Estant assis de nuict secret estude, Seul repousé sus la selle d'aerain; Flambe exigue sortant de solitude Faict proferer qui n'est à croire vain. (Century I.1, 1555)
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.
Nostradamus enthusiasts regularly make claims regarding each new world crisis as it comes along as there is a tendency to claim that "Nostradamus predicted whatever has just happened." These claims rely heavily on the role of interpretation. For example, they have often credited him with predicting numerous different events in world history, supposedly including the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the atomic bomb, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and the last pope.[1][2]
Great King out of the Sky
One well-known supposed prophecy is that "a great and terrifying leader would come out of the sky" in 1999 and 7 months "to resuscitate the great King from Angoumois." But the phrase d'effraieur (of terror) in fact occurs nowhere in the original printing, which merely uses the word deffraieur (defraying, hosting), and Nostradamus sometimes uses the word ciel simply to mean 'region', rather than 'sky'. On the basis of Nostradamus' by now well-known technique of projecting past events into the future, Lemesurier[3] suggests that X.72 therefore refers to the restoration to health of the captive Francis I of France (who was Duke of Angoulême) following a surprise visit to his cell by his host, the then Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1525. No fewer than five of the planets were in the same signs on both occasions.[4]
Author and researcher Ove von Spaeth on his work Nostradamus, the New Millennium and the Basilisk notes that "numerous attempts of interpretation" of Nostradamus texts do not take into consideration that he was also an astrologer.[5] Von Spaeth also denotes that the interpretation of deffraieur as "horror" is misleading, and suggests a new approach to interpret the text:
The Nostradamus words, roy de deffraieur is a special, old French spelling of ‘the king of the horrible’. If the word is changed a tiny bit, e.g. def(f)rayer - meaning something financial, ‘to lend money’, ‘to exempt from expenses’, as well as something entirely different, i.e. ‘to be the subject/matter/entertainment in a conversation’, a new possibility appears. People who have tried to interpret his prophecies have had problems in fitting this in, unless they have suggested a financial world crisis.[6]
September 11, 2001
The September 11, 2001, attacks on New York City's World Trade Center led to immediate speculation as to whether Nostradamus had predicted the event. Almost as soon as the event had happened, the relevant Internet sites were deluged with inquiries. In response, Nostradamus enthusiasts started searching for a Nostradamus quatrain that could be said to have done so, coming up with interpretations of Quatrains I.87, VI.97 and X.72. However, the various ways in which the enthusiasts chose to interpret the text were not supported by experts on the subject.[7][8] In addition, Nostradamus himself in his dedicatory letter to King Henri II states that his prophecies were about Europe, North Africa, and part of Asia Minor only.
Lower Manhattan, September 11, 2001
The nearest that the former could come up with was quatrain VI.97, which in the original 1557 edition ran:
With instant evidently a version of the Latin instanter ("violently, vehemently"), a reasonable English translation (after Lemesurier) would thus appear to be:
"Five and forty degrees" was said to be the latitude of New York City (New York's latitude is 40°47'), and was interpreted as "40.5 degrees" (even though the decimal point had not yet come into use in the Europe of Nostradamus' day). "New City", similarly, was claimed to be New York (even though Nostradamus refers in this way to various "New Cities" whose names, unlike "New York", literally mean "New City", and especially Naples – from Greek Neapolis, "new city"); and most of the attempts to fit in the "Normans" of line 4 seemed contrived at best. While it is true that New York State, which has the same name as New York City, crosses 45° latitude, it cannot, of course, be described as a "new city", and so doesn't fit line 2 of the verse.[9]
Lemesurier suggests that the verse is merely an undated projection into the future of the capture of Naples by the Normans in 1139 during a year marked by a notably violent eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius that is recorded in the contemporary Annales Cassini.[3][10] In this case, the first expression may simply be a version of
Cinq[ante minutes] & quarante degrés
– which is indeed the latitude of Naples.
Another quatrain which came under the scrutiny of enthusiasts was quatrain I.87, which in the original 1555 edition (Albi copy) ran:
Here, once again, the cité neufve was claimed to be New York; au tour de had to refer to the Twin Towers (even though, in French, the word tour in the masculine – as it is here – has absolutely nothing to do with towers, but is part of a phrase meaning "around"); the Deux grands rochiers had to be the Twin Towers themselves; and Arethusa was said to be an anagram of "the USA". Once again, however, a rather more sober investigation by Brind'Amour[11] had already revealed (bearing in mind that, in French, faire la guerre aux rochers, or "to make war on the rocks", simply means "to struggle fruitlessly") that the reference was probably to Naples and its nearby volcano. Subsequent investigation by Lemesurier[3] and his colleague Gary Somai[12] suggested that it applied particularly to the Annales Cassini's report of its lava eruption of 1036, at a time when the Lombards of Capua and the Byzantine dukes of Naples were constantly at war over the city prior to the decisive intervention of the Normans. For 968, similarly, Leo Marsicanus had reported in the same annals that "Mount Vesuvius exploded into flames and sent out huge quantities of sticky, sulfurous matter that formed a river rushing down to the sea". Thus, given that Arethusa was the classical nymph of springs and rivers, with a well-known "spring of Arethusa" still visible today in the Sicilian port of Syracuse, the case for a "9/11" interpretation was evidently unfounded.
The Julian Calendar was indeed the calendar system used during Nostradamus' lifetime. In his Almanachs, Nostradamus published at least eleven Julian calendars of his own – but all of them in fact started on January 1, and in all of them the seventh month was consequently July. Lemesurier consequently suggests that X.72 does not predict the 9/11 attacks at all, but refers back to the allegedly "miraculous" restoration to health of the captive Francis I of France in August 1525 by his then Roy deffraieur ("host-king") Charles V, and then projects it forwards into the future as a prophecy.
As for the various interpretations of the line usually rendered as "To resuscitate the great king of the Mongols", the verse in fact contains no such line (the word mongolais which, since Leoni [1961] has often been proposed as an anagram for Angolmois, doesn't exist in French anymore), but merely refers to the well-known French region of Angoumois, of whose capital (Angoulême) Francis I was duke: he was thus, as the verse states, Le grand Roy d'Angolmois ("the great King from Angoumois") of Nostradamus's own day.[13]
In these and other ways, Nostradamus's statement in his open letter to his son Cesar that his quatrains were "written in a nebulous rather than plainly prophetic form" is widely taken by enthusiasts as carte blanche for suggesting that they can mean almost anything that they want them to say.[14]
Some have interpreted the writings as predicting a series of three antichrists. However, the name "Mabus" as a synonym for or embodiment of the third antichrist is allegedly not suggested by any of the Prophecies. In fact the verse in question (II.62) merely states that a character of a similar-sounding name (according to Lemesurier [op. cit.], an alleged reference to the Flemish painter Jan Mabuse, contemporary with Nostradamus) will die. Otherwise, the reference says nothing about what "Mabus" will do or what he will be like. However, parts of Nostradamus Quantrain 2.61-62 state that "Mars at the port of the arrow. Behind the river the ladder put to the fort, Points to fire great murder on the breach. Mabus then will soon die, there will come Of people and beasts a horrible rout."[15]
More recently attempts have been made to link the name "Mabus" anagrammatically with "Obama", as previously with "Saddam", "Osama" and "Bush". This tendency to attempt to adapt quatrains to fit current events can be traced all the way back to Nostradamus' own time.[16] However, Mabus is also acknowledged to be the surname of longtime U.S. political figure Ray Mabus.[17][18]
As with other hoaxes, only the purported English translation was given. It is likely that this verse was written as a joke.[19]
World Trade Center prophecy hoax
Shortly after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the following spoof text was circulated on the Internet, along with many more elaborate variants (one of them signed 'Nostradamus 1654' – when he would have been 150 years old):
In the City of God there will be a great thunder,
Two brothers torn apart by Chaos,
while the fortress endures,
the great leader will succumb,
The third big war will begin when the big city is burning.
As it turns out, the first four lines were indeed written before the attacks, but by a Canadian graduate student named Neil Marshall as part of a research paper in 1997. The research paper included this poem as an illustrative example of how the validity of prophecies is often exaggerated. For example, the phrases "City of God" (New York has never held the title, unlike how for instance Los Angeles is nicknamed the "City of Angels"; some versions of the text thus outright use "City of York" or "the New City"), "great thunder" (this could apply to many disasters), "Two brothers" (many things come in pairs), and "the great leader will succumb" are so vague as to be meaningless. The fifth line was added by an anonymous Internet user, completely ignoring the fact that Nostradamus wrote his Propheties in rhymed four-line decasyllables called quatrains. Nostradamus also never referred to a "third big war".[20]
Towards mid-December 2012, an internet hoax related to South Korean singer and rapper Psy being one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was widely circulated around social media platforms. The hoax text, purportedly written by Nostradamus in 1503, is as follows:[21]
From the calm morning,
the end will come
when of the dancing horse
the number of circles will be nine
"Calm morning" is said to be in reference to Psy's birth country – South Korea, derived from the characters for one of its older names, Joseon (조선/朝鮮).[22] "Dancing horse" refers to Psy's Gangnam Style "dancing horse" routine, whereas the "nine circles" refer to the number of zeroes in one billion (1,000,000,000), which is nine. It was believed that once Psy's Gangnam Style video on YouTube amassed a billion views, the world would end.
The music video did reach one billion views on December 21, 2012, a popular date for which the world was predicted to end. However, the quatrain could not have been written by Nostradamus in 1503; he was born in December of that year.[citation needed]
Political and military manipulation
During World War II, leaflets with false Nostradamus quatrains predicting the defeat of France were launched by German planes over European skies. It seems that this operation was mastered by Nazi political secretary Rudolf Hess, and that even Adolf Hitler believed in Nostradamus' quatrains. Certainly his propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels did, under the influence of his wife Magda.[23] Subsequently, the Allies responded in kind, both with air-dropped leaflets and via the American film Nostradamus Says So.[24]
After Rudolf Hess left Nazi Germany in a solitary flight to Scotland, seeking a peace agreement with the United Kingdom, Hitler issued the Aktion Hess, a mandatory prosecution of any divinator or future-teller in all Nazi-occupied countries.[25]
Entertainment
Film
Nostradamus is the subject of many films and videos, including:
Nostradamus (1994) depicts Nostradamus's rise in influence, because of both his success in treating plague and his predictions, culminating in his appointment as court physician to Charles IX of France (son of Henry II of France).
Before Twilight (2008) Polish film directed by Jacek Bławut.
Mention is made of Nostradamus in the 1985 Italian horror film Demoni, directed by Lamberto Bava and produced by Dario Argento. According to the characters of the film shown at the fictional Metropol movie theater, Nostradamus predicted the spawning of demons that will "spread pestilence" and be "instruments of evil".
On Mr. Show with Bob and David, an episode contains a sketch called "Nostradamus and his Companion". In it, Nostradamus (played by Bob Odenkirk) is a gay man who falls in love with a fashion designer, played by David Cross. Nostradamus is left behind by his constant chum, who goes on to achieve fame and fortune in the fashion industry. The sketch ends with a school being named after them: "Nostradamus and His Constant Chum Elementary School."
In the Nickelodeon cartoon CatDog, the title characters find a prediction in a book by the fictitious prophet "Nostradummy" that they interpret as predicting the imminent end of the world.
In the Hong KongATV series My Date with a Vampire (series 1), Nostradamus (also referred to as the "French Guy") was held to have made a prophecy of the end of world in 1999, with a third of the world's population turning into monsters or vampires and the rest perishing. The antagonist, vampire Yamamoto Kazuo (portrayed by Kenneth Chan) and later Yu Meng Sap Sam or his true identity—Lo Hau (portrayed by Wai Lit), sought to make the prophecy come true and rule the world, but the protagonists Fong Tin Yau (portrayed by Eric Wan) and Ma Siu Ling (portrayed by Joey Meng) were able to stop this from occurring. The anime Occult Academy revolves around an artifact called the Nostradamus Key, an object that will open a dimensional rift on July 21, 1999, that would trigger an alien invasion in the year 2012. In fact, it seems that the survivors of the 2012 invasion used alien technology to send someone to tell Nostradamus as part of a plan to prevent the invasion.
Bob Bainborough portrayed Nostradamus in an episode of History Bites, appearing in an infomercial to sell his books, referencing C1Q35, among others, as an example of his prophecy. A two-hour documentary on Nostradamus first aired by the History Channel on 28 October 2007 suggests that a book of paintings in the National Library at Rome is The Lost Book of Nostradamus.
He also appears in various episodes of the MTV animated show Clone High as a teenaged clone of the original Nostradamus.
The Doctor WhoPast Doctor Adventures novel The King of Terror features the Fifth Doctor and UNIT dealing with a group of terrorists called the Sons of Nostradamus who consider it their duty to ensure that his prophecies-apparently predicting the end of the world in 1999-come true, but the prophecies are eventually revealed to have been part of the efforts of the alien race known as the Canavatchi to retard humanity's development.
The History Channel periodically airs a series of films on supposedly apocalyptic prophecies under the general title The Nostradamus Effect, but in his book 2012: It's Not the End of the World, Nostradamus specialist Peter Lemesurier describes them as 'largely fiction' and 'lurid nonsense'.[26]
In Hetalia: Axis Powers, Germany and Japan worry about the end of the World due to one of Nostradamus's prophecies. However, Britain and France ignore this warning, due to having lived through another supposed apocalypse, and instead tell Japan and Germany not to worry.
Nostradamus is featured in the Robot Chicken episode "Petless M in: Cars Are Couches of the Road", voiced by Alfred Molina.
Nostradamus was mentioned in Celebrity Deathmatch as the intended opponent for John Edward in one episode. However, he predicted he would lose the fight and refused to show up.
In season 14 episode 8 of Bobs Burgers 'Wharf, Me Worry?' a new attraction at the park called Clamstradamus, a talking clam shell predicts visitors future. Although the children in the show get hold of the microphone and make their own predictions. A major story line in the episode involves 'Big Bob' being obsessed with end of the world.
Books
Fiction
In Phil Rickman's historical novel The Bones of Avalon, Nostradamus appears at the end as the major villain who must be opposed by this novel's hero John Dee. The book describes his contemporary influence and depicts him as a master of propaganda and psychological warfare.
In Alexander Kuprin's short story "The Blue Star", published in 1927, it is mentioned that Nostradamus has composed a horoscope for one of the main characters, a French prince.[27]
In Stephen King's 1986 novel It, Nostradamus’s work is mentioned when a supernatural quake rocks the town of Derry (the fictional town in which the story is set) specifically knocking books of Nostradamus’s quatrains from the library bookshelves and onto the floor.
Music
British singer/songwriter Al Stewart's album Past, Present and Future was a concept album including a song about every decade of the 20th century. As Stewart wrote the album in 1973, events from the latter years of the century were covered by the song "Nostradamus", in which some of the prophecies are quoted. One of the prophecies appears to refer to the future fall of the Berlin Wall and the unnatural death of a Pope named Pol; events which might have been considered predictable, even if the date was not.
Darkane's Song "July 1999" from Rusted Angel, is all about the Nostradamus dated prophecy.
Rapper Nas refers to himself as Nastradamus and released an album titled Nastradamus along with its first single titled the same name in 1999.
Bulgarian guitarist Nikolo Kotzev released a rock opera called Nikolo Kotzev's Nostradamus in 2001, based on the life and times of Nostradamus. In 2005, Dutch band Kayak released a rock opera called Nostradamus – Fate of Man.
In 1997, Finnish metal band Stratovarius recorded a concept album loosely based on the life and prophecies of Nostradamus. The album was called Visions.
In 2008, the British heavy metal band Judas Priest released a concept album based on the life of Nostradamus. Simply named Nostradamus, the album itself focuses on Nostradamus' life and his prophecies.
"Nostradamus said 'I predict that the world will end at half past six' / What he didn't say was exactly when" are the opening lyrics of "Tinderbox", penned by Bernie Taupin and sung by Elton John.
Modest Mouse vocalist Isaac Brock seems to take a stab at Nostradamus in a song called "Education" from the band's fifth studio album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. The verse is as follows: "Good old Nostradamus / he knew the whole damn time / there would always be an east from west / and someone in there fighting".
In the bonus track of Dane Cook's "Harmful If Swallowed" he speaks of how a person would wake up and think he is late, then look at his clock to find out that he is in fact late. He would yell "I HATE it when I'm like Nostradamus and I predict that I'm late!"
Several songs by The Stranglers contain references to Nostradamus' prophecies: "Goodbye Toulouse" (1977), "Shah Shah a go go" (1979), "Four Horsemen" (1980), "Top Secret" (1981), "It's a Small World" (1983).[further explanation needed]
Comics
In an Italian Mickey Mouse story (Topolino e la Piramide Impossible), Mickey and Goofy travel back in time and by accident a young boy followed them back to the present. The boy had to go back to his own time and his memory of the future was erased, but before that he grabbed pieces of books. The boy of course became Nostradamus and the ripped pages from books explained his visions of the future. The story was made by Massimo Marconi and Massimo De Vita.
In the 1989 Scrooge McDuck story "The Curse of Nostrildamus" by Don Rosa (AR 143), Scrooge enters the prophet's tomb to take the amulet that was the source of his power. However, whoever wears the amulet also attracts disasters – though Donald Duck ends up as the victim of the disasters instead of Scrooge. In author's commentary in the Finnish album release, Don Rosa says he was inspired to write the story based on the legend that whoever drank from Nostradamus's skull would be given the gift of prophecy.
A Phantom story from 1983 by Ulf Granberg and Jaime Vallvé featured an appearance by Nostradamus.
In Mad magazine's section entitled the "strip club", a comic strip entitled Middle School Nostradamus appears every so often. Nostradamus is depicted as a preteen in wizard garb who makes predictions of impending despair for the people he is around at inopportune times.
In Record of Ragnarok, thirteen historical humans are chosen to fight thirteen mythological gods in a tournament for humanity's survival. Nostradamus is one of the human fighters.
In Chainsaw Man, the prophecies of Nostradamus are used to predict the end of the world by the hands of demonic entities.
Games
Face released an arcade game called Nostradamus. Though the game itself had nothing to do with Nostradamus, the game's title screen showed a resemblance to his son's portrait of him, however he is facing the other direction and looks older.
In Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow, the prophecy of 1999 was used as the resurrection of Dracula and added that all born of the day of Dracula's demise are "Dark Candidates" meaning that they have the potential to become the next Dark Lord. This prophecy is referenced again in Portrait of Ruin; the Belmonts cannot wield the Vampire Killer whip until 1999, when Dracula is revived.
In the erogeNostradamus ni Kiite Miro♪, a girl named Stra (a shortened form of Nostradamus) claims to be the writer of Nostradamus' predictions.
In Ninja Gaiden, the hero is a nameless ninja on a quest to defeat an evil cult led by a fictional descendant of Nostradamus.
In SpyHunter, the hero, Alec Sects, has to stop an organization called Nostra, led by Daemon Curry, who believes in the prophecies of Nostradamus, thinks he is the figure mentioned in several religions and plans to stop all the world's electricity.
In Assassin's Creed Unity, there are Nostradamus riddles hidden in Paris for Arno to solve.
In the PopCap game Insaniquarium, there is an obtainable pet with the ability to postpone alien attacks named Nostradamus.
In the horror video game Fear and Hunger Nostradamus is a supportive NPC, being portrayed as a young man with long hair and a white robe, a few ingame books that can be found were written by him.
↑ See Wilson, I., Nostradamus: The Evidence (Orion, 2002) p. 274.
↑ Lemesurier, Peter: The Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 1997, pp. 146–147
↑ Wulff, Wilhelm Theodor Zodiac and swastika; how astrology guided Hitler's Germany, Pub. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. New York 1973, ( ISBN0-698-10547-8)
↑ Lemesurier, Derwen Publishing, 2011. For summaries and reviews of The Nostradamus Effect, see here. Archived 17 August 2016 at the Wayback Machine
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.
A quatrain is a type of stanza, or a complete poem, consisting of four lines.
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.
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, 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.
Jeane Dixon was one of the best-known American psychics and astrologers of the 20th century, owing to her prediction of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, her syndicated newspaper astrology column, some well-publicized predictions, and a best-selling biography.
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.
Postdiction involves explanation after the fact. In skepticism, it is considered an effect of hindsight bias that explains claimed predictions of significant events such as plane crashes and natural disasters. In religious contexts, theologians frequently refer to postdiction using the Latin term vaticinium ex eventu. Through this term, skeptics postulate that many biblical prophecies appearing to have come true may have been written after the events supposedly predicted, or that the text or interpretation may have been modified after the event to fit the facts as they occurred.
The Man Who Saw Tomorrow is a 1981 documentary-style movie about the predictions of French astrologer and physician Michel de Notredame (Nostradamus).
Luca Gaurico was an Italian astrologer, astronomer, astrological data collector, and mathematician. He was born to a poor family in the Kingdom of Naples, and studied judicial astrology, a subject he defended in his Oratio de Inventoribus et Astrologiae Laudibus (1508). Judicial astrology concerned the fate of man as influenced by the stars. His most famous work is the Tractatus Astrologicus. Later in life he was named a bishop of the Catholic Church.
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 Brahan Seer, known in his native Scottish Gaelic as Coinneach Odhar, and Kenneth Mackenzie, was, according to legend, a predictor of the future who lived in the 17th century.
Les Prophéties is a collection of prophecies by French physician Nostradamus, the first edition of which appeared in 1555 by the publishing house Macé Bonhomme. His most famous work is a collection of poems, quatrains, united in ten sets of verses ("Centuries") of 100 quatrains each.
Nostradamus ni Kiite Miro♪ is the first visual novel developed by Navel's sister brand Lime.
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.
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.
Erika Cheetham was an English writer, best known for her controversial interpretations of Nostradamus' writings.
Nostradamus Effect is an American television series that premiered on September 9, 2009, on the History Channel. The program detailed various historical apocalyptic prophecies, such as the 2012 phenomenon. The show was named after reputed French seer Michel de Nostredame, more commonly known as Nostradamus. The series ran for a single season.
Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter-day Saint movement, is viewed by the movement's adherents as a prophet in the tradition of the ancient prophets recorded in the Bible. During his life, Smith made several prophecies, many documented in the Doctrine and Covenants, a book of scripture in several of the movement's denominations.
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