Michel de Nostredame, usually Latinised as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer, apothecary, physician, and reputed seer, who is best known for his book Les Prophéties, a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events.
Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Persian to English of a selection of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia".
The Vulgate, sometimes referred to as the Latin Vulgate, is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible.
A psychic is a person who claims to use powers rooted in parapsychology such as extrasensory perception (ESP) to identify information hidden from the normal senses, particularly involving telepathy or clairvoyance, or who performs acts that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws, such as psychokinesis or teleportation. Although many people believe in psychic abilities, the scientific consensus is that there is no proof of the existence of such powers, and describes the practice as pseudoscience. The word "psychic" is also used as an adjective to describe such abilities.
In religion, a prophecy is a message that has been communicated to a person by a supernatural entity. Prophecies are a feature of many cultures and belief systems and usually contain divine will or law, or preternatural knowledge, for example of future events. They can be revealed to the prophet in various ways depending on the religion and the story, such as visions, divination, or direct interaction with divine beings in physical form. Stories of prophetic deeds sometimes receive considerable attention and some have been known to survive for centuries through oral tradition or as religious texts.
The Great Bible of 1539 was the first authorised edition of the Bible in English, authorised by King Henry VIII of England to be read aloud in the church services of the Church of England. The Great Bible was prepared by Myles Coverdale, working under commission of Thomas Cromwell, Secretary to Henry VIII and Vicar General. In 1538, Cromwell directed the clergy to provide "one book of the Bible of the largest volume in English, and the same set up in some convenient place within the said church that ye have care of, whereas your parishioners may most commodiously resort to the same and read it."
The Mirabilis liber is an anonymous and formerly very popular compilation of predictions by various Christian saints and diviners first printed in France in 1522 and reprinted several times thereafter. It is not to be confused with the almost contemporary Liber mirabilis. Its unwitting contributors include:
Karl Ernst Krafft was a Swiss astrologer, born in Basel. He worked on the fields of astrology and graphology.
The Man Who Saw Tomorrow is a 1981 documentary-style movie about the predictions of French astrologer and physician Michel de Notredame (Nostradamus).
The Vaticinia Michaelis Nostradami de Futuri Christi Vicarii ad Cesarem Filium D. I. A. Interprete, or Vaticinia Nostradami for short, is a collection of eighty watercolor images compiled as an illustrated codex. A version of the well-known Vaticinia de Summis Pontificibus of the 13th–14th century, it was discovered in 1994 by the Italian journalists Enza Massa and Roberto Pinotti in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma in Rome, Italy. The document can be found in the library under the title Fondo Vittorio Emanuele 307.
Tsutomu “Ben” Goto was a Japanese journalist and writer best known for his books on Nostradamus.
The prophecies of the 16th-century author Nostradamus have become a part of the popular culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. Nostradamus' life has been depicted in both fiction and non-fiction books as well as several films, and made-up prophecies that were said to be his were circulated online in several well-known hoaxes, where quatrains in the style of Nostradamus have been circulated by e-mail. The most well-known hoax claims that he predicted the attack on New York City's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Theophilus de Garencières (1610–1680) was a French apothecary who spent most of his life practising in England.
The Mask of Nostradamus: The Prophecies of the World's Most Famous Seer is a 1990 book by magician and skeptic James Randi. Randi provides an overview of the life and work of Nostradamus, a 16th-century French physician and astrologer who, in a series of quatrains in Les Prophéties, allegedly predicted several major historical events. Randi argues that Nostradamus was actually an exceptionally poor prognosticator who used vague and ambiguous language to give an illusion of authenticity. Randi further describes the widespread use of poor scholarship, mistranslations, and reference to forged prophecies by Nostradamus’s believers, and describes dubious methods that believers have used to obtain meaning from Nostradamus’s prophecies. Randi also provides an overview of the popularity and pseudoscientific nature of astrology, a technique that Nostradamus used to prepare prophecies, as well as providing an overview of other prophets and their methods. The book received generally positive reviews.
Renaissance magic was a resurgence in Hermeticism and Neo-Platonic varieties of the magical arts which arose along with Renaissance humanism in the 15th and 16th centuries CE. During the Renaissance period, magic and occult practices underwent significant changes that reflected shifts in cultural, intellectual, and religious perspectives. C. S. Lewis, in his work on English literature, highlighted the transformation in how magic was perceived and portrayed. In medieval stories, magic had a fantastical and fairy-like quality, while in the Renaissance, it became more complex and tied to the idea of hidden knowledge that could be explored through books and rituals. This change is evident in the works of authors like Spenser, Marlowe, Chapman, and Shakespeare, who treated magic as a serious and potentially dangerous pursuit.
Roger Frontenac was a French navy officer and a scholar of Nostradamus' prophecies. He proposed an interpretation system for the text of Les Propheties, based upon a form of cryptography known as the Vigenère table.
The Orus Apollo is a manuscript work by Nostradamus written before 1555, and formerly owned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's finance minister. It contains two books of 182 verse epigrams. Its full title is Orus Apollo Fils de Osiris Roy de Aegypte Niliacque, des Notes Hieroglyphiques.
Nostradamus's Traité des fardemens et confitures, variously entitled Moult utile opuscule... and Le vrai et parfaict embellissement de la face..., was first published in 1555, even though it contained a Proem, or prologue, dated 1552. Clearly the work of an apothecary, it contained recipes for preparing cosmetics and preserves, the latter based largely on sugar, which was controlled at the time by the apothecaries' guilds.
Erika Cheetham was an English writer, best known for her controversial interpretations of Nostradamus' writings.
Pierre Rodrigue Brind'Amour was a French-speaking Canadian philologist, professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Ottawa.
