Michel de Nostredame was a Provençal apothecary and physician who signed his work with the Latin form Nostradamus. Born in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in December 1503, he treated plague in Marseille, Aix and Salon in the 1540s, married a widow in Salon-de-Provence in 1547 and settled there for good. Nearly five centuries after his death in July 1566, his name is still shorthand for prophecy, and almost every major disaster brings a fresh claim that he saw it coming.
What happened
His fame began with almanacs. From 1550 he published a yearly booklet of weather, harvest and political forecasts, and they sold well enough that wealthy clients across France began asking him for horoscopes. In 1555 the Lyon printer Macé Bonhomme issued the first part of a different kind of book, Les Prophéties: 353 rhymed four-line verses, or quatrains, grouped in “centuries” of a hundred, with a preface addressed to his infant son César. Later editions added more, and the edition printed in 1568, two years after his death, carried the full set of about 942 quatrains that most modern translations follow.
The verses mix French with Latin, Greek and Provençal, use anagrams and classical place names, and almost never give a date. That vagueness has been their strength. Catherine de’ Medici read his almanacs, called him to Paris in 1555 and later had him named physician to her son, the young Charles IX. When her husband Henri II died in 1559 after a lance splintered through his visor during a tournament, quatrain 1.35, about a young lion overcoming an old one in single combat and piercing his eyes in a cage of gold, was eventually held up as a forecast of the king’s death. That link does not appear in print until 1614, fifty-five years later, and another verse that promised Henri prosperity is rarely quoted.
The Hister case
The most famous modern reading concerns Adolf Hitler. Quatrain 2.24 speaks of beasts wild with hunger crossing rivers and of the greater part of the battlefield being against “Hister,” and the same word appears in a few other verses. Twentieth-century interpreters read Hister as Hitler with one letter altered. But Hister, or Ister, was the ordinary Latin name for the lower Danube, a usage Nostradamus followed elsewhere; in context the verses describe armies and a river. Hitler was born near the Danube, which proves nothing about a sixteenth-century poem.
The quatrains were put to wartime use all the same. The historian Eric Kurlander has described how Joseph Goebbels’s propaganda ministry commissioned pamphlets around 1940 that cherry-picked Nostradamus for verses favorable to German expansion, and briefly employed the Swiss astrologer Karl Ernst Krafft to interpret them. British intelligence, for its part, planted astrological forecasts of its own. A text that could serve whichever side was printing it is, skeptics argue, a text that predicts nothing in particular.
The explanations
Critics from Cecil Adams to the stage magician James Randi have described the method by which the quatrains acquire their accuracy. A verse is matched to an event only after the event has happened; letters are rearranged, place names reinterpreted and translations adjusted until the fit improves; and the hundreds of verses that match nothing are passed over. Because Nostradamus borrowed heavily from classical history and from earlier prophetic writers, many quatrains describe the kinds of things that keep happening, such as sieges, floods, plagues and the deaths of kings. Ian Wilson’s biography, which draws on the rediscovered 1555 and 1557 editions and on Nostradamus’s surviving letters, presents a busy professional astrologer rather than an oracle, and shows how many famous stories about him were invented by much later commentators.
The decisive test is forward prediction. No interpreter has used the quatrains to name a specific event, place and date before it happened and been proved right. Forward readings, such as the many forecasts built on the verse 10.72 and its “great king of terror” arriving in July 1999, have come to nothing, while the verses keep being re-matched to events that have already occurred.
Where it stands
Nostradamus was a real and successful figure of the French Renaissance, and his book has never gone out of print. As a seer, the record does not support him. The quatrains were written to be cryptic, they are read backward rather than forward, and their most celebrated hit, Hister, is the name of a river.