Nostradamus biography

Nostradamus, (December 14, 1503 – July 1, 1566) bornMichel de Nostredame, is one of the world's most famous authors of prophecies. He is most famous for his book Les Propheties, which consists of rhymed quatrains (4-line poems) grouped into sets of 100, called Centuries.
Nostradamus enthusiasts have credited him with predicting a copious number of events in world history, including the French Revolution, the atom bomb, the rise of Adolf Hitler and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Detractors, however, see such predictions as examples of vaticinium ex eventu, retroactive clairvoyance and selective thinking, which find non-existent patterns in ambiguous statements. Because of this, it has been claimed that Nostradamus is "100% accurate at predicting eventsafter they happen".

Who Was Nostradamus?

Nostradamus, the author of the famous Centuries, was an unusual man for his time. He was a practicing physician, astronomer and astrologer who lived in the mid 16th century (1503 – 1566) who turned his hand to prophecy later in life. As a physician he treated those suffering from the Bubonic plague and then in a twisted irony lost the members of his family to the disease. He was a devout student of pagan methods of divination at night who wore the mask of a devout Catholic during the day to avoid persecution from the Spanish Inquisition. In the end he predicted his own death, and some say also cursed the marauders from the French Revolution that he foresaw would desecrate his own burial tomb.
Nostradamus wrote messages from the past to the future in the form of short poems consisting of four lines each called Quatrains. In his lifetime Nostradamus completed a total of 942 quatrains, which he organized into groups of 100 quatrains called Centuries.  However one century only has 46 quatrains.
His followers say he predicted the French Revolution, the birth and rise to power of Hitler, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He also predicted other events, such as the Great Fire of London (1666) and the exile of Napoleon to Alba.  You can find out more information about these predictions in the Fulfilled Prophecies section of this book.
His cryptic missives about the future seem almost exponential in their ability to reveal about current event. Recently the writings of Nostradamus have been shown to reveal the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger to the destruction, the death of Lady Diana and the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11/01. The fact that so many of his grimmest predictions in the past have indeed come true has given him the nickname “The Prophet of Doom.”
After he resigned from treating the victims of the bubonic plague and settled down in a psychic studio in Salon, France, this self-styled soothsayer was in the habit of writing long letters to world leaders warning them of future events, that is until the Vatican decided that magicians were evil. The fact is that Nostradamus did indeed qualify as a magician according to the definitions of those days, which was anyone who produced visions and predictions through scrying.  Scrying was considered to be a form of conjuring spirits and Nostradamus taught himself this skill by reading ancient texts about Egyptian and Alexandrian magic.
Unfortunately this great prophet also lived during the time of the Spanish inquisition. Conjuring spirits (or channeling as we call it today) was a crime punishable by death, which meant that he was force to scramble up the meaning and the order of his quatrains so that he could not be tried and executed for being a soothsayer. Even though his quatrains are divided up into books called Centuries they do not chronologically represent the timeline of any centuries. Scrambling the quatrains so that they did not follow a time line was one of the tricks that Nostradamus used to disguise his work as the ramblings of a mad poet. This explains why when you read the quatrains, he seems to be referring to incidents from all of the centuries at the same time.
The rhymed quatrains of Nostradamus were written mainly in French with a bit of Italian, Greek, and Latin thrown in to throw the Spanish Inquisition off if they should ever discover his manuscripts. This is because the Spanish Inquisition had been dealing with metaphysical literature by holding public burnings in the public squares.
To disguise his own metaphysical manuscripts also used words from the “Languedoc” or Provencal dialect of southern France and swaps words around so that the quatrains don’t make sense. That is why so many of his prophecies are left wide open to interpretation and also great debate, particularly among English speaking scholars who have a habit of interpreting the quatrains with the French phrases that suit them best. In this book we are using the public domain verses of Charles Ward, an English scholar who was one of the first to translate the quatrains from the original Latin, French and other dialects and leave them as naked as possible.

A painting from the 1400s showing the Spanish Inquisition burning books
Artist is unknown.

The result of all of Nostradamus secret magical studies, pagan rituals, coding and conjuring is the Ten Centuries. Each Century is one of the most cryptic longest and most poetic letters ever written to citizens of the future. The quatrains consist of a mystic vision that was capable of scanning events that would take place over thousands of years. The quatrains are in essence missives from a prophet who was directly warning both you and me of the apocalypse to come.

2.  Nostradamus Methods of Prophecy

Nostradamus was essentially a trance channeller. Trance channellers, which have been around from before the days of John The Baptist and are still around today, communicate with supernatural entities and spirits in order to predict the future. Usually the method is to first conjure a spirit (or spirit guide as they are called today) and then host the entity inside your body and ask them to provide you with a vision.

Examples of modern day trance channellers include Elizabeth Clare Prophet (who channels the angels) and Derek Acorah (an English channeller who communicates with dead spirits.) Another very famous trance channeller is the healer Edgar Cayce, who went into a trance in order to communicate with his spirits who gave him divine remedies for certain physical disorders.

Two of the methods that Nostradamus used for inducing his prophetic visions are from ancient pagan traditions. He used scrying – staring into a flame or staring into a bowl of water to send him into a trance. He also followed the ritualistic practice associated with the Delphic priestess Branchus who was a famous soothsayer who attended at the Oracle of Delphi. He would sit, feet flat on the floor with a straight spine on a brass stool (called a tripod in his own writings) whose legs were angled at the exact same degrees as the Egyptian pyramids. The dimensions of the stool were thought to create an electromagnetic energy that weakened the veil between this world and the supernatural world.

He explains his divinatory process exactly in the very first two quatrains of Century 1

Sitting alone at night in secret study;
it is placed on the brass tripod.
A slight flame comes out of the emptiness and
makes successful that which should not be believed in vain.

The wand in the hand is placed in the middle of the tripod’s legs.
With water he sprinkles both the hem of his garment and his foot.
A voice, fear: he trembles in his robes.
Divine splendor; the God sits nearby.

Pythia of Delphi (a high priestess of the Oracle of Delphi) sitting on top of a copper tripod much like the one Nostradamus used.

Nostradamus would also sometimes place a bowl of steaming water and pungent oils and spices on a tripod also made with the same dimensions. He may have also ingested nutmeg, which is slightly hallucinogenic in order to put him in a trance.

As tripods were mainly used in the temples of Athena and Apollo he was likely working with the deceased spirits of human attendees at these alters (such as Branchus or Pythia) or summoning the energies of a God like Apollo. The reason I say this is that this simply isn’t a Christian ritual and it is not monotheistic in nature. In no way was Nostradamus contacting the God that he so devoutly appeared to worship during the day.

An image of Nostradamus Using a Divining Wand

Here again, in a very famous letter he wrote to Henry II, the King of France he describes in detail his divination process.

“I emptied my soul, brain and heart of all care and attained a state of tranquility and stillness of mind which are prerequisites for predicting by means of the brass tripod. Although the everlasting God alone knows the eternity of light proceeding from himself, I say frankly to all to whom he wishes to reveal his immense magnitude—infinite and unknowable as it is—after long and meditative inspiration, that it is a hidden thing divinely manifested to the prophet by two means: One comes by infusion which clarifies the supernatural light in the one who predicts by the stars, making possible divine revelation; the other comes by means of participation with the divine eternity, by which means the prophet can judge what is given from his (her) own divine spirit through God the Creator and natural intuition.”

As he was writing to the King, Nostradamus would naturally imply that he was channeling God the creator when it was more likely he we would be channeling Apollo. This pretense towards connecting toward God The Creator through a manner other than prayer, was in fact a form of heresy in his day that seemed to be overlooked in his case as he so often would prove to be accurate

3.  The Life of Nostradamus

Michel de Nostradame, more commonly known as Nostradamus, was born on December 14, 1503, in St. Remy de Provence, which by the way makes him a Sagittarius (something this astrologer would find important to be conveyed to you.). His parents were of the Jewish faith but converted to the Catholic faith when he was nine to avoid the wrath of the Spanish Inquisition who were wary of Jewish wealth and influence.Nostradamus was the oldest of four brothers. After displaying the intelligence of a child prodigy, his grandfather Jean de Nostradamus (who had converted from Judaism to Christian) home schooled him in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Mathematics and Astrology. After the death of his grandfather in 1522, Nostradamus was sent to Montpellier University to become a doctor.

After he obtained his bachelor’s degree in Medicine he went out into the countryside to assist impoverished victims of the black plague. Four years later, he returned to Montpellier to complete his doctorate where he aroused suspicion for refusing to bleed sick patience. His refusal to cut patients or use leeches to draw the blood out of them eventually led him to be expelled from the university. Many biographers have noted that Nostradamus also raised eyebrows by maintaining that the earth circled the sun and not the other way around. He upheld the Copernican theory that the world was round and circled around the sun more than 100 years before Galileo was prosecuted for the same belief.

Dance Macabre by Holbein (1490)
A metaphorical depiction of the Black Death

While practicing medicine Toulouse he received a letter from Julius-Cesar Scaliger, a philosopher considered second only to Erasmus in eminence throughout Europe. Scaliger invited him to stay at his home in Agen. Scaliger became the mentor in metaphysical and esoteric studies that Nostradamus badly needed to replace his deceased grandfather.
During this happy time in Agen where he was largely supported by Scaliger, Nostradamus met and married a young very rich and beautiful girl (nobody knows her name but it is probably scrambled in the quatrains somewhere.) He married her in 1534 and they had a son and daughter.  Unfortunately he only enjoyed three years of domestic bliss with the love of his life as the very Black Plague that he had fought so hard against in the countryside slunk into the city and killed his wife and two children.

The Black Death – Artist Unknown

To add to his woes, his late wife’s family tried to sue him for the return of her dowry and then in 1538, he was accused of heresy because of a chance remark made some years before. Unfortunately, Nostradamus informed a workman casting a bronze statue of the Virgin Mary that he was “making devils.” This was exactly the type of remark that was considered to be typical of a Satanist. His defense was that he didn’t like the likeness of the Virgin that was being created and that the remark was merely meant to bean aesthetic objection to the look of the statue. Sensing his own popularity and a growing opinion that he was odd and a heretic he left Agen.

The Life of Nostradamus - Continued

After this Nostradamus entered a deep depression and spent the next six years wandering around France and Italy. From references in later biographies about his life we know he traveled in the Lorraine and went to Venice and Sicily. Otherwise very little is known about his life at this time. It was during this period of the “dark night of the soul” that Nostradamus and others first noticed his prophetic gifts and his name first started to become legendary.
While wandering through Italy, Nostradamus encountered a group of Franciscan monks.  Standing aside to let them pass Nostradamus suddenly gasped and threw himself on his knees, bowing his head and clutching at the garment of one of the monks.  The monk, named Felice Peretti, was a former swine herder of very lowly birth. When asked why he had done such a silly act, Nostradamus replied, “I must yield myself and bow before his Holiness.” Nineteen years after the death of Nostradamus, Peretti became Pope Sixtus V.
In another famous account intended to verify Nostradamus psychic talents, a skeptic, the Seigneur de Florinville, challenged the visionary. While staying at his chateau in the province of Lorraine, Florinvilles asked the budding young prophet to guess what his guests were having for dinner.  Nostradamus was shown two suckling pigs, one black and the other white.  Florinville then asked Nostradamus to predict which pig would become their supper that night.  Nostradamus assured him that they would be dining on the meat of the black pig.  Florinville then told the cook to prepare the white pig.
That evening at dinner, Nostradamus was again asked which pig they were eating, and again he replied the black one.  Florinville triumphantly asked the cook to reveal to Nostradamus which pig it was that they were eating.  The cook said that while preparing the white pig a tamed wolf cub had wandered into the kitchen and devoured it.  The cook then slaughtered the remaining black pig and prepared it for the dinner instead. So it appeared than “even when Nostradamus was wrong, he was right.”
By 1554 Nostradamus had settled in Marseilles. In November that year, the Provence experienced one of the worst floods of its history. The plague returned yet once again with a vengeance and Nostradamus spent his energy practicing medicine and healing the ill.
In 1547, Nostradamus finally settled in the small town of Salon.  There he remarried a rich widow (Anne Ponsart Gemelle) and began to seriously live his life as metaphysician.  He converted the top half of the house into a study and spent a lot of time working with an ancient book about Egyptian magic called De Mysteriis Egyptorium. Iambachulus – an ancient tender of the Temple of Athena, wrote this book of rituals. This book is filled with the black arts, which teaches techniques for housing spirits in the soul.

He spent the remainder of his days here and the renovated version of his place can still be seen on the Place de la Poissonnerie in Salon, France

He began his metaphysical publishing career by producing an annual Almanac of predictions in 1550. In 1555, Nostradamus published the first of ten books, all entitled Centuries.  These volumes contained predictions from his present until the end of the world. Each volume contained 100 predictions written in four line verses known as quatrains.
It is important to note he word Century has nothing to do with one hundred years. Each book called a Century because there were a hundred verses or quatrains in each book. Latin. In order to avoid being prosecuted as a magician, Nostradamus writes that he deliberately confused the time sequence of the Prophecies so that their secrets would not be obvious to those not so skilled in Egyptian witchcraft, numerology and astrology.
The first volume of the prophecies that Nostradamus published only contained the first three Centuries and part of the Fourth. However this tome rapidly became a best seller and made him the celebrity of choice at French court. On July 14th,1556 his credibility as a poet and prophet was firmly established by an invitation by the Queen, Catherine de Medici to her in person.