradamus’ exaggerations for far smaller and perhaps for more lethal, invasions by small bands of nuclear terrorists.

1 Q19

When the serpants will come to encircle the altar,

The Torjan blood is vexed by the Spanish:

Because of them a great number will suffer.

The chief flees, hidden in the swamp within the swamp.

Jaubert claims that Coligny escaped the flamming wreck that was his command, the besieged town of St Quentin, and was later pulled out of the surrounding swamp by the victorious Spanish and taken prisoner. Actually he was caught in the flaming wreck of the bombarded town by an overwhelming attack from a Spanish force of 64,000 men. His garison only numbered 1,000, the majority of them survivors who had swum through the swamps from the tout of the French relief army 17 days before on 10 August 1557. It is a fact that Coligny’s second in command, his gallant brother Andelot, did swim through the swamps to escape capture.

1 Q20

Tours, Orléans, Blots, Angiers, Reims and Nantes,

Cities shaken by sudden change:

Tents will be pitched by those of foreign tongues

Rivers, javelins at Rennes, land and sea trembling.

The vision in the brass bowil is of towns along the Loire River (except for Reims) that will suffer a recurring of wars and occupations by foreign troops. First their cobblestone streets feel the tramp of Prussian boots when Napoleon falls from power in 1815. The grandsons of those Prussians would return again 1871 after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussians war. By the early 20^th century, Prussian bluecoats give way to American kakhi; the sharp staccato of Prussian commands are replaced by a mix of mid-Western twangs and Southern drawls echoing off the old walls and streets. The year 1917, and the Loire towns and the city of Reims open themselves to a friendly occupation of American “doughboy” soldiers come to help France win World War I. Then with the suddenness of a lightning war, the Germans return in 1940 to Reims and the Loire, this time as occupiers from Hitler’s Greater Germany. They would remain for the next four years. Scholars of Nostradamus could go wrong if they think the last line describes a natural earthquake shaking Rennes. Perhaps it is the quaking thunder of tank treads and motorized artillery of the returning Americans on the cobblestone streets and echoing through the bivouacs outside these towns along the Loire. The final line could picture the day when elements of Parton’s Third Army would break out of Normandy in the summer of 1944, in their own lightning war, sweeping the Germans out of Rennes and other cities of the Loire for one last and benevolent occupation of the region.

1 Q21

Deep white clay nourishes the rock,

Which from an abyss will go out milk white:

Needlessly preplexed they will not dare touch it,

Unaware that the earth at the bottom is of clay.

André Lamont believes Nostradamus is giving Europeans clues to their future discovery of how to make procelain. In 1704, Boetcher – a Saxon alchemist – would find way for them to manufacture china plates, thus ending Europe’s sole reliance on Chinese imports.

1 Q22

That which will live without any senses,

Will come to injure itself to death through artifice:

Autun, Châlon, Langres and the two Sens,

Hail and ice will cause great evil.

One could describe a machine as a thing that lives without senses. It destroys itself by thoughtlessly following its own motive machinations. The French towns listed in line 3 will be affected by its demise. The dead yet living thing brings on a sudden climatic change, if not a new ice age. Several life like though unliving things could cause this. Any of today’s nuclear cruise or intercontinetal ballistic missiles can senselessly drive themselves via the artifice of rocket engines to their target and death if numerous enough, can cause enough dust and smoke to rise into the stratosphere to cause a nuclear winter. A comet or metor can also run itself into the ground by the artifice of gravitational attraction and injure itself in a collision with Earth. The result could be a nuclear like winter, from all dust hurled into the atmosphere by its impact. There are a number of quatrains following down these missile/meteor slants.

1 Q23

In the third month, the sun rising,

The Boar and the Leopoard meet on the battlefield:

The fatigued Leopoard look ups to heaven,

And sees an Eagle playing with the sun.

On 18 June 1815, in the third month after retaking power, Napoleon prepared to do battle with the era’s other great general, the Duke of Wellington, on the rain soaked fields of Belgium. Napoleon had defeated Prussian army under Field Marshal Blucher two days before at Ligny. He had sent a third of his army in persuit, gambling that Marshal Grouchy’s 30,000 men would persue the Prussians and prevent them from surprising his right flank while he engaged the British. By dawn the 18^th, the Emperor had endured another long and terrible night of suffering from a chronic urinary infection. The pressures of sustaining his Empire and fighting 50 pitched battles in 20 years had burnt him out. Still he was expecting victory at Waterloo. The red orb of the summer rising over the muddy campgrounds reminded him of an autumn surprise many years before at Austerlitz, the place of his greatest victoyr. While watching the 3,480^th sunrise after Austerlitz, Nostradamus’ older and war weary First Antichrist wanted to believe it was an omen of victory – Napoleon desperately needed the sun that had shone on Austerlitz in December 1805 to rise in June, in the approaching winter of his career. The rising sun of Waterloo could not dry out the mud. As the light increased it was clear Napoleon’s cannons and troops could not maneuver at dawn as they had done in Austerlitz. Precious time would be lost. And no one knew where Grouchy or the Prussians were. The battle began at exactly 11:30am. One hour and several thousand lives later, keen-eyed junior members of Napoleon’s general staff spotted a great mass of men on the distant eastern horizon. One sweep of his spyglass told Napoleon they were not Grouchy’s returning forces but Blucher’s Prussians coming to the aid of Wellington. Time was running out. If Napoleon couldn’t give Wellington’s army the coup de grace by sundown, his own right flank would be overrun by 30,000 Prussians. Wellington’s men held on to the ridge of Mont St Jean all that bloody afternoon, beating back wave after wave of French calvary and infantry assaults. By sundown Napoleon committed his final reserves – his won Imperial Guard. The grenadiers swept across the trampled and corpsstrewn fields propelled with the irresistible confidence of 20 years of victory. A thin red line of British soldiers crouched in the tangled wheat upon Mont St Jean, poised for the collision. Wellington rolled his eyes and said, “If Blucher doesn’t come now, they will break every bone in my body.” In that terrible moment, Wellington could not have known how close he was to victory. As he watched the eagle standards of the Imperial Guard crest the ridge before the setting sun, a prophecy written 261 years before was coming true: The third month (June 1815), the sun rising (Napoleon’s omen of Austerlitz), the Boar (this is Napoleon), and the Leopard (what Napoleon called the heraldic lion, symbolizing England, here referring to the Duke of Wellington, on the battlefield of Waterloo). The vision of Nostradamus becomes reality for the exhausted   Duke as he sees the brass eagle standards of the French playing in the sun, just as the British line discharges the first of several deadly volleys into the advancing enemy. The vision of Nostradamus’ bowl of water growns faint and will not complete the prophecy until later in 1 Q38.

1 Q24

The new city of contemplating a condemnation,

The bird of prey offers itself to heavens:

After the victory pardon [given] to the captives,

Cremona and Mantua will have suffered great evils.

A number of European towns have names that mean “new city.” The most notable candidates are Naples (from the Greek, nea-polis) and Cittanova. The bird of prey is a synonym for the Imperial Eagle of Napoleon Bonaparte. General Bonaparte made one large step toward his imperial dreams by winning another Italian campaign in 1796. At one time during the campaign, some of his forces were garrisoned at Cremona. He laid a protracted siege to General Wurmser’s Austrian garrison of 16,000 at Mantua, which later surrendered at Napoleon on 14 January 1797. Wurmser’s men underwent a parade surrender ceremony in which they were disarmed of their weapons and 1,600 cannons and paroled (pardon give). Modern-day Cremona also has a nuclear power plant. The great evils could be a nuclear disaster or an act of terrorism set to take place there.

1 Q25

The lost thing is found, hidden for so many centuries,

Pasteur will be honored as a demigod:

This happens when the moon completes her great cycle,

He will be dishonored by other rumors as foul as farting.

To combat this plague, Nostradamus used medical techniques that were centuries ahead of his time. One prophecy in particular has caused much speculation as to whether or not the 16^th – century doctor utilized his prophetic skills to save lives. Louis Pasteur’s discovery that germs pollute the atmosphere was one of the greatest milestones in medical history, and he was called a demigod by his contemporaries. Until his theories were proved beyond doubt, he endured vicious attacks from influential colleagues in the medical academies of his time. Pasteur is not only named by Nostradamus, but the prophecy also correctly dated the establishment of the Institute Pasteur. He achieved this by reference to the last great lunar cycle in astrology, which began in 1535 and ended in 1889, the year the institute was created. A century after his death in 1895, a new scandal threatens Pasteur’s posterirty. Princeton historian Gerald Geison, in his book ‘The Private Science of Louis Pasteur,’ finds a self-serving and sloppy scientist hiding behind this legend of scientific discovery and altruism. His source is a careful reading of Pasteur’s original lab books. Pasteur’s notes do show that he tested his rabies vaccine on a 9 year old boy bitten by a rabid dog, as is popularly believed, but they also overturn his public claim that he had done thorough tests before making a child his lab mouse for experimental treatments. Whether Pasteur will be dishonored or this book will be viewed as foul rumors is left for the future to decide.

1 Q26

The great man will be struck down in the day by a thunderbolt,

The evil deed predicted by the bearer of a petition:

According to the prediction another falls at night time,

Conflict in Reims, London, and pestilence in Tuscany.

With the remarkable sensitivity to major upheavals in our future history, Nostradamus would have been unlikely to miss the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (JFK) and his brother, Senator Robert Kennedy (RFK), which so shocked the world. With the president’s assassination in 1963, the American post war age of innocence ended and the nation faced the new realism of war in Vietnam and turbulent protest at home. But in 1968 hopes were renewed by the polictical rise of Robert Kennedy, who won a decisive victory in the California primary. The Kennedy charisma was back and riding on a wave of polictical support and public euphoria, Robert seemed destined for the White House. A few mintues after delivering his victory speech Robert Kennedy was assassinated. A plethora of plausible but controversial assassination theories have circulated since the 1960s, raging from an underworld conspiracy to kill the Kennedy brothers to a state sanctioned assassination of President Kennedy by Fidel Castro, Cuba’s Marxist dictator. Such conspiracy theorizing was given a new lease on life first by Bill Kurtis’ critically acclaimed documentary The Men Who Killed Kennedy (1988) and later in the 1990s by Oliver Stone’s blockbuster movie JFK, which proposes that a rouge element in the United States government assassinated the president in a coup d’état. Stone’s dramatization has us believe that the assassination was carried out to forestall Kennedy’s efforts to pull out American forces out of Vietnam and end the Cold War 30 years earlier. There is no denying that the deaths of John Kennedy and his brother directed the world down a new prophetic pathway of chance. Their assassinations have aided those with a vested intrest in the continued expansion of a military industrial complex with its highly profitable business of arnaments and weapons development. If Kennedy had lived, there may never have been a Vietnam and 60,000 American and 2 million Asian deaths would have been prevented. Now to the specifics of this quatrain. President John Kennedy was shot shortly after 12 noon in Dallas, Texas on 22 November 1963. Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated a few mintues later after 1 am, moments after his victory speech in the 1968 presidential primary. Jeane Dixon, one of the foremost prophets of modern times, earned international notoriety for predicting JFK’s assassination as early as 1956. The bearer of a petition could be Dixon. Nostradamus may have chronicled her unsuccessful attempt to forewarm the president and later Senator Kennedy, who was her friend. The last line dates RFK’s murder through events occurring around that time – student riots in France and London during 1968-69 (Reims is a synecdoche for France) and the 1966 Florence flood, when authorities feared that pestilence in Tuscany would follow the disaster.

1 Q27

Beneath the mountain chain of Guienne struck from the heavens,

Not far from there is the treasure hidden:

That which for long centuries has been gathered,

When found, it will perish, its eyes put out by a spring.

Guienne gives us the general loaction of the treasure hidden somewhere in south-western France (see 9 Q7). The butter of many interpretations has been spread across these lines. This treasure sounds like a device that has recorded information over the eons. The articles in this quatrain can just as easily translate to “he” as they do to “it,” which would make this device something potentially sentient. The day its examination of man is discovered, it is destroyed. The powers that lights its observant eye are shut off.

1 Q28

Tobruk will fear the low-drafted Barbarian boat,

For a long time, much later by the Western Fleet:

Cattle, people, chattels, both [fleets] cause great waste,

What a deadly quarrel in Taurus and Libra!

The Libyan port of Tobruk has one of the finest harbors in North Africa. It was an important supply port for Axis and Western Allied forces during World War II. In the first phase of the North African campaign it was captured from the Italians in a combined British land, air and sea assault on 22 January 1941. The British supply ships which safely nestled in Tobruk’s harbor would have feared the low silhouette of “Barbarossa’s” boat – not the low riding galleys of the “Barbary” pirate but Nostradamus’ other “Barbarossa” – the name he gives Adolf Hitler after the code name of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa. This makes the barbarian boat a German submarine or U-boat. Throughout most of the war (for a long time) several of these barbarian boats were usually on station outside the safety of the harbor, waiting to torpedo any Western Allied ships venturing into the Mediterranean. In the end Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps could not defeat the Allies because the Axis fleets of U-boats and the Italian surface navy were defeated by the superior Anglo-American (Western) fleets in their struggle to dominate the Mediterranean. Most of Rommel’s desperately needed supplies were sent to the bottom of the sea. Even the well sheltered 40 foot deep harbour of Tobruk was clogged more that once with the wreckage of scuttled Axis and Allied cargo ships packed with supplies. The final line is remarkable dating of two battles fought over Tobruk. The first deadly quarrel sees Rommel’s stormtroopers beaten back by General Morshead’s Australian garrison at Tobruk on 30 April 1942, when the sun was in its annual transit of the constellation of Taurus. One year later, during the next transit of the desert sun through Taurus, Rommel unleashed a second Axis offensive, driving the British out of Libya. In the following month a British force of  33,000 men and mountains of supplies (people, chattels) surrendered at Tobruk after heavy fighting. Tobruk fell again to the British after their decisive victory against the Afrika Korps at El Alamein. This most deadly of desert quarrels began with a horrendous British artillery barrage lighting up the desert night in the early hours of 23 October 1942, shortly after the sun finished its transit of Libra.

1 Q29

When the fish [that is both] terrestrial and aquatic,

Will be put upon the beach by a strong [cruising] wave:

Its form [is] strange, attractive (smooth) and horrific,

From the sea to the walls [they] instantly reach the enemy.

What future image has impressed its alien shape upon the 16^th century mind of the prophet? Is it the broad duck-billed prow of an amphibious armoured fish grinding its chin into the graveled beaches of Normandy? A gurgling, sputtering roar is heard when air and diesel meet as the great amphibian rises laboriously from the waves, displaying its round and rolling feet. The olive-drab polliwogs in helmets, holding fast to its back, spring onto the sand. They hop, leap, dive for cover and run towards the chalky cliffs. Many fall and do not rise again. Was Nostradamus seeing the Normandy beach landings of June 1944, or something closer to home? It is a monstre from his own native shores in the Gulf of Fréjus, where infernal metal water bugs race out of control? They do not heed the signaled commands of their magicians and cuase schools of metal amphibians to swim out of their way. Was Nostradamus viewing the smooth and frightful drone boats, filled with high explosives, that the Allies intended to drive over the German beach obstacles during the Allied landings on the Riviera in August of 1944? Their signals were jammed by the Germans on the shore sending them out of control in all directions. Only two speeding drones mounted the beach in a great wave to explode on target. But the Riviera landings witnessed other strange amphibians. Are these the amphibious Sherman tanks rolling from the water across the beaches into the steep, pine covered hills of the Riviera in search of their favorite Nazi prey? Are more firghtful amphibians forseen? Does Nostradamus witness the flaming eye of Satan’s sea to air missile riding the column of a great wave just before it leaps from beneath the sea? Its cauldronlike lungs suck in the air with an ear-splitting roar, faster than the speed of sound, the cyclops beast of deep fanthoms now slips across an invinsible carpet of air a few feet above the waves. Its nose and body is graceful, its electronic eye emotionless and frightful. The Iraqi soldiers in their cement pillbox on the Kuwaiti shore does not see it coming. Suddenly it plows through their four-foot cement walls, which become fire.

1 Q30

Because of the tormented seas, the strange ship,

Will arrive [or land] at an unknown port:

Notwithstanding the signals from the branch of the palm [radar dish],

After death, pillage: good advice [or birds] arriving late.

Out of a churning ocean, whether of water or of cosmic ions, we see a strange ship landing at unknown port. Is this uncharted haven a pirate’s lair in the 16^th-century? Is it a secret rendezvous site where a container submarine deposits nuclear terrorists and their atomic device on a lonley stretch of Italian shoreline sometime around the dawning of a new millennium (see 2 Q5)? Could this be a landing at the end of the next millennium with a floating “ship” arriving from the distant skies to deposit the first colonists on a new world orbiting a star in the constellation of Cancer or Aquarius? The answer hides somewhere under the veil of Nostradamus’ nebulous poetry. A man shimmies up a palm tree to wave the “all clear” signal and Barbary Corsairs begin dragging their plunder down into the waves. A terrorist extends his microwave dish to signal his commander, Nostradamus’ Third Anthichrist after Napoleon and Hitler, lurking offshore in a submarine. In the distant future, human beings beyond our imagining extend a retractable metallic shaft and open the parabolic umbrella towards a sky filled with alien stars; they signal their mothership that landfall is attained. Any of these images is possible. The final line displays another of Nostradamus’ cryptic apocalyptic themes of a holocuast followed by a new era (from death, pillage to good advice …arriving late). A word play on the Latin avis against the French word for “advice” links this quatrain to the mystical message of the “rare birds” crying “Now!” which is written in the Epistle. They give the world this cryptic message (advice) just before the global apocalypse begins. Perhaps they are extraterrestrials making contact with humanity before it destroys itself or they are the spiritual catalysts – the new Christs and Buddhas – preparing humanity to make the next great spiritual step in evolution.

1 Q31

For too many years the wars in France will last,

Beyond the course and momentum of the monarch of Castulon:

Uncertain victory will the three great ones crown,

The eagle, cock, moon, lion, sun in its mark.

Nostradamus had tried hard to warn his countryman of the coming Wars Of Religion (1562-98) seven years before they began. It seems we have a prophecy about their completion after running the course of 36 blood soaked years. Line 2 makes a double pun out of course which in Old French would describe the momentum or trajectory of King Philip II of Spain, who cannot stay the course of war with France because of the slackening momentum of the Spanish economy. In other words, the course of Spanish fortunes ended in 1596 with Philip’s empire in bankruptcy, effectively taking Spain out of the conflict with France, or beyond the course of Philip’s ambitions to prosecute the war to a victorious finish. Though he became increasingly enfeebled with financial woes and age, he wouldn’t sue for peace with Henry IV of France for another two years, until he sensed that he was himself beyond the course of his natural life and death was near. The three rulers in uncertain victory  would be Elizabeth I of England, the newly crowned Henry IV of France and Pope Clement VII. Spain was checked by France, which would indirectly benefit England but Spain would fight her until 1604. The pope could celebrate Henry IV’s conversion to Catholicism, and his victory over the Huguenots, but Henery’s Edict of Nantes gave far more freedom of worship to the Huguenots than the pope would have liked. The factions in France had ended their conflict more out of exhaustion than from a clear winner, so the feeling of uncertainity was strong in the devastated land. However Henry IV would go far to heal the wounds and rebuild France. The final returns us to a staccato of astrological data and double puns of animals represting nations. The eagle in this case represents arms; the cocks is the ancient Gallic symbol of France; the moon is the crescent symbol of the Ottaman Turks; and the Lion is Elizabethan England. The final phrase may be a near miss at astrological dating the death of Philip II of Spain when the sun is in its astrological mark (consellation) of Leo. According to the Gregorian calendar, the advent of which was predicted by Nostradamus (see 1 Q42), the sun is in Leo every year between July 22 to August 21. The death watch for Philip may have began just as the sun finished its transit of Leo – but he didn’t actually die for another three weeks.

1 Q32

The great Empire will soon be exchanged

For a little place, which will soon come to increase in size:

A very pretty and tiny place [for a] county,

In the middle of which he will come to lay down his sceptre.

After defeat at Waterloo in 1815 (see 1 Q23, 1 Q38), Napoleon was exiled to the tiny island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. He who once ruled an empire covering most of Western Europe now sat in the modest house upon a litlle place of a few square miles, mostly of rock. The tropical climate and idleness conspired to kill him by 1821. Thus fell the first of Nostradamus’ three predicted Antichrists. Earlier interpreters liked to pin this transferral from great holdings to small upon another European Emperor, Nostradamus’ contemporary, Charles V, who at 55 retired, handing over an empire equal in size to Napoleon’s. His brother Ferdinand took the Imperial power of the Holy Roman Empire, and his son Philip II, received soverignty over the Netherlands and Spain. Once having abdicated all responsibilities, Charles V exchanged his far-flung empire to settle as a guest in a much smalle place, the monastery of Yuste, in the province of Extremadura, Spain where he died in 1558. The pubilication of this quatrain would have predated the event of Charles’ abdication by several months, making both interpretations authentically fulfilled prophecies.

1 Q33

Near the great bridge of spacious plain,

The great Lion with Imperial forces:

Will cause a felling outside the austere city,

Because of fear the gates will be opened to him.

Just as Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels – blinded by the myth of the Fuhrer’s invincibility – would have had difficulty finding a prophecy assuring ultimate victory for Germany, so Nostradamus – blinded by his bias against John Calvin – could not pen a correct prophecy about the fall of Geneva (auster city), which was the headquarters of John Calvin from 1541 through 1564. In this spin doctored prophecy Nostradamus see a great, lionized warrior hunting Calvin down. Perhaps this warrior is Nostradamus’ friend and astrological client, the Duke of Savoy. Whoever he was supposed to be, this Lion was expected to assemble Imperial forces of the Holy Roman Empire near the spacious plain of the city’s western approaches, which was (poetically speaking) their great bridge through the steep Alpine terrain into Geneva. These forces would make preperations for laying siege by felling many trees on the verdant foothills. But the fearful inhabitants would first renounce Calvin, their heretical religious leader, and surrender the city of the great Lion.

1 Q34

The bird of prey flying to the left [for six months],

Before the conflict preparation made by the French:

One will take it for good, another for a sinister mixed bag,

The weak country will hold it as a good omen.

Implied here is the German condor or eagle of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. The rich layers of meaning personalize this bird of prey as Hitler, represeted by his high altitude Dornier reconnaissance planes circling over Paris, six months before the Battle of France. The word semester can give us roughly the length of the six month lull on the western front between the fall of Poland in early October 1939 and the invasion of France in May 1940. Semester also means “left.” Paris was “left” or west of Germany airbases at that time. Semester can also represent fenestra, or “window.” Put all these layers together and we get a bird of prey flying to the left (over Paris and the French lines) sometime during a time window of six months. The French did prepare for a second war with Germany by building an extravagant fortress system called the Maginot Line. Behind this wall they nurtured their illusions of invincibility (good omen). In terms of men and material, France had the most powerful military land force in western Europe, but their tactics and their equipment were behind the times. The good omen may also be long pause in fighting. The French press could propagate the idea that the Germans were too frightened of the Maginot Line and of French élan. This was nothing more than the boasting of the weak. The French government was politically leftist (sinister), divisive (mixed bag), and impotent. At least one Nostradamian scholar, Max de Fontbrune, saw France’s Maginot mentally as a sinister mixed bag. He risked vilification on a national scale be declaring to the French that a vast redoubt of concrete fortresses and subterranean garrisons built an astronomical expense would be useless defense against a German invasion in the coming war. The fierce debate over Max de Fontbrune’s interpreatations ended when Hitler went sightseeing beneath the Eiffel Tower with his general.

1 Q35

The young lion will overcome the older one,

On the field of combat in single battle:

He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage,

Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.

The quatrain foretelling the death of King Henery II of France in a jousting accident is one of the most famous, predocumented and successfully fulfilled prophecies in history. It can be paralled in our time only to Jeane Dixon’s documented forecasts of the rise of John F. Kennedy to the presidency and his assassination. At the end of June 1559, Henery II ignored all warnings against ritual combat from Nostradamus and his queen’s court astrologer, Luc Gauricus, and decided to celebrate the dual marriage of his sister Marguerite to the Duke of Savoy, and his daughter Elizabeth by proxy to King Philip II of Spain, by staging a three day tournament. Thousands gathered from all over France along rue St Antoine outside of Paris to see the athletic French king compete in jousting tournaments. On the final day the king’s attre and that of his horse were in the heraldic colors of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers. He was resplendent in full gilded armor, wielding a great lion decorated shield. The excitement of the crowds on rue St Antoine paralleled the festive joy of those ten of thousands lining the streets of Dallas, Texas four centuries thereafter, who watched the resplendent motorcade carrying President Kennedy and his lovely wife turn into Dealey Plaza. On two festive days in two different countries, two psychically gifted women tried to hide their premonitions of doom. On was Queen Catherine de’ Medici, sitting in place of honor on the festooned platform in front of the tournament lists. The other was Jeane Dixon, a 20^th century US psychic who, at around the half past noon of 22 November 1963, was sitting at lunch with friends at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC – the very moment Kennedy’s motorcade was turning into Dealey Plaza in far off Dallas. Queen Catherine had just seen her husband’s final bout with Gabriel de Lorge, Comte de Montgomery, end in a draw and for a moment she could secretly sigh in relief. The prophecy documented three years before in the 35^th quatrain of Century I, which foretold Henery’s death in a jousting accident, seemed a destiny unfulfilled. Then she noticed a heated conversation between the two ritual warriors. The king had lifted his glided visor and was leaning over his horse to speak more forcefully to the younger man. Montgomery’s manner betrayed nervousness at what the king requested. At last he bowed his head and drew up his own lion embossed shield. Both lions reached for a new lance. Catherine bit her hand in dismay. It was obvious now that Henry had demanded another match. The terrible suspense of the last three days would be drawn out a few minutes more. The future’s inclination toward the two destinies described in Nostradamus’ prophecies for Henry would remain in doubt a little longer. Would Henry live to become a second Charlemagne or would he be overcome with a mortal wound on the ritual field of combat? Just as Catherine pondered her husband’s quantum futures in the 16^th century, Jeane Dixon in the 20^th, suddenly became so distraught that she couldn’t touch her food. “Something dreadful is going to happen to the president today,” she declared. Throughout the month, Dixon’s friends noticed her increasing concern about a premonition of doom for the young President Kennedy. She had been making accurate and documented predictions about him for over a decade. She had attained notoriety for her vision recorded in 1956 by Jack Anderson, publisher of Parade Magazine, in which he saw the White House with the shimmering numbers 1-9-6-0 hovering above it. Pulled like a magnet, her consciousness floated toward the main door, where a young man with striking blue eyes stood upon the threshold, would be elected President in 1960 and was destined to die violently while in office. In two different centuries the cry of horror bursts from festive throngs. A shattered lance mortally wounds a French king in the head and throat. A rifle cracks in Dealey Plaza, fatally wounding an American President in the head and throat. A great splinter of ragged wood rams through the glided visor and impales the king’s eye. He reels in the saddle. Catherine shrieks and faints. Jeane Dixon and her friends look up as the orchestra at the Mayflower suddenly stops playing and the conductor announces that someone has just taken a shot at the president. Her friends try to comfort her, saying that he must have avoided danger. “No,” she replies, “The president is dead … You will learn that he is dead.” Catherine de’ Medici’s ladies in waiting cannot console their revived queen, for she knows the future had inclined towards the end she had tried so hard to forestall. The young man will overcome the older one. Both men that day had held shields embossed with lions. Montgomery was six years younger than Henry who was 41. On the field of combat in single battle. A tournament is a field of ritual single combat. He will pierce his eyes through a golden age. During the final bout Montgomery failed to drop his lance in time. It shattered sending a large splinter through the king’s glided visor (golden cage). Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death. Along with multiple minor punctures in the face and throat are two mortal wounds, One splinter has destroyed the king’s eye; the other has impaled his temple just behind the eye. Both have penetrated his brain (two wounds made one). Bacterial infections spreading through Henery’s brain drained his life away. He lingers for 10 agonizing days (then he dies a cruel death). We have seen the prophetic paths of Jeane Dixon and Nostrdamus cross again in 1 Q26.

1 Q36

Too late the monarch will repent,

Of not having put to death his adversary:

But he will come to consent to a much higher thing,

Than for all his blood through death to waste.

Henry III has his chief rival Henry de Guise and Henry’s brother Cardinal Louis, assassinated in 1588. But one obstacle pruned means that a dozen leaves of trouble grow in its place. By killing the very popular Guise, rather than his more troublesome brother the Duc de Mayenne, the king has made an enemy out of his own Catholic camp. He will be chased from his throne and later knifed to death by a Catholic priest. Mayenne, the surviving brother, takes over the Catholic League and wages one more bloody War of Religion against the new and rightful heir to the French throne, the Protestant king of Navarre (now Henry IV of France). Eventually Mayenne will concede all powers to Henry IV, especially when the king converts to Catholicism, recanting the heresy that had been Mayenne’s reason to continue the fight. Mayenne will sheathe his sword rather than keep fighting and see the House of Lorraine completely annihilated by war and irrelevancy.

1 Q37

A little before the sun sets,

Battle is given, a great people in doubt:

Dashed to the ground, the marine port makes no answer,

Bridge [Sea] and tomb in two strange places.

The marine port makes no answer because it is dashed to the ground by an atomic attack. The two entombed places of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A little before the sun of the Japanese Empire sets, the final major battle of World War II is waged in Okinawa. The great people could be the Japanese or the Americans. After Okinawa is invested, both sides are in doubt of future. Okinawa was a test battle for the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands and after its bloody conclusion America is in doubt that it can afford the estimated million casualties fighting in Japan itself. The bomb clears the way for a new and brutual era in military history and a new world peace. So much for a 20^th century interpretation. Here’s one for the early 19^th century. Napoleon’s Imperial Guard advances across the blood-soaked fields of Waterloo just before sunset on 18 June 1815. They are repulsed by the British and the French army breaks ranks in a full rout (dashed to the ground). Napoleon would be exiled to inactivity and slow death on the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic. From this strange tropical rock in the middle of a tepid blue nowhere, Napoleon’s bones would later be removed across the sea to Paris and placed in a grandiose sepulchre beneath the golden dome of another exotic place, the Hotel des Invalides.

1 Q38

The Sun and the Eagle will appear the victor.

The vanquished is reassured with an empty message:

Neither bugle nor cries will stop the soldiers,

In time peace is vindicated if achieved through death.

We return again to the Duke of Wellington watching the French Imperial Guard’s eagle standards playing with the setting sun at Waterloo just as they disappeared in the fire and smoke of a shattering British volley (see 1 Q23). Now the lines of the second Waterloo prophecy written 261 years before the event spring from potentially to reality. The Sun and the Eagle will apear the victor. The vanquished is reassured with an empty message… Before the Imperial Guard advanced, Napoleon passed a false message among his regular troops that the men massing on their left flank were Grouchy’s troops and not the Prussians. The weary sun of Waterloo illuminated an unbelievable sight to the French regulars of the Imperial Guard emerging from the smoke of British volleys in full retreat off the ridge. In the warning light they also saw the battle flags and slate blue uniforms of Prussians on their right flank. The truth behind Napoleon’s empty message registered on the minds of tens of thousands of exhausted Frenchmen. His army broke ranks and ran. Neither bugle cor cries will stop the soldiers. In time [liberty and] peace is vindicated if achieved through death. No bugle call or command could stop the stampede. Only the retreating Imperial Guardsmen held their ranks, forming battle squares to face the advancing English and ignominy of capture. Within 15 minutes thousands of Guardsmen lay dead and dying. Peace descended on Europe like the gathering darkness to cloak the bodies of 47,000 dead and wounded men.

1 Q39

The night, in bed, the highest one strangled,

For having tarried too long, the blond elect:

By three substitues the empire is enslaved,

Put to death, paper and packet unread.

In 1830 the last of the Condé Bourbons and a supporter of the Royalist claim to the French throne, was found hanging by the neck in his bed-room (the highest one strangled). Conspiracy buffs of the 19^th century claim that he was strangled to death because he supported the Duc de Bordeaux’s claim to the throne. His assassins strung him up to hide the telltale bruises made by the hands that twisted his neck. The three substitutes in line to rule France are Louis Philippe (1830-48), followed by Louis Bonaparte (Napoleon III) and the Second Empire (1848-71), and finally a string of French Republics starting with the Third Republic of Louis Adolphe Theirs and Maréchal Patrice de MacMahon. A second interpretation of three substitues could allude to the three enemies of Condé. Charles X, the Duc d’Angoulême and the Duc de Bourgogne. Nostradamus, the royalist sympathizer sees the Second Empire, enslaved again by the nephew of his frist Antichrist, Bonaparte. The chief author of this conspiracy theory, Le Pelletier, insists that Condé was blond and had written a will (paper and packet) in favor of Bordeaux. Not long after his lifeless feet drew circles in the air, his assassins are said to have destroyed and replaced the will one in favor of the Duc de Aumale, the son of Louis Philippe. The real wishes of Condé would forever remain unread.

1 Q40

The false trumpet concealing madness,

Will cause Byzantium a change of laws:

From Egypt there will go forth one who wants withdraw,

[The] Edict [that makes] money and metal standards unstable.

One can walk through the thought processes of several modern interpreters to train this quatrain of modern Turkey. Erika Cheethambids us to consider this as portraying the political climate between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire during the time Napoleon returns from Egypt, from his military expedition in 1799, bringing along artifacts and archeological discoveries that would trigger Napoleonic France’s infatuation will all things Egyptian. Jean Charles de Fontbrune targets this for the early 20^th century after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, when Turkey lost in Egyptian province and gained a new republic through the Turkish Revolution of 1920. We then move ahead into our own future, with Jochmans’ interpretation that this quatrain foretells a call to Islamic revolution in Turkey and Egypt through the false trumpet or modern loudspeakers from the muezzin’s minaret.

1 Q41

City besieged – a night assault,

Few escaped, conflict not far from the sea:

The whore on the return of her son faints for joy,

Poison and letters hidden in the fold.

At least one hundred besieged cities must have suffered a night assault at some time between 1555 and today. The list gets shorter if the city is not far from sea. This frosting of specifics ladled over a quatrain cake of generalities is easy to sweeten with all kinds of projections. Jaubert frosts it with the contemporary invasion of Italy by the French in 1556-57. Rolfe Boswell (1941) picks the fall of Dunkirk in 1940 (even though Dunkirk isn’t near but right on the sea). Boswell’s whore is the Third Republic and the poison and letters are poetic for the Nazi indoctrination of prisoners. When in doubt, Fontbrune usually applies any obscurely predicted battle, maneuver or seige to future world war. Back in the mid – 1980s when the Cold War was still chilling our interpretations, he had Paris (which by the way is not very near the sea) under siege by the Russians and the whore became the Fifth French Republic falling to communism. Now that the Cold War is over, Lemesurier has Marseilles under the gun of a huge and nonexistent Muslim invasion fleet sometime in our near future.

1 Q42

The tenth of the Calends of April, in Gothic count,

Revived again by evil people:

The fire [of insight] extinguished, diabolical assembly,

Seeking the bones of the Daemon of Psellus.

Here is another quatrain the debunkers of Nostradamus avoid challenging. Nostradamus seems well aware of the change that would take place 38 years later in 1582, when most Catholic countries adopted the reformed Gregorian calendar of Pope Gregory XIII over the Julian calendar of his time. Each year of the Julian calendar contained 365 days and six hours and by 1582 the extra time had gradually moved the vernal equinox from 21 March to 11 March. Pope Gregory rectified the error by making 10 days vanish. October 5 became October 15, 1582. The change was quite unpopular; most Europeans demanded their ten days back. The tenth day of the Calends of April is April 10, for the Calends signified the first day of the Roman month. The new Gregorian system would subtract 10 days from the Gothic count making it April 1 or Good Friday, a date regarded as the best day of magical invocations. Some believe that Nostradamus is clueing us in to the day he began conjuring and writing Les Propheties, around the end of March 1554. The last two lines gives us an account of the final moments of his first session with the devas and daemonic messengers of prophecy. The slender flame of his trance is extinguished along with the diabolical or daemonlike assembly of spirit familiars. At dawn’s first light they poetically retreat with the darkness, seeking the resting place of Michael Psellus the noted neo-Platonist who wrote a book on demons and Hellenistic magical practices.

1 Q43

Before the change of empire occurs,

There will occur one very marvelous event:

The field moved, the pillar of porphyry,

Placed, transferred onto the gnarled and knotty rock.

The change of empire might link this to the great empire of the Third Reich falling through Ardnnes in 5 Q45. However many empires have changed in Europe since 1555. The “Reich” most likely described here is the First Reich or the Holy Roman Empire. A mere five months after the publication of this quatrain, Charles V handed over his imperial powers to his brother Ferdinand and sovereignty in the Netherlands and Spain to his son Philip II in an opulent formal ceremony (marvelous event) in the Hall of the Golden Fleece in Brussels. The following year Charles would leave the fields and palaces of the Spanish Netherlands and sail to Spain, where he would live out his days as a guest in a monastry in the gnarled and arid province of Estremadura. The building of his tomb is at least indirectly implied by the pillar of porphyry.

1 Q44

In short sacrifices will be returned,

Transgressors will be put to martyrdom:

No longer will there be monks, abbots or novices,

The honey will be much more expensive than wax.

A general commentary or religions revolution for the modern era, covering anything from the French Revolution to the present and perhaps far beyond. At first glance the quatrain fits the disbanding of Catholic monastries and Church properties and the banishment of priests and nuns during the French Revolution. The wax candles diappear in church windows and metaphorically at least the honey anointing Louis XVI during his coronation may see him pay the ultimate expense – losing his life through execution. The new pagan sect is the Cult of Reason. A similar treatment can be applied to the atheistic cult of communism banishing Russian Orthodox priests, abbots and nuns during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. But these are only the first vulgar examples of the changes coming in the new age. Line 1 is poetic for the reutrn of paganism and return to earth religious during the latter days of the 20^th century. The transgressors are the early pioneers of new religious thinking which the mainstream religious usually depict as cult members or “gurus” and then persecute. In some cases they are martyed for their belief. In line 3 Nostradamus adds, with some regret his vision to that of many prophetic traditions that see an end to the Piscean religions of superstition and faith during the new and scientifically oriented Aquarian Age. The 21^st century will find the monks, abbots and novices of Christianity and many other mainstream religions fading away. Within a century or two they will be replaced by a new, nondogmatic and scientific religiousness: one that applies theory and meditation techniques in an inner search to scientifically understand human and divine consciousness. In other words, one doesn’t blindly believe a religious mystery. In the Aquarian Age one searches, doubts, observes the subjective and then later analyzes what is witnessed. Then you either know, or accept that you do not yet understand a religious mystery.

1 Q45

Cutter of sects great punishment to the informer,

Beast in the theater, erects the scene [for the] play,

The ancient fact exalts the inventor,

Because of sects the world confused and schismatic.

Leoni believes this is a less a prophecy and more a diatribe against John Calvin, but I think that is not completely fair. If one dusts off the anger and takes a second look, Beast is a close match to Besze, the Old French spelling one finds on the letters and religious pamphlets signed by Calvin’s right hand man, Theodore de Beze. A theater of sorts was set up for him in the summer of 1561 to explain Calvinism to the French National Council. Catherine de’ Medici invited de Beze in a desperate bid to nurture a dialogue between a Protestant  French  Huguenots and Catholics, and thus avoid a religious civil war. All went will this performance until he began arguing against the sanctity of the Holy Eucharist (the ancient fact). The beast from Geneva soon made a hasty retreat and Europe especially France slipped ever deeper into a religious war fever.

1 Q46

Very near the Auch, Lectoure and Mirande,

Great fire in the sky for three nights will fall:

A very stupendous and marvelous event will happen,

Very soon after the earth will tremble.

This quatrain describes the celestial events in the département of Gers in south-west France that lasts for three nights and is followed shortly thereafter by an earthquake. UFOs have been reported on the eastern approaches of Gers outside of Toulon. UFO researcher Jacques Vallée cites an incident on page 282 of Passport to Magonia: in August 1961 “five persons observed a luminous yellow shpere, 8 meters in diameter, flying about 10 meters above the road. Horizontal and vertical bands of darker tone gave the impression of ‘windows.’ The object flew up very fast when the car reached [Toulouse].” The early 1960s were noted for great earthquakes in Morrocco (1960), Bali (1963) and the great Alaskan quake of 1964. If this celestial event is still in the future, the three towns in Gers may witness significant UFO sightings before an earthquake rumbles out of the nearby Pyrenees Mountains.

1 Q47

The speeches of Lake Leman become angered.

The days drag out into weeks:

Then months, then years, then all will fail.

The authorities will damn their usless powers.

Early interpreters have identified this quatrain as another diatribe by Nostradamus against the Protestant John Calvin, and his theocratic city state of Geneva. Twentieth century interpreters claim it for the League of Nations, which disbanded in 1946 and became the United Nations. Today the same city is the scene of further debates between US and former Soviet diplomats over nuclear diarmament, as well as the site where much endless and important drones on about how to stop the global plague of ethnic cleansing and ethnic wars, primarily the one raging in the Balkans over Bosina-Herzegovina. Since the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START I and II) of 1988. Geneva has been and remains one of the major locations of negotiation regarding the 75 percent reduction of United States and Russian nuclear arsenals by 2003. At the time of writing (early 1996). Worldwatch reports that around 40,600 nuclear warheads remain undestroyed, and dozens of nuclear warheads from the collapsed Soviet empire are unaccounted for. Both START treaties will have to be reratified by the new and unsteady nuclear powers of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. If this cannot happen then START I and II are useless. The Ukraine shows signs of keeping a few of its strategic nuclear weapons while shipping most back to the Russian federation and the same hoarding could happen between now and 2003 if the five former Soviet republics in Centeral Asia go through with their dream of forming a confederation or even a new state of their own called Turkestan. Qualified intelligence reports in 1993 mention at least two nuclear tipped Soviet missiles surfacing in Iran. Prophetically speaking, START is like having hamburger “buns” without the “beef” of the unilateral nuclear disarmament of all states. The lack of solid global proliferation control policy has helped set the stage for the entry of Nostradamus’ third and final Antichrist, and his war of Armageddon.

1 Q48

When twenty years of the Moon’s reign have passed,

Another will take up its reign for 7,000 years:

When the exhausted Sun gathers up its days,

Then my prophecy and threats will be accomplished.

The Nostradamus controversy (whether he is a prophet or a practical joker) is approaching 450 years in running. This quatrain might clue us in to the length of the prophet’s legacy. Roussat believes the astrological lunar cycle mentioned above is that of 1535 to 1889. Twenty years after 1535 is Les Propheties’ publication day, 1555. This could extend Nostradamus’ chronicle of human history beyond the ninth millennium.

1 Q49

Very much before such intrigues,

Those of the east by the virtue of the Moon:

The year 1700 will cause the great ones to be carried away,

Nearly subjugating a corner of the northern land.

On assuming the crown of Sweden in 1697, Charles XII faced a three way threat to Swedish supremacy of the Baltic from the neighbouring kings (great ones) of Denmark and Poland and Peter the Great of Russia. Diplomatic intrigues developed into open conflict by the year 1700. The Great Northern War lasted 21 years. Charles XII managed breifly to get the Turks (the moon) into the fray against Russia. In the end Charles’ expansionism was checked and the war all but ended when he was shot through the eyes at the siege of Fredrikshald in Norway in late 1718. By the treaties of Stockholm (1709-20) a number of territories chnaged hands in the Baltic. Sweden delievered the duchies of Bremen and Verden to Hanover for a large war indemnity and gave the city of Stettin and parts of the west Pomerania to Prussia. Denmark gave up its city of Stettin and parts of the west Pomerania to Prussia. Denmark gave up its war prizes, except for Schleswig. Russia received the largest prize – Livonia, Ingermanland, part of Karelia and a number of Baltic islands and Finland ceded from Sweden (nearly subjugating a corner of the nothern Land).

1 Q50

Out of aquatic triplicity will be born,

One who will take Thursday for his feast day:

His [its] renown, praise, reign and power will grow,

By earth and sea the East [is] turbulent.

The list of planets born with three planets in a water sign can be narrowed down to Americans, whose feast day is the national holiday of Thanksgiving Day, held every year the fourth Thrusday of November. The third party hopeful, in the 1992 American presidential elections, Ross Peror was born with a Jupiter – Sun conjuction with near conjuction of the Moon in Cancer. The winner, Bill Clinton, has no water aspects in his birth chart, but the Clinton/Gore administration which was in effect born on election night (3 November 1992), not only has the Sun, Pluto and Mercury in the water sign of Scorpio, but also possesses a grand triplicity of planets in three water signs. This augurs a two-term presidency that plants and waters the seeds of a new, post Cold-War America. This administration promotes and nurtures a new vision of internationalism on all levels of diplomacy, economy and military policy. It may be hard for us now to imagine it, but people in the 2050s may look back on three 20^th-century American presidents as the leaders most responsible for bringing the world out of nationalistic wars, cold wars and ecological wars and into a new global society. These presidents will be Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Richard Nixon and William Jefferson Clinton. Line 4 implies that future Gulf or Middle East wars will plague Clinton in his second term. Even a crisis from 1996 through 1999. Century 4, Quatrain 95 however implies that the victor is born on American soil.

1 Q51

Head of Aries, Jupiter and Saturn

Eternal God what changes!

Then the bad times return after a long century,

What turmoil if France and Italy.

Several windows in time are possible in relation to line 1’s astrological conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Aries. Leoni cites Dr Christian Wollner’s calculations for the conjuction: on 19 October 1583 and 13 December 1702 and again on 2 December 1995. One could agree with Leoni that 1702 seems to be a fulfillment of the prophecy since Italy and France were fighting in the War of the Spanish Succession in 1702. But there are two problems. One is that Wollner’s computations are notoriously inaccurate; the other is Leoni’s prejudice against astrology, which often dilutes this fine scholar’s research when it comes to checking astrological interpretations of Nostradamus. The next Jupiter – Saturn conjunction will be in February 1999. This is a very significant year in Nostradamus’ prophecies. The survival or destruction of human civilization hinges on what actions we take, individually and globally, during the last year of this millennium. Imagine what awe-inspiring and terrible visions we would experience if a divine spirit stirred an oracle’s bowl of water to conjure visions of humanity 441 years from today. Would we not cry out as Nostradamus has in the second line? The things we take for granted, like cars, commercial jets, commercials themselves – whether on billboards or the boob tube – would appear miraculous to the 16^th-century mind. Alas, despite all these marvels, mankind does not balance technological discoveries with new revelations in spiritual consciousness. After the long 20^th century is finished the bad times return with a new conjunction in the sign of Aries, whose god, Mars, is that of war. But occult teachings tell us there are two sides to every aspect. Mars, if he strives for consciousness and compassion, becomes the sacred magician, the spiritual teacher; he holds the firebrand of awareness, not war. The higher aspect of Mars tells us that if there must be turmoil in France, Italy and the world let it be a war against ignorance, superstition and stupid habits. Let it be a war against the conditioning of each new generation that causes them to unconsciously cling to fossilized moralities. Mars the Magus tell us that the new millennium will require that we become new humanity.

1 Q52

Two wicked ones conjoined in Scorpio,

The great lord murdered within his hall:

A pestilence to the Church, from the king newly unted,

Europe decadent and the North.

The maliciously aspected planets are Saturn and Mars conjunct in Scorpio. Selim III of the Ottoman Empire was deposed in 1807 during a Mars – Saturn conjunction in Scorpio, but he wasn’t strangled until the following year. The year 1807 saw Pope Pius VII a prisoner of Napoleon. It was also the year that most of Europe came under his domination and Czar Alexander 1 of Russia struck up an alliance with Napoleon against the British.

1 Q53

Alas! How much one will see the great people tormented,

And the sacred law in total ruin:

By the other laws all of Christianity [is governed],

When gold and silver is sought through a new source.

This may be a continuation of 1 Q51 when the great people of France will be tormented in a future time, perhaps as soon as 1999. Imagine the preplexity of Nostradamus viewing our far looser interpretations of Christianity. Or his bewilderment at our modern electronic economies in which one can draw cyber-coded gold and silver from one’s Internet bank. No doubt the prophet had a hard enough time comprehending earlier advances such as paper money inovation, the Assignats of the French Revolution, the new source of which depended on wealth stolen from the clergy. But for the 21^st century this new source for silver and gold grubbing may imply a new resource such as Arab oil and the dangers of the Christian world’s depending on an even more militant Islam as a source of wealth. Equally possible is a new source of wealth coming from developed countries who will profit from their grain reserves in an overpopulated world as much as the petrol states of the Middle East will use its oil reserves as a political weapon in an energy starved world.

1 Q54

Two revolutions caused by the evil scythe-bearer,

Making a complete change in reign and centuries:

The mobile sign [of Libra] in its place so mettlesome,

Equal in favour to both sides.

Conventional wisdom would tag the scythe-bearer as Saturn, which exerted its negative influence in the French and Russian Revolutions. However, Saturn also has constructive ways of reflecting uncompromising change by being the planet of reality checks. In the light of Saturn’s positive utility, the two revolutions mentioned here not only concern the rise and fall of Marxist communism, but also point to the revolutions taking place at the beginning and end of the 20^th century. The first Russian Revolution of 1917 was Saturn’s reality check on the corruption of the Czar’s autocratic rule. In August 1991, 74 years later a second Saturnian revolution exposed the social and political bankruptcy of the Bolshevik Utopia, signaling the disintegration of the Soviet bloc. The quatrain indexing (Q54) could be interpreted as a fulcrum in time, the midpoint in the pendulum’s swing from one extreme revolution to the advent of another. The death of Stalin made 1953 (a near miss for Q54) a pivotal year in the Cold War and for communist hegemony, through the election of Nikita Khruschev could begin the de-Stalinization of Soviet society. The mobile sign is Libra’s scales of Justice and Balance, which Nostradamus in other quatrains uses as a symbol for democracy. Perhaps this prediction hints that the kind of change Nostradamus is referring to here is a form of democratic government which affirms that all people are created equal (equal in favor to both sides). A wider interpretation of the two revolutions of the hammer and sickle (scythe) sees them as disclosing the fates of the Russian and Chinese communist revolutions. Communism in those countries will completely collapse as a result of the Chinese and Russian efforts to democratize before the coming millennium, making a change in reign and centuries. If America or democracy is implied by the mobile sign of Libra, it could also foretell a time of chaos and crisis for global democracy in the near future. The strain on Earth’s finite resources and food made by an increasingly voracious horde of humanity will require that democracy, like communism, undergo revolutionary changes. One solution maybe a blend of the best aspects of democracy and communism. In other words line 1’s Saturn reality check in the 21^st century may be intimate to us that a true and lasting social revolution cannot come from the extremes of the right and left wing but through balance (equal in favor of both sides). Through a synthesis of East and West, communism and democracy, socialism and capitalism.

1 Q55

Under the opposite Babylonian climate,

There will be great shedding of blood:

Heaven will appear unjust both on land and sea in the air,

Sects, famine, kingdoms, plagues, confusion.

The first line is puzzling. It may apply to Paris, France which sometimes Nostradamus described as the Mesopotamia of Europe for the city is geographically defined by two rivers, the Seine and the Marne. The phrase can be applied equally to the region of modern day Mesopotamia (Iraq), where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers flow. It is safe to say that the fates of both “Mesopotamias” are at least poetically interwined. French forces played a large part in Operation Desert Storm. The massive allied airstrikes and the funeral shroud of burning Kuwaiti oil fields torched by retreating Iraqis did indeed make the heavens appear unjust on the land, sea and in the atmosphere people breathed. The neighbouring kingdoms of the Gulf Sheiks, Jordanians and Saudis suffered terribly from the war and ecological disasters. At the time of writing, five years after the Gulf War, the cessation of hostilities has left only political uncertainity (confusion) in the Gulf, thousands of malnourished Iraqi children (famine), and a future legacy of health problems and shortened life expectancy (plagues) due to petroleum pollution. The future may look upon the blackened Mesopotamia of the Middle East taking its revenge on Paris, the Mesopotamia of Europe. In December 1994 Algerian terrorists held a dree rehearsal. On Chirstmas Eve Algerian terrorists hijacked Air France flight 8969, with its 227 passengers at Algiers’ Houari-Boumédienne International Airport. During the tense siege three hostages were killed before the plane was permitted to fly to Marseilles. When they landed in the early hours of 26 December, the hijackers demanded 27 tons of fuel to fly to Paris (a flight to Paris requires only 10 tons). Later that afternoon they were overpowered and killed when anti-terrorist gendarmes hurled concussion grenades into the cockpit. Some of the hostages had overheard the terrorists talk about their plan to detonate the plane over Paris. They saw them check and recheck 20 sticks of dynamite set behind the pilots’ seat and the passenger seats in the central portion of the plane between the gas tanks in the wings. If they had succeeded in flying out of Marseilles for Paris, the 42 ton Airbus with 15 tons of highly volatile jet fuel would have erupted into a giant gasoline bomb over central Paris, creating a conflagaration as catastrophic as a detonation of a tactical nuclear weapon. The tons of flaming jet fuel would have set large areas of the city on fire.

1 Q56

You will see, sooner and later, great changes made,

Extreme horrors and vengeances:

For as the moon [of Islam] is thus led by its angel,

The heavens draw near to the reckoning.

Gabreel (Gabriel) is the avenging angel of the Christian and the Islamic Apocalypse. As suggested in 10 Q72, the terror of the Middle Eastern Antichrist comes from the skies (the heavens). This could therefore mean that nuclear fires from the skies (from 10 Q72) will descend on the Western democratic powers as early as July of 1999. The quatrain indexing may target the year 1956, which witnessed the first successful victory of Pan-Arab Nationalism against the West during the Suez Canal incident, when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez canal and forced French and British forces to withdraw.

1 Q57

By great discord the whirlwind will tremble

Broken accord, lifting the head to heaven:

Bloody mouth will swim with blood,

The face once anointed with milk and honey lies in the soil.

This remarkable prophecy was written 239 years before the event. Louis XVI mounted the scaffold, his eyes sweeping over the jerring mob below. Under his piercing gaze the drums and crowd fell silent and the deposed king began to protest his innocence in clear, steady tones. But the drums started to roll again and the executioner Sanson proceeded. As he raised the blade, witnesses heard the king reciting the third verse of the third psalm, “Thou, O Lord, are my glory and lifter of my head…” until his voice was silenced by the falling blade. Sanson then lifted the king’s severed head high in the air in front of the crowd. The whirlwind of the French Revolution did tremble with the death of Louis XVI, setting into motion the lunacy of the Reign of Terror. Louis had promised to remain in Paris but was caught escaping (broken accord). The prophet describes the executioner displaying the king’s severed head to the mob and in a double pun echoes Louis’ last words from the third psalm (lifting the head to heaven), which he recited as the blade fell. Line 3 gives a vivid description of beheading (bloody mouth will swim with blood). In considering the last line, Steward Robb, in Prophecies of World Events By Nostradamus, gives us an ingenious interpretation that dates the beginning and end of Louis’ life as king. Louis had been crowned on the feast day of St Agnes, 21 January and in honor of that day his face was anointed with milk and honey. The holy offices of St Agnes contain the key words to line 4: Mel [honey] et lac [milk] ex ore [mouth] ejus suscepi, et sanhuis [blood] ejus ornavit oras [face]… Louis was guillotined 19 years after his coronation, on St Agnes’Day, 21 January 1793.

1 Q58

Cutting the belly, [it] will be born with two heads,

And four arms : A few years it will live whole:

The day which Aquileia will celebrate its feasts,

Fassano, Turin, chief of Ferrara will follow.

It is difficult for any interpreter to read the entrails of this quatrain. I place it as a French prophet’s biased synonym for the monster born with two heads sired by Charles V when he split his vast empire between his brother Ferdinand and his son Philip II six short months after this quatrain was published. One could say that these two heads later became the empires of the Spanish and the Austrian Habsburgs. The Austrian Habsburgs would eventually adopt the two headed black eagle as their emblem. The four arms of this monster wrap Nostradamus’ France in their embrace. They are the routes of potential dangers and invasions: the first arm is in the Pyrences through Navarre, the Spanish Netherlands is the second; the invasion routes through Savoy and Italy are the third arm; and those through the ports of the south of France the fourth. The final line lists those Italian and Mediterranean kingdoms and states that will follow the new world order after Charles V’s retirement. The intimation that Philip and Ferdinand would unite the empire again and add Venice/Aquileia to the alliance never became reality.

1 Q59

The exiles deported to the isles,

At the advent of an even crueler monarch

Will be murdered: and two put to the sparks,

Who had not been sparing with their speech.

A general augury for history’s endless file of people being deported to prison camps. The word “isolation” is etymologically connected with isles (islands). If I were to pick the most notorious penal archipelago in history, I would choose Josef Stalin’s island chain of concentration camps spread across the vastness of the Soviet Union, described by Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn as the Gulag Archipelago. Few monarchs were as cruel or sent more millions to oblivion than Stalin. With this interpretation is mind I wish to transfer fcintile with a more mordern appication – literally sparks representing the flash of mordern guns as they cut down the political enemies of Stalin by firing squad.

1 Q60

An Emperor will be born near Italy,

He will cost his Empire very dearly:

They will say that from the sort of people that surround him,

That he is less a prince than a butcher.

Nostradamus foresaw the coming of three tryants whom he called Antichrist. These men, he warned, could move mankind towards total world destruction sometime shortly after the year 2000. The first of these is identified in this quatrain. He is a man who was to critically influence the military and political course of modern European history – Napoleon Bonaparte, born near Italy on the island of Corsica. Nostrdamus envisioned a bloody reign of a commoner dictator (common advent of the people) beginning in 1792. This man was destined to force the crowned heads of Europe to adopt his laws and strategies so they could defeat his revolutionary empire, an empire that would cost France 2 million men, to make and to lose. As a consequence, the united Europe that defeated Napoleon became even more Napoleonic. Moreover, the First Antichrist succeeded in sterring European history towards the demise of monarchies, a development that set the geopolitical stage for the two future Antichrists. Nostradamus predicted that they would emerge in the 1940s and 1990s.

1 Q61

The miserable, unhappy republic,

Will be ruined by the new magistrate:

Their great amassing of the wicked exile,

Will cause the Swiss to carry off their great contracts.

An orthodox slant would construe this as another attack by Nostradamus on John Calvin, who was shepherd to the Protestant citizens of Geneva and de facto magistrate of a theocratic city-state. Rather than stay with the mainstream theory I will pin this quatrain on the near future destiny of the Palestinian state, under its new (and first) president, Yasser Arafat. Those doing all the amassing (or better, “Hamassing”) against Arafat are the anti-Zionist Palestinian faction, Hamas. I sense that Yasser Arafat’s presidency will be a bust. Perhaps he is assassinated. There seem to be few good leaders to replace him. The decoding hinges on whether the French word for “amassing,” amas, is in fact a cryptogram for (H)amas, whose operatives may perform some act of terrorism so henious that it details the efforts of peacemakers from the Middle East all the way to the peace tables of Geneva. This interpretation hinges on Swiss representing a Geneva that is more than Calvinist – a Geneva that is the capital of the 20^th century diplomacy. Otherwise this quatrain remains better suited to a time and a bias far closer to Nostradamus’ heart.

1 Q62

A great loss, alas! There will be of learning,

Before the cycle of Latona [the moon] is completed:

Fire, great flood more through ignorant rulers,

How long the [lunar] cycle will not see itself restored.

A society that abandons its higher arts is like a tree that cuts off its own flowers. That society becomes impoverished and the tree will eventually come to a disaster. Nearly all great civilizations have begun their decline by throwing their pearls of their highest understanding into the maw of its swinish collective mind, its lowest common demonitator of values. Today the Pax Americana spreads across the world its materialism and the all hallowed  market value and Mickey Mouse mentality. Hokum is holy. Excellence becomes a hostage of the majority vote. Soon the world will watch tabloid shows  like American Journal and forget to read the Journal American. Art, music  and literature will become democratic. Popularity, not aesthetics, will dictate funding. The grammies and the oscars will be the only diploma respected. MTV will be our grandchildren’s professors and mentors. Whatever challenges our values or rattles our rationales will be deemed antisocial. Soon after that, it will be forgotten altogether. As Lynda S. Clary of Bethesda, Maryland, wrote in the letters section of Time Magazine, “Killing cultural funding will leave future generations with an educational, aesthetic and spiritual deficit far greater than the financial one we currently face.” Not only has American society degraded and thrown the wisdom of native cultures (along with the natives), it will also soon deny its hard won lessons when history departments shut down for lack of funding or worse, are downsized in intellectual excellence to match the students’ warning capacity. The consequence is an even dumber generation succeeding the last, ruled by those chosen by the mobcracy because they are predictable and lower in quality than the mob itself. If we do not turn back to the value of excellence, the current grand lunar cycle – which began in 1889 with a puff of coal – industry smoke during the high industrial revolution – will host an ecological disaster of biblical proportions before the Latonan cycle ends in AD 2243.

1 Q63

Pestilences extinguished, the world becomes small,

For a long time the lands will be inhabited in peace:

One will travel safely by air, [over] land, sea and wave:

Then wars will start anew.

No prophecy could better describe the Cold War era. By 1963 (Q63), advances in medical science had almost eradicated the great killer diseases such as yellow fever, polio and smallpox. The dawning jet age following the war paved the way for countless millions to travel safely through the skies to every continent over every ocean. Airline companies transported 1.3 billion passengers in 1995. Developments in communications technology facilitated contact between differnet peoples and cultures. For nearly half a century fear of the atomic bomb has prevented the power brokers of the world from punishing Earth with a third global war. The struggle between the superpowers has been played out in the developing countries of the Third World. Superpower disagreements have boiled to the surface during a string of wars after 1945: Korea, Suez, Vietnam and a dozen other confrontations between the Arab nations and Israel or India and Pakistan. With the end of the Cold War, tensions are on the increase in the Third World as are a series of vicious wars arising out of the ethnic hotbeds in the former Communist bloc, the Second World. More people flew around the world in 1995 than in any previous year, but the year also produced as increase in wars across the world. Between 30 to 32 conflicts are raging at the time of writing, the majority of them civil wars within national boundaries. The technological and medical advances foretold by Nostradamus have their darker consequences. A drastic cut in infant mortality has spawned overpopulation. Record growth in industrial production has improved the quality of life, but pollution threatens Earth’s fragile ecosystem. Computers, which have revolutionized our lives, are capable of transmitting a message of peace – or global nuclear destruction – at the stroke of a key.

1 Q64

They will think they have seen the sun at night,

When they see the half-pig man:

Noise, chants, battles seen fought in the sky:

And one will hear brute beasts speaking

Leoni’s tongue-in-porcine-check interpretation that Khruschev is the half-pig man might fit with the indexing to reveal a date (1964); however I see this as another example of the uncanny accuracy of Nostradamus in forecasting future technology. He records future battles of great air fleets, piloted by half pig men (masked pilots). He hears this radio transmissions to match his own wild poetry, with foreign tongues and coded gibberish: Noise, chants… brute beasts speaking. This could be either applied to the Battle of Britian, or it could be of the jets pilots in the Korean Vietnamese and Yom Kippur wars, Desert Storm and unfortunately coming air battles in the next few decades of the 21^st century.

1 Q65

Child without [power] never was seen so great a thunderbolt,

The royal child, at the game of revenge, wounded:

On the summit fracutres, lightning flashes going is soundly trash,

Three in chains trussed up around the middle.

During his incarceration in the Temple prison, Louis XVII, the Bourbon heir to the throne, was taken away from his mother and placed into the grubby hands of Simon the Cobbler. He suffered lightning flashes of pain to numerous whippings and beatings. Simon was instructed to humble the young Dauphin and seemed to exult in the abuse, as if it were a game. The context of the word Nostradamus uses, oeuteuf, suggests that the quatrain figuratively describes a game of revenge. Circumstantial evidence points to the Dauphin’s injuries as the cause of death in 1795. The last line could be either a representative image of aristocrats tied together by the waist being let to the guillotine or it specifically points to the three most important aristocratic victims of the Reign of Terror: Louis XVI, Louis XVII and Queen Marie Antoinette. The description would then be poetic rather than factual, since the king and queen were not tied in this way and the Dauphin died in prison.

1 Q66

He who then will bear the news,

After a short while he will come to rest

Viviers, Tournon, Montferrand and Pradelles,

Hail and tempests will make them gasp.

A quatrain with a clear though private message. Because the recipient and the messenger have long since returned to dust, it is pointless to decipher it except to say that Pradelles is in Haute-Loire in east-central France; Montferrand is in the Puy-de-Dome; Viviers is on the west bank of the Rhone in Languedoc; and so is Tournon, about seven miles upstream from Valence.

1 Q67

The great famine which I  sense approaching,

Will often turn [up in various places] then become universal:

It will be so vast and long-lasting that [people] will grab

Roots from the trees and children from the breast.

I once watched a documentary called The Birth of Europe. The segment portrayed the travails of the 13^th century, when European society suffered terrible plagues and wars because its numbers had swelled beyond the agricultural sustainability of the times. The first half of the century welcomed a series of bountiful harvests and good weather that instituted a sudden population increase. Then an abrupt climate change called the Little Ice Age visited Europe, causing skies to be darkened with unremiting rain for three straight years. Europe suffered continetal crop faliures, followed by a great famine and finally by the Balck Death, the bubonic plague. Society was disrupted and the land was vexed by fundamentalist religious extremism and numerous wars over dwindling resources. The beleaguered all across the continent were convinced that the Apocalypse was at hand. One empirical fact supports the prophetic vision of St John the Divine: the Black Death alone killed off one-third of the European population, and wars and famines reduced it further by half. As we approach the 21^st century, each day 250,000 people are born, more than 90,000 new motor vehicles hit the road, more than 160 square miles of tropical rain forest are destroyed, 57,000,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide contaminate the air and 40,000 children under the age of 5 die from humger or bacteria infested water. With the end of Cold War the world becomes ever more enamored with the market side, high waste producing American lifestyle, yet our current global technologies and infrastructure and food sustainability can support a population of only 2.5 billion living the American dream. By 1997 the world population exceeded 5.7 billion. Ninety million hungry and thirsty new consumers are born each year. By the new millennium this will increase to 100 million each year. In 20 years the population will reach 8 billion; in 50 years, 14 billion. Zero population growth reports undergoing a baby boom even greater than the one after World War II. The country that consumes the most energy and spews out the most pollution (one-sixth of the poplation using one-quarter of the world’s energy) will roughly double in numbers to 500 million by 2050 and be responsible for half of the world’s current energy consumption rate! By 2030 China could by itself eat up the world, since it will require all the current grain exports of the world. By 2025, we will have to build a nuclear power plant every week to keep up with the energy demands of nearly a dozen billion people! Thirteenth-century hell hath no fury like the one we are concocting for ourselves in the 21^st century – that is if we don’t heed the warnings of our prognosticator and todays insightful pundits. The plaques, famines and droughts perdicted by Nostradamus have already begun and continue to be right on astrological schedule. The growing world drought and the spread of famine and hunger, especially in early 1990s Africa, continues to remind a foot-dragging new world order that the greenhouse affect cannot be ignored.

1 Q68

Oh what a horrible and ill starred torment,

Three innocent ones whom one will come to hand over:

Poston suspected, evil treason preserved,

Put in horror by intoxicated executioners.

I agree with Lamont that upon first impression this could be about the brutal murder of the Czar Nicholas and his family by Red Guards in Ekaterinburg, Siberia in 1917. Similar word links to poisoning exist in other Romanov murder quatrains such as 4 Q71. Sometimes it is prudent to avoid the habit of scholars who pin meanings of a quatrain to their own century. Perhaps this one is about the 16^th. In line 1 Nostradamus could be playing with words again to make a compounded pun – if we can replace the letters left out of tourment. If one adds an n and e to tourment the line could also be read Oh what a horrible and ill-starred tournament. Henry II suffered the torment of a mortal wound in a tournament in 1559 (see 1 Q35). With the addition of letters to one word the fog is burned with adult responsibilites and kingship far too soon. Novelists enjoy saying that Charles IX was poisoned, but no definite proof exists; Francis II died from the fainting sickness shortly after the death of his father; and Henry III was assassinated. The last two lines may suddenly change the subject, as Nostradamus commonly does. From the three Valois kings he jumps to the plots of Henry III against Henry de Guise, his chief rival. Perhaps the last line pictures Guise walking into the king’s bedchamber to find the king’s bodyguards waiting for him with drawn swords and the sour and rapid breath of drunken assassins poised for murder. Even so, I cannot help but ride the waves upon Psellus’ wishing bowl back to the royals of the 20^th century, the Romanovs. It is a documented fact that while the Czar, his family and retainers waited in the basement, their executioners, sitting upstairs, were drinking heavily to fortify themselves while they loaded their pistols. The Czar’s jailkeeper kept him in the dark, telling his family that they were only going to be moved to another location. His jailers had known for a while about the treasonous act, or order for their execution, and they preserved the secret until the very last moment when the guards appeared at the door with barrels raised and pistol hammers ready to fall.

1 Q69

The great mountain, 4,247 feet in circumference,

After peace, war, famine, flooding:

[The impact] will spread far, drowning great countries,

Even antiquities and their mighty foundations.

An asteroid strike seems to be hidden in the cloudy lines of several quatrains – not in some distant future but perhaps as a clear and present danger every 13 months for the next 30 years. The interloper will come in the shape of a shadow mountain from space, a chunk of refuse labeled by author Jane Blosveld in Omni magazine as “rocky placenta left over from the solar system’s birth.” Each year it orbits closer to Earth and it may eventually collide with either this planet or the Moon. In March 1989, retired geologist turned asteroid hunter Dr Henry Holt studied photos taken by the 18-inch Schmidt telescopes at Mt Palomat Obesrvatory in California and discovered an asteroid between 500 and 1000 feet in diameter which he labeled 1989FC. The asteroid hurtled past Earth at a distance of a mere 450,000 miles – a very close shave in cosmic terms. Dr Holt estimates that “sooner or later,” it will hit something. According to Clark Chapman, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson Arizona, “This asteroid passed closer to the Earth than any asteroid or comet ever observed.” Fortunately a rock as big as 1989FC has a 1:20,000 chance of making this interpretation of Nostradamus correct this year or any other. Still, many scientists believe Asteroid 1989FC or a cosmic fragment of similar proportions will eventually score a hit. If it does, Bevan French, a program scientist at NASA’s Solar System Exploration Divison, says its 2,000-megaton impact would unleash blast waves and firetorms, flattening everything in a 50 mile radius.

1 Q70

Rain, famine and war in Persia will not cease,

A trust too great will betray the monarch:

For the end was planned and conceived in France,

A secret sign for one to be more sparing.

Ayatollah Khomeini captured world attention in 1963 when his Iranian followers staged a series of demonstrations against the Shah of Iran’s government. Khomeini was subsequently exiled to Iraq, where he began his 15-year struggle to forge his fundamentalist movement. After being removed from Iraq in 1978 he directed the Iranian revolution from Paris (planned and conceived in France) instructing them not to hesitate “to shed your blood to protect Islam and overthrow tyranny.” The trust the Shah of Iran had in America and its CIA operatives, who had helped him gain power decades before, was indeed too great. President Carter balked at the request for overt or even covert military support of the Shah’s collapsing regime. The final line is reflective. Perhaps the Islamic Revolution that followed was a sign to the Shah that he had pushed his people too hard and too fast into the modern world. Since 1979, the Iranian people have suffered continued deprivation, natural disasters, and the loss of a million people in wars and revolution. A 1990 earthquake in northern Iran killed 45,000, injured 100,000 and left nearly a half million people homeless.

1 Q71

The marine tower three times siezed and recaptured,

By Spaniards, Barbary raiders and Ligurians:

Marseilles and Aix, Aries by those of Pisa,

Devastation, fire, steel, Avignon pillaged by the Turiese.

Cheetham found this one irritating and undecipherable. Lemesurier and Fontbrune fling it on their heaped pile of “Asiatic/Muslim invasion of the French Riviera” themes. I would meet them halfway. There is no doubt this quatrain points to an invasion of the Southern French coast, but the chances of Islamic nations’ uniting and creating the naval and armed forces required to invade Europe in some future Normandy like World War II landing are quite slim. It is a ludicrous prophetic posit equal to the belief of Christian evangelists that China will invade the West with “200 million horsemen.” Most likely we have here a failed alternative future of an invasion of the Ottoman Turks in or close to Nostradamus’ time. The prophet saw Spain and Genoa, allied with the Turks and Barbary Corsairs, embarked on an expedition against Provence. I don’t doubt he peered through the mists and shadows of his vapour beclouded bowl of water and saw his ships invading the Riviera or Italian troops poundering Avignon. But at what time? I think Nostradamus would sometimes misread the images when coming out of a trance. The process of moving from a subjective experienced in more fimilar grab. He probably saw an invasion of Southern France but projected Muslims, Genovese and Spaniards onto a vision that more adequately describes Provence during its occupation by the Axis and during the Allied landings of World War II. The Italians pillaging Avignon were not Turinese mercenaries but Mussolini’s Italians, who marched through Avignon, Axis and Arles in November of 1942 to assist German troops if occupying Vichy controlled Southern France. For the next year the Italians occupied the French Alpine regions as far west as the Rhone river and as far south as Avignon. Later, in August 1944, the Allied invasion fleet did set sail from bases in Italy. One could say by synecdoche that they are those of Pisa. Marseilles in particular Axis and Atles endured vicious street fighting or devastation, fire and steel, during the Allied invasion.

1 Q72

The inhabitants of Marseilles completely changed,

Flight and persuit right up of the approaches of Lyons,

Narbonne, Toulouse outraged by Bordeaux,

Killed, captives almost a million.

In 1940 the French government fled Paris for Bordeaux, leaving the capital to Hitler’s panzers. The outraged towns later belonged to the hated Vichy puppet government. It appears that Nostradamus foresaw the peaceful town and hills of his native Provence become a battlefield in a distant, future war. In 1944, the great steel monsters firing and making tumult landed on the shores of Provence in Operation Dragoon. The forces of the Free French intially pushed the Germans out of Marseilles and all the way back to Lyons. Official French casualty estimates for World War II put their losses at 863,145.

1 Q73

France on five fronts is assaulted because of negligence,

Tunis, Algeria stirred up by the Persians:

Leon, Seville, Barcelona having yielded,

[They] will not have the fleet from [or for] the Venetians.

First let us examine this as a prophecy for our time. The subject is France’s resistance to European Union. It might even cover Chirac’s international blunders of brazenly perforating a South Pacific atoll with nuclear detonations in the mid – 1990s at a time when nuclear test-ban efforts when showing promise. Line 2 covers the threat of Islamic fundamentalism to France in the guise of Iranian supported Algerian terrorists who nearly detonated an Air France passenger jet over Paris. Line 3 is Spain after having surrendered (yielded) its national identity to join the EU. Line 4 is either some vague reference to Italy (home of the Venetians) backing out of NATO or it becomes a roadblock to my interpretation, detouring us back to the 16^th century for another try at this quatrain. The detour takes us to 1557, a few short years after the publication of this quatrain, when the forces of Henry II faced a military disaster at St Quentin. One botched adventure followed another and France was under assault on five fronts. The Spanish threatened her from Savoy, the Spanish Netherlands and the Pyrennees. Spanish fleets harassed her from the west coast, where their English allies held a foothold on the continent at Calais. Italy was the fifth front and had been the main theater of war between the Valois and Habsburgs for 50 years. North Africa was definitely stirred up during this period by numerous pirate raids on European and Venetian holdings in Rhodes and Cyprus and raids along Southern Europe’s shores. But these Barbary Corsairs were hardly stirred up by the Persians, unless North Africa indirectly stands for the entire Ottoman Empire during its civil war in 1559. Even so, the Persians waited in the sidelines, delivering the Sultan’s rebel son to his executioners. The Persians (Iranians) of today are definitely stirring the pot of North African Islamic extremism in our time. This may be another example of time fluctuation in Nostradamus’ vision that causes him to converge events from widely distant centuries into one vision in our time.

1 Q74

After tarrying they will move forward by rowing for Epirus,

The great relief effort will be toward Antioch:

The black curly haired one will strain hard for the Empire,

Brazen Barb[arossa] will be roasted on a spit.

There was no second crusade to Antioch in Nostradamus’ time. The future shoe I’d try to fit on this gnarly foot of a quatrain are actions in Greece and the middle east in 1940-41. Italian forces crossed the Adriatic to conquer Albania early in the war. From there they attacked western Greece (Epirus) in October 1940. The free French and British Common Wealth forces successfully invaded Vichy-held Syria (Antioch is right on the Turkish Syrian border). They mostly advanced from Iraq towards the west. Here’s where our interpretation rubs a bunion. Nostradamus gives us two Barbarossas. The conventional version is his contemporary, the pirate leader of the Barbary Corsairs. The unconventional one is Adolf Hitler, after his favorite medieval German king, Fredrick Barbarossa. The first Barbarossa would die in 1557, a few years after this quatrain was published. He was not burned on a spit, whereas the second Barbarossa came pretty close to being. After his suicide, Hitler’s body was creamated in a shallow pit outside his bunker in Berlin. The man with the black curls is either Don Juan of Austria, mistakenly pitted against Barbarossa in the battle of Lepanto in the 1570s, or the wiry haired commander of the Vichy French forces in Syria, General André de Verdilhac – but the latter is a stretch. This could be a future strategic attack on the Middle East via Greece through Turkey contemplated as an alternative by Hitler. Acting on it depended on the Turks joining the Axis Alliance which they never did.

1 Q75

The tryant of Siena will occupy Savona,

The stronghold gained will hold the marine fleet:

The two armies by the standard of Ancona.

Because of terror the chief self – searches.

This has something to do with the Italian intrigues of Henery II during the mid-to-late 1550s. Siena was a free city, allied to France against its chief adversary, the Florentines. The garrison sent by the French to Siena capitulated in April 1555, about a week before Les Propheties were published and well after this quatrain was written. The standard of the city of Ancona was that of the Papal States, to which it had belonged since 1532.

1 Q76

Of a ferocious name such will be proclaimed,

That the three sisters will possess for destiny his name:

Then to a great people [the French] he will speak in words and deeds,

More than any other man [he will have] fame and renown.

Clues to unlock a quatrain can come in surprising places. One can imagine Le Pelletier on a stroll through the Place de Vendome sometime in the 1860s, stopping at the great column of Napoleon’s memorial. He pauses to study the inscription “NEAPOLIO. IMP. AUG.” Eureka! The key to a Nostradamus mystery is found. Le Pelletier is the first to unravel the ferocious name of the man forseen here. “Neapolio” is a play on the Greek word neapolluon, which means “new” (neo-) or “certain” (ne-) “destroyer” (-apolluon). Le Pelletier sees this as an apt, poetic description of the destiny of Nostradamus’ First Antichrist. Expanding on his interpretation, I see three sisters are a double pun for the Three Graces of classical Greek mythology and the three sisters of Napoleon – Caroline, Pauline and Elisa – to whom he gave crowns and titles. The ferocious name they immortalize for destiny is also “(N)apollyon,” immortalized in Revelation 9:11of the New Testament as “the angel of abyss, whose name, in Hebrew, is Abbadon and in Greek, Apollyon the Destroyer.” Of the three Antichrists, Napoleon was correctly foreseen as the most obsessed with deeds of glory and his immortal destiny. To this day more books have been written about Napoleon than any other despot, expect perhaps for the fierce mid-20^th-century German warlord, Nostradamus’ Second Antichrist.

1 Q77

Between two seas stands the promontory,

A man will later die by the bit of a horse:

For his own man Neptune unfurls a black sail,

Through Gibraltar and the fleet near Rocheval.

In 1805 the British Fleet, commanded by the legendary Lord Nelson, defeated the French and Spanish Fleets under Admiral Villeneuve off the Spanish coast near Cape Trafalgar, which is between Cape Roche (Rocheval) and Gibraltar. Napoleon could not proceed with his planned invasion of England. This would create a fatal strategic setback. England remained unbeaten and safe from his victorious armies and was free to invade occupied Spain and incite the Russians to break Napoleon’s continental blockade of England. This led to his disastrous war with Russia in 1812. By 1814 his empire collapsed. Lord Nelson died in the battle of Trafalgar. On his flagship, HMS Victory, black sails were unfurled for her homeward voyage. The hapless Villeneuve was captured in the battle. When he was returned via a prisoner exchange, Napoleon had him strangled to death by one of his Mameluke bodyguards, who used a horse’s bridle (a bite or bit of a horse). Nostradamus saw the executioner’s weapon 250 years prior to the crime.

1 Q78

To an older chief will be born one with dull senses

Degenerate both in knowledge and in weapons:

The chief of France feared by his sister,

Fields divided, conceded to the soldiers on horses.

I dedicate this one to La Reine Margot, the lusty and ill-starred daughter of Catherine de’Medici. The older chief is Henery II. Charles IX is the child in question. As a fully grown chief (king) of France he was feared by his sister Marguerite. Charles, a dull and easily manipulated monarch, had permitted the massacre of her husband’s wedding guests on St Bartholomew’s Day (August 1572). Her marriage to the Huguenot King Henry de Navarre had worked as wedding bait to entice the Huguenot leadership into the Catholic lion’s den of Paris. Marguerite was further compromised by her sometime lover, the chief of the Catholic Leaguers, Henry de Guise who plotted against her new Huguenot husband while scheming against her degenerate brothers, Charles IX and the Duc de Anjou (the future Henry III). The final line is a good general description of the nine Wars of Religion: it suggests the Catholic and Huguenot nobility jockeying for territory and influence during the long lulls between civil war’s sharp and short – term military actions. Many of these battles were won or lost by calvary attacks (soldiers on horses).

1 Q79

Basas, Lectoure, Condom, Auch and Agen,

Affected by laws, quarrel and monopoly:

For Bordeaux, Toulouse, Bayonne [it] will ruin.

Wishing to revive their sacrifice of a bull.

All these towns are in the south-west France and are watered by the Garonne river except for Bayonne. According to Leoni there is a widely disputed theory that the town of Condom, like the inventor Thomas Crapper, had its name immortalized for its association with a naughty bit or two. The rest of the quatrain describes a prophylactic defense of another kind. The quatrain is so general that it could be as much about a Huguenot rebellion in Nostradamus’ time as the French farmer and produce drivers’ revolt against EU regulation of French agricultural perks in the 1990s. The final line either metaphorically describes the desire of some French farmers to return to the old and conservative ways rather than go forward with the EU, or is another of the prophet’s odd comparisons: of Hugenots to Jove – worshipping pagans.

1 Q80

Of the sixth bright celestial splendor,

It will come to thunder very much in Burgundy:

Then a divine portent of a very hideous beast will be born,

March, April, May, June, great bandaging [of wounds] and decapitating.

The constellation of Vingo is implied in line 1. Burgundy is the scene of too many wars to make a definite interpretation, although conflicts that thunder could apply to artillery barrages of the 20^th century. Now all we need is to find a modern battle harvesting deaths in the hills of Burgundy during the month of harvests, September (zodiacal Virgo). This leaves us only one choice. In September 1944 the German Nineteenth Army had made a fighting withdrawal through Burgundy. Patton’s US Third Army from the Normandy landings linked up with General Patch’s Seventh Army to advance up the Rhone river valley from the Riviera at Dijon on 11 September. The final line takes us into the first half of 1945, where Nostradamus may have foreseen the final titanic battles of World War II: the Ruhr Pocket, Berlin and Okinawa.

1 Q81

Nine will be set apart from the human flock,

Separated from judgement and counsel:

Their fate to be determined on departure.

Kappa, Thita, Lambda dead, banished and scattered.

In 1961, around the time the United States was hurling its first Mercury astronaut on a Redstone rocket, Edgar Leoni first published his belief that this quatrain could have a mordern, space-oriented application – one that indicated a future fatal voyage in space. A decade later Erika Cheetham boldly went where Leoni had never gone before, firing off the hypothesis that this quatrain is about the death of the three Soviet cosmonaughts of Soyuz XI. However her idea that the three Greek letters Kappa, Thita and Lamda are the intials of the three cosmonauts, Dobrovolsky, Patasayev and Volkov however is unfortunately a crash of another kind. Still I believe Leoni was on the right track: a space disaster is foretold here. On 28 January 1986, 71 seconds after lift off, the US space shuttle Challenger exploded. The tragedy witnessed by shocked millions around the world was caused by the leakage of volatile gas from the left solid rocket booster. Seven astronauts were killed in the explosion. In an era when space flight would have been the stuff of fairy tales to Nostradamus – apart from a mistake in numbers (nine rather than seven were killed) – he makes an uncannily accurate description of this disaster. During the months of investigation following the explosion, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) came under close scrutiny. The inquiry revealed flaws in the shuttle itself and in command decision-making (separated from judgement and counsel). The final line is a riddle of Greek letters has puzzled interpreters for centuries. I would venture that they are an anagram for some of those involved in the Challenger scandal: K, TH, L =TH(io)K(o)L = Thiokol. This could stand for the rocket manufacturer, Morton Thiokol Inc., which designed and built the faulty solid rocket boosters. Neither management nor NASA officials took much interest in the doubts expressed asbout the booster design by junior egineers at Morton Thiokol Inc. In the scandal many company heads and egineers, along with a number of senior NASA officials, were fired (banished and scattered).

1 Q82

When the columns of timber tremble greatly,

Led by the South Wind covered in red:

Such a great multitude will be drawn off:

Vienna and the country of Austria will tremble.

How does one unravel the riddle of columns of timber trembling? Are they wooden-walled fortresses under an artillery barrage? Are they logging convoys or forests trembling from an earthquake? I personally experienced a large scale forest temblor while camping in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. The quake’s shock wave moved across the moutains from the north and in the sultry, windless night it sounded like ten thousands logs rolling down a hill. If this is a prophecy in past tense for us, the trembling trimbles could be the oars of Turkish galleys on the moves, or the earth trembling under a great army of Turks emerging from the Austrian forests near Vienna in 1683 to lay a second siege on a city that had been a Christian outpost of Eastern Europe since 1529. In both case they failed to win the city. But if we move into prophecy, future tense, the shivering timbers are from future earthquakes in central Europe. Around the turn of the century chaotic weather patterns caused by the greenhouse effect introduced a string of droughts across Southern Europe. The hot Mistral (South Wind) blows through a desicated Provence. The wind is colored by the red smoke of catastrophic forest fires along the Riviera all the way down through Spain. A great multitude drawn off may be the same victims of the global plague described in the Epistle, which carries off two-thirds of humanity. Pherhaps it is the blood plague described in several quatrains that is caused by HIV, the Ebola virus or radiation from widening ozone holes in the atmosphere. Perhaps Mother Nature is using a number of ways to draw off a todentlike population explosion of humans in the first half of the 21^st century.

1 Q83

The alien race will divide the booty,

Saturn in Mars his [its] gaze furious:

Horrible slaughter to the Tuscans and Latins,

Greeks who will take part [in] a careful strike.

The aline race are the Muziks and Mongolians troops of Zhukhov’s Siberian soldiers, rummaging through the snow covered wreckage of the Italian Eighth Army outside of Stalingrad. Saturn in Mars represent the cabalistic colors black into red. A contemporary slant would take these to represent the Spanish. For the 20^th century it would stand for the fascists of Mussolini (the black shirts) against the Red Soviets. On 16 December 1942, three Soviet armies charged across the frozen Don river, along a 60-mile front guarded by the Italian Eighth Army. Over half of the 225,000 men from Tuscany and Rome were killed or wounded and 60,000 survivors were captured. The last line could chronicle the successes of Greek communist (red) and non communist guerrillas against the Italian and German occupation forces when they coordinated careful strikes(s) of sabotage, clumintaing in the destruction of the vital Gorgopotamos railway bridge on 5 November 1942.

1 Q84

The moon obscured in profound shadows,

His brother becomes the color of stained blood:

The great one hidden for a long time in the shadows,

Will hold the blade in the bloody wound.

One of Nostradamus’ prophetic strong suits is identifying murders of various members of various members of the French Royal line. This is the first of the three quatrains that give a relatively clear, but unheeded, warning for the near perfect date of the assassination of the Duc de Berri outside the Paris Opera. The murder of the Bourbon heir apparent is accurately forseen in 1 Q96 as taking place on the night of 13 February 1820. This date is supported by the astrological information in line 1 of this quatrain. The moon was indeed in a profound shadow on that night; according to American astrologer Dan Oldenburg there occurred a new moon at 9 pm (Paris time) on February 13! Line 2 concerns Charles X, the father of the Duc de Berri and the brother of Louis XVI, who was executed by guillotine in the French Revolution (his brother becomes the color of stained blood). The phrase profound shadows could also be a description of the assassin, Louvel, waiting outside the Paris Opera in the shadows, dagger in hand. Louvel leapt upon de Berri as he was helping his wife into the carriage. As the grooms qucikly dragged the assassin away, the duke looked down in horror at his own hand gripping the dagger buried up to the hilt. “I am dead!” he cried, “I am holding the hilt of the dagger!” Nostradamus was apparently intimating the parting words of the Duke as he clutched the blade (Will hold the blade in the bloody wound).

1 Q85

The king is troubled by the Queen’s reply,

The fearful ambassadors take their lives into their own hands:

The greater of the brothers will double disguise his action,

Two of them will die through anger, hatred and envy.

Nostradamus first introduces part two of his prophecy on the assassintaion of Henry de Guise by Henry III. (See 3 Q51 for part one). On the stormy night of 22 December 1588, Henry III’s Mignons – a dozen of his best male friends, male lovers and bodyguards – pounced on Henry de Guise with swords bared. His cries of “My friends!” were drowned out by the steady drumbeat of a downpour. His sword and scabbard were entangled in his cloak and he could not reach them in time. Quick hands darting in and out of the lightning flashes caught hold of his arms and neck; other hands thrust five poniard blows into his chest, neck and groin. Yet with an extreme effort he carried his attackers across the room, pounding and scraping their boots on the floorboards, to fall in a heap in front of the king’s bed. So violent was the storm that the 70-year-old ailing mother of the king, Catherine de’ Medici, sleeping in a bedroom one floor below, didn’t hear a single footstep or body-fall. The next day she awoke from her afternoon nap to see her son by her bedside, consulting with her physician, Dr Cavriana, who was assuring him that she was doing well and taking her medicine. The king turned to her and asked, “How do you feel Madame?” “Oh, my son, fairly, fairly,” she replied in a tone that might gain her some sympathy. His reply would give her cause to go to her grave. “As for me, Madame, I am extremely well,” he declared. “Excuse me. Monsieur de Guise is dead. He will be heard of no more. I have had him killed.” One can only speculate on what was going inside Catherine’s mind that moment as she stared him, while the king rambled on excitedly, rejoicing in his revenge for the Duke’s insolence and many offenses. Did her mind turn back the pages of her life to all her warnings and prophecies of doom for the House of Valois? Did she think again for her occult heraldic device of the Serpent clapsing its tail in its teeth? The serpent ring stands for ultimate power, such as that she wielded often down through the years as regent, preparing her boys for the throne. So far Francis II and Charles IX had been weaklings, disasters. The power they held was unbalanced, like the serpent that, in devouring his own tail, eats itself up completely. Now as she heard her favorite and final son finish explaining his actions, one can only wonder if she thought her son was yet another power-mad and hungry serpent beginning a feast of himself. “My Lord, have you well ordered your affairs?” she asked darkly. “Monsieur de Guise has many frineds.” He assured her that he had, to which she replied fatefully, “I pray to God that will turn out well.” She collapsed back into the pillow and fell silent. At the time the king scarcely acknowledged her response and revitalized by the elixir of revenge, left the room. But a short time later he would be at great pains to remember her warning to set his affairs in order, for his actions, as foreseen by Nostradamus, would see him assassinated in the following year. The King is troubled by the Queen’s reply. Catherine de Medici sees herself as a pawn in her son’s terrible blunder and is furious. Not only did Henry III murder the Duc de Guise, but after his conversation with her that morning he would have the Duke’s brother, the Cardinal de Guise, murdered, effectively cutting of the head of the Catholic leadership against the Huguenots. This completes a deed so dastardly that Catholic France unites against their own Catholic king. Catherine’s exasperation is so acute it brings on her death soon afterwards. The last three lines tell of the consequences of Henry III’s blunder. The fearful ambassadors take their lives into their own hands. The ambassadors of the Estates-General denounce Henry III for the murder of Guise and his brother, the Cardinal Louis. They direct all their support to the surviving brother Charles, the Duc de Mayenne. The greater of the brothers will double his action. Mayenne accomplishes the double disguise by taking both titles held separately by his brothers: Lieutenant General of France and Commander of the Catholic League. Two of them will die through anger, hatred and envy. The two are Henry de Guise and Cardinal Louis, murdered by the jealous king.

1 Q86

The great Queen when she will see herself conquered,

Will be excessive in masculin courage:

Upon a horse, totally vulnerable, she will pass over the river,

Pursued by the sword. She will outrage her faith.

Mary Stuart had thoroughly outraged her Catholic subjects through her affair with the notorious Bothwell. She escaped prison only to see her army defeated at the Battle of Langside. Mary fled across the Solway Firth to England to seek refuge in Queen Elizabeth’s court. She became the English queen’s prisoner and eventually met her death at Fotheringay 1587.

1 Q87

Earth-shaking fire from the center of the Earth.

Will cause the towers around the New City to shake:

Two great rocks for a long time will make war,

And then Arethusa will color a new river red.

This quatrain may reinforce others heralding 1987 as the earliest year for earthquakes. The two great rocks stand for Earth’s continental plates grinding (will make war) against one another. Volcanic eruptions corresponding with earthquakes are also hinted at the last line of this quatrain. Arethusa is a classical Greek nymph who in legend changed herself into a spring. By describing Arethusa as red Nostradamus warns us of lava flows. This may indicate that huge volcanic eruptions will hit major First World population centers from 1996 through the spring 2000. We may see Mt Vesuvius and Etna in Italy and Mont Pélé on the Caribbean island on Martinique cannot be ruled out for the same period. At the same time of writing a major eruption is expected near Martinique on the island of Montserrat.

1 Q88

The divine wrath will surprise the great Prince,

A short time before he will have married a woman.

Both support and credit will suddenly diminish,

Counsel, he will die because of the shaven heads.

This quatrain pinpoints the beginning of troubles for Charles I of England as well as their outcome many years later. In 1625 Charles I declared on his wedding day that the persecution of Catholics in England should stop. In its divine “Puritan” wrath Parliament, already estranged by the king’s disregard of its powers, openly refused him by vetoing his request for subsidies (credit) for his war against Spain. His marriage to Catholic princess further rubbed their Puritan noses in what they condemned as his papist intrigues (divine wrath again). Twenty-four years later communication between king and Parliament broke and civil war ensued. The day came when the king’s own court (counsel) would sentence him to die because of pressure from the victorious Roundheads (shaven heads).

1 Q89

Everyone from Lerida will be in the Moselle,

Putting to death all those of the Laire and Seine:

The marine current will come up to the high wall,

When the Spanish will open every vein.

If this predicts the conquest of France by Spain, then it is a complete failure. Several modern scholars have tried to piece together a complete teacup prophecy out of a few broken fragments. Cheetham tries to make one fragment imply the Duke of Wellington’s peninsular campaign – this overlooks the minimal contribution of Spanish contingents in the expedition into Southern France in 1814. Fontbrune grabs another broken shard and by extension turns Spanish Habsburgs into Prussian soldiers surrounding Bazaine at Metz during the the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. He reasons well that the war was fought over the Spanish succession, but no Spanish soldier fired a shot at a Frenchman, much less slaughtered an appreciable proportion of the population. James Laver’s attempt is the most thought provoking. He translates haulte velle (“High valley”) as “High Well(ington).” The duke of Wellington did lead a mostly British force with a few Spanish units into France to win the irrelevant Battle of Toulouse (irrelevant because it was fought after Napoleon had abdicated his throne). But Toulouse is well south of Nostradamus’ Loire – Seine axis of slaughter, and in my opinion James Laver does no better than the others in salvaging this quatrain.

1 Q90

Bordeaux, Poitiers at the sound of the bell,

A great army will go as far as Langon:

The north wind will be against the French,

When a hideous monster [or divine omen] will be born near Orgo

The description of a divine omen visiting France through the medium of a two-headed and generally hideous newborn babe is similar to the monster in 1 Q80. Langon is 30 miles south-east of Bordeaux, on the Garonne river. Orgon is a dozen miles north of Salon. Invasion! The alarm is sounded across Provence and south-western France. But who is the invader? In 1815 Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from Elba and landed near Cannes with a band of 1,000 men. It is known that an effigy of Napoleon was burned in the public square at Orgon to protest his return. After taking power Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo in June. Bad weather played a role in his defeat (the north wind will be against the French). The summer of 1815 is known as the summer that never came. A volcanic eruption in Indonesia was responsible for cooling the climate just enough to treat Europe to soggy and cold weather throughout the summer months. A muddy battlefield at Waterloo had upset Napoleon’s timetable. He was forced to wait six precious hours before the sun dried the field well enough to initiate a battle. If the June weather had been sunny, he could have defeated the Duke of Wellington’s Anglo-Belgian army in ample time before the Prussian army came to their rescue.

1 Q91

The gods will make it appear to the humans,

That they will be the authors of a great conflict:

Sword and lance [fly] before heaven is observed as serene,

So that on the left hand there will be great affliction.

Who are the gods? Are they merely to flotsam of poetic license or do they describe a future godlike human or alien race responslible for a war in the heaven of space. Let’s take the question from some other angle. Are these sky gods partly responsible for some of the wars we humans wage in our times? Are they providing technology to certain terrestrial guinea-pig governments as one of many steps towards preparing humanity for open contact with an extraterrestrial civilization? Let’s hope whoever site on the left hand of these gods, such as the CIA or Saddam Hussein, does not get the information and hardware to curtail human freedom.

1 Q92

Under one man peace will be proclaimed everywhere

But not long after there will be looting and rebellion:

Because of a refusal, town, land and sea will be broached,

A third of a million dead or captured.

Some quatrains are handed down from one application to another through the centuries. This one has suffered such a fate. Jaubert pins it on the War of Religion (1562-98), the refusing town being Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle, which fought off a vigorous siege in 1572. But the casualities are too inflated of that day. This tempts Boswell and Henry C. Roberts to place it nearer to their times. Roberts applies his national bias, making this one sing to his American point of view. He designates the third of a million dead as the American Gis who fell as a result of the Japanese attack in World War II. Boswell, his contemporary, has launched modern scholars on the most plausible interpretation – that it has something to do with the fall of Louis Napoleon and the second French Empire during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). Aided by the collective machinations of his scholars, Nostradamus foretells the tragic and sudden fall of Napoleon III, the one man who called the Second Empire the “empire of peace” (peace will be proclaimed everywhere). The second line aptly describes the rebellion and bloodshed of the Paris Commune of 1871. The refusal is the Prussian Kaiser Wilhelm I’s rejection of Napoleon III’s humiliating demands concerning the Hohenzollern candidacy for the Spanish throne. The result of this refusal was that France found itself plunged into a war it was not prepared to fight. The Prussians and their German allies made rapid and deep incursions into French territory (land and sea will be broached), and historians estimate that French losses in those killed and captured were around 300,000 (Nostradamus is 33,000 casualties over the mark.) This estimate is conservative, however, because it takes no account of inadequately recorded civilian deaths. The latest fashion dresses this quatrain is desert camouflage for Operation Desert Storm, in 1991. Jochmans has American president George Bush as the leader proclaiming an end to the Cold War and the beginning of a New World Order. From the city of La Rochelle we move to Paris resisting involvement in the alliance against Iraq. Although French president Mitterand tried harder than Bush to negotiate with Saddam Hussein of Iraq, when the shooting began, the French were shoulder to shoulder with their post colonial partners. The dead or captured are either Iraqi casualties or the same number of Iraqi children imprisoned by the sanctions or dying of dysentery caused by the bombing of water purification systems across the nation.

1 Q93

The Italian land near the mountains will tremble,

Lion and Cock not too well confederated:

Instead of fear the one will aid the other,

Only liberty and Celts [the French] restrained.

This does sound like Napoleon’s Italian campaigns. At that time Britian was at war with Republic France. The quaking mountains are poetic for the Alps, which tremble(d) at the victory after the three-day battle of Rivoli in January 1797, and later in 1800 when the French army marched over the Alps to win the battle of Marengo. These two victories brought a political and social earthquake to the states of Italy, changing them forever. Catulon in this case may refer to the calssical tunic worn by the Republican symbol of the French Revolution, Marianne. One can even imagine her smiling face – and perhaps a smiling breast or two falling over her castulon – painted on the battle banners fluttering over the shaggy heads of Bonaparte’s tattered but rough and ready vetrans.

1 Q94

At Port Selin the tyrant is put to death,

Liberty is not completely recovered:

The new Mars because of revenge and remorse,

The lady through force of terror [is] honored.

This is definitely not about Lepanto. Arthur Prieditis proposes that it concerns the assassination of the Turkish tyrant Abd-el-Aziz on 4 June 1876. Leoni has it down for a failed prophecy of the assassintaions of Andrea Doria, the tyrant Genoa and admiral of the Imperial Fleet. A third possibility is the Young Turks’ Rebellion of 1908-1909, when General Mustafa Kemal, later known as Kemal Ataturk, led an army of liberation into Contantinople (Port Selin). This new Mars (god of war) deposed (rather than killed) Sultan Abdul-Hamid II with the approval of Muslim clerics, and named his brother Muhammad V Rashid as ruler in a Committee of Union and Progress (CPU)-run government. The identy of the new Mars of line 3 doggedly remians less readily apparent. The lady of line 4 still remains a mystery.

1 Q95

Before the monastery a twin child is found,

Of the heroic and ancient blood of a monk:

His fame, through a mode of language and powerful sound,

Such that one will say elect the healthy survivor of the prematurely born twins.

Nostradamus could be waxing poetic for the first set of twin-named popes in Catholic history, John Paul I (1978) and John Paul II (1978-). The final two lines are open to all kinds of papal interpretations, but the gist is well suited to both John Pauls. The first shook the Church with his surprisingly strong language of drastic reform, but he died suddenly and suspiciously. He was replaced by far more healthy John Paul “twin” from Poland, who at the beginning of his reign promised to carry on the reform but has used his mode of language and the powerful sound systems used in large scale public masses to promote and enforce a far more conservative message than the first John Paul.

1 Q96

A man who will be charged with destroying

Temples and sects altered by fantasy:

He will harm the rocks rather than the living,

Ears filled with ornate speeches.

The idea that traditional religions are a fantasy or a shadow of their original living teaching is a recurring theme of Nostradamus. The man mentioned here must be pioneering mystic who will strike out against old rocklike dogmas, earning the unified wrath of the world’s organized religion. We will know him as an eloquent and compelling speaker. The Indian mystic Osho was put in chains in America in 1985. Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon was vilified. He was first imprisoned by the North Koreans and later served a term in prison in the United States. Bahá’í mystic’ Abdu’l – Bahá and his father before him (Bahá’u’lláh) spent much of their lives in exile or in prison for their beliefs and teachings.

1 Q97

That which fire and sword did not know how to accomplish,

Will be managed by a sweet-speaking tongue in council:

The king will be made to contemplate the dream seen while sleeping,

Moreover, the enemy at [his own] hearth, in warlike blood.

By 1589, Henry III’s position was precarious in the extreme and calls for his death issued from all sides. After conspiring to murder Henry de Guise, he was forced to flee with his Mignons to the camp of his enemy, Henry de Navarre. The instrument of revenge was to be Brother Clément, a Dominican friar, who obtained a private audience in the king’s bedchamber at St Cloud on 2 August. Clément’s mild manner and gentle speech threw the king off guard and as he stood near the cosy fire of his hearth to read the letter, he noticed the young friar motioning him to come close for a whispered message. As the king drew close the friar stabbed him in the belly with a concealed dagger. When loyal bodyguards responded to king’s cries, it is said that Clément met their sword blades with arms outstretched like a crucified Christ. It was well know that Henry III, still a relativley young man at 38, was morally and physically spent and that three days before death he had forseen his demise in a dream and related to his Mignons its nightmare vision of the crown and scepter of Fracne being trampled by a monk-led mob.

1 Q98

The chief who will have conducted [the] infinite people,

Far from the skies of their own, consisting of alien customs and tongues:

Five thousand finished in Crete and Thessaly,

The chief fleeing, saved in a seagoing barn.

Infinite people can refer to the French, but it could also fit a future human race that lives in physical and spiritual harmony. A people of the infinite, both at home in outer and inner space. I take line 2 literally to mean alien skies of another world, perhaps in some distant planet of the Cancerian or Aquarian star systems mentioned in the Preface as humanity’s future home. Line 3 could date this quatrain for AD 5000. The reference of regions around the Aegean Sea being finished might pinpoint the meteorite strike described elsewhere, or Nostradamus may be seeing this as a precursor to final conflagration of the planet Earth by the sun in the year 3797. In the final line our prophet tries to describe the technology of a distant millennium when the captain of the first mission to a remote world is plucked off the surface of an alien sea by a space vehicle that can only be described as a seagoing barn by someone from the 16^th century. Perhaps barn describes this cosmic Noah’s Ark?

1 Q99

The great monarch who will make company,

With two Kings united by friendship:

Oh what a sigh will the great household make,

Children around the environs of Narbonne, how pitiful.

The two kings in friendship might be another link to the Brothers of the North (Russia and United States) theme. If we are talking about modern times, the great monarch need not be a bluebound but a great French president. Perhaps it is Jacques Chirac, who is certainly a major player in European and Russo-American diplomacy. The great household could be that of the European Union. Something terrible happens near Narbonne. It may be either a nuclear disaster or an act of nuclear terrorism at the nearby reactor plants at Cruas and Tricastin in the lower Rhone River valley. Children are the most vulnerable victims of radiation poisoning, but prophecies of global famine in the 21^st century may point to a sad vision of children starving in and around Narbonne.

1 Q100

For a long time a gray bird will be seen in the sky,

Near Dole and Tuscan land:

Holding in its break a verdant branch,

Soon will die the great one and the war will end.

Most interpreters assume that the gray bird is a dove of peace. Dole is in Burgundy, but Mirandola is intended by apheresis since it is 30 miles north of Tuscany. The quatrain is general enough to fit any peace ending a Franco-Italian conflict shortly after the death of a great leader. Cheetham thinks it was the son of the Duchess de Berry, the Comte de Chambord, who was known as the Dove of Peace. One cannot rule out American President Roosevelt as the great one. He died shorlty before the end of hostilities between France and facist Italy during World War II.