The Essential Nostradamus by Richard Smoley

Author:Richard Smoley [Smoley, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: General, Body; Mind & Spirit, Occultism, Nostradamus, Prophecies (Occultism), Prophecy, Divination
ISBN: 9781585427949
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published: 2010-04-15T04:00:00+00:00

CENTURY VI

a

2.

En l’an cinq cens octante plus & moins,

On attendra le siecle bien estrange:

En l’an sept cens & trois cieulx en tesmoigns, Que plusieurs regnes un à cinq feront change.

In the year 580, more and less,

One will expect an extremely strange era:

In the year 703, with the heavens as a witness,

Many kingdoms—one to five—will change.

The years in this quatrain are generally understood to mean 1580 and 1703.

Commentators have—incomprehensibly—seen this verse as a vindication of Nostradamus’s predictive powers. Certainly one can find historical events to fill those years: for 1580, the annexation of Portugal by the Spain of Philip II; yet another in the interminable wars of religion in France; and a consequent deterioration of the social order in Nostradamus’s native Provence.

But none of these, alone or combined, add up to a date that marks a watershed in history. The seer, perhaps suspecting as much, gave himself an out with the addition of “more and less.”

The year 1703 can similarly invoke historical events on behalf of its importance: a change in Ottoman sultans; the founding of the city of St. Peters158 a the essential nostradamus burg by Peter the Great of Russia; even the signing of the Methuen Treaty between Portugal and Britain, giving preferential rates to Portuguese wine imports and thus inaugurating a long era of port drinking in the British Isles.

Some commentators mention the War of the Spanish Succession, even claiming that this is cryptically suggested in the term “one to five”: Louis XIV of France tried to engineer the Spanish succession in favor of his grandson, who became Philip V of Spain. But the war actually started in 1701.

All in all, however, neither 1580 nor 1703 stands out as a particularly important date in history. One commentator has tried to fudge the issue by saying that Nostradamus began his dating with the Council of Nicaea in 325

A.D., but I can see no reason to believe this.

5.

Si grand famine par unde pestifere,

Par pluye longue le long du polle arctique:

Samarobryn cent lieux de l’hemisphere,

Vivront sans loy, exempt de politique.

So great a famine by a pestiferous flood,

By long rains along the Arctic pole:

Samarobryn a hundred leagues from the hemisphere; They will live without law, exempt from politics.

The first two lines of this quatrain reflect a common theme in Nostradamus’s prophecies: the bad weather that was a feature of the Little Ice Age of the sixteenth century. On the other hand, to speak of “long rains along the Arctic pole” may sound peculiar. Someone looking for a more up-to-date interpretation may want to see in it a premonition of global warming, with widespread flooding and rain rather than snow in the circumpolar areas (cf. II.3, VIII.16).

“Samarobryn” has long exercised the ingenuity of Nostradamus’s interpreters. For Peter Lemesurier, it refers to the ancient name for Amiens—

Samarobriva—and indicates that this city in Picardy will form a boundary between the “hemispheres” of East and West, that is, between the Holy Rothe prophecies/century vi a 159

man Empire and France. For Edgar Leoni, to be a hundred leagues from the

“hemisphere” means to be in space.

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