Nostradamus: Complete Prophecies for the Future: The Complete Prophecies for The Future (Sunday Times No. 1 Bestseller)

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Michel de Nostradame was born in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1503. Though Catholic, he later traded on his Jewish ancestry by saying his natural instinct for prophecy was “inherited from my forebears”. He made his early living as a travelling apothecary, much in demand for the treatment of plague victims. “His time was comparable to ours,” says historian Dan Jones. “He lived when there were also massive social divisions and catastrophes. It was also a time in which the new invention of the printing press made the transmission of ideas, and crazy mad bullshit, incredibly easy. It was the social media of its day.” All this data can be verified from: Wikipedia; Encyclopedia Britannica; the other 2 authors as well as other sources, all you need to do is do a bit of research. TS Eliot wrote that humankind cannot bear much reality. Today, when life seems irremediably chaotic, our politicians catastrophic and the future more ungraspable, we desperately seek patterns, narratives and meaning. “At moments of great change or social anxiety we do tend to go looking for explanations,” says Jones. “We want the past and the future to make narrative sense.” The point of the prophet is to provide this by showing us mugs what we have not noticed, be it a providential working-out of a larger, perhaps God-determined, purpose, the march of progress, or, as Steven Connor puts it, “a redemptive parabola rising from fall to forgiveness”. Nostradamus was born Michel de Nostradame on December 14 or 21, 1503, in the south of France in Saint-Remy-de-Provence. He was one of nine children born to Reyniere de St-Remy and her husband Jaume de Nostradame, a well-to-do grain dealer and part-time notary of Jewish descent. Quatrain 8/15 as mentioned above reads "The masculine woman will exert herself to the north. She will annoy nearly all of Europe and the rest of the world. Two failures will put her in such an imbalance. That both life and death will strengthen eastern Europe."

The beauty of Nostradamus is you can read whatever you wish into what he wrote. What some may consider his charlatanry is, viewed from another angle, his genius, says Everett F Blieler, author, under the pseudonym Liberte E LeVert, of Prophecies and Enigmas of Nostradamus: “Circumlocution and evasion of directness play a large part. He usually waffled in his astrological datings, since conjunctions are repeated. He invoked obscure Latin words to create possibilities of double meanings; he omitted prepositions, articles, reflexives and connectives, and favoured the infinitive as a timeless, personless form that can be read many ways.” I found Marco Reading’s interpretation of many of the prophecies required and enormous stretch of the imagination. Some of the claims were very sketchy and some were plain ridiculous. There are errors: Britain ceding from the EU (2060) it happened in 2020 40 years earlier; XCXXXXXXXX Reading makes inexplicable connections between 9/11 and the quatrain where Arethusa is mentioned. Arethusa is a natural spring in Syracuse, Sicily. ArethUSA? Come on.

Uncommon Knowledge

That people are so willing to believe anything anyone tells them along an eschatological vein is often more interesting than the eschatology itself. Perhaps Nostradamus didn’t predict the king’s death so much as make it look to future readers as if he had. That is not to suggest that Nostradamus was a charlatan, but something more interesting. “The point of prophecy is not to give you tipoffs about share-price fluctuations but to be able after the event to affirm that they were foreseen,” argues Steven Connor, professor of English at Cambridge University, “Prophecy is only ever retroactively potent, or by the kind of anticipated retrospection that we could call ‘posticipation’, which always means knowing too late what you might have known in advance.” Nostradamus writes that 2K23 will find the world embroiled in, “Seven months great war, people dead through evil.” This could apply, albeit a bit late to the firefight, to the devastating conflict in Ukraine which thus far has been marked by war crimes and a heavy civilian death toll. In terms of the “evil” Nostradamus blames, hate-mongering, death-dealing, Libra Vladimir Putin comes pretty close to personifying it. Nostradamus took advantage of this new means of spreading ideas. From 1550 onwards he produced annual almanacs that included prophetic verses. In 1554, he started writing Les Prophéties, in which he aimed to set out the future history of the world in 1,000 quatrains, arranged in 10 “centuries”. As his fame grew, Nostradamus became a close friend of the queen of France, Catherine de Médici, the death of whose husband Henry II he is supposed to have predicted in the following verse: During a nomadic youth he sold rare books, taught riding in Cape Town, studied dressage in Vienna, played polo in India, France, Spain, and Dubai, ran a seventy horse polo stables in Gloucestershire, and helped manage his Mexican wife’s coffee plantation.

This book was a hoot. I would like to give it 4 stars just for the sheer entertainment value, however a more critical level is the 1 star rating it has. Marco Reading takes the prophecies of Nostradamus and uses them to foretell the future. Many of the prophecies are ambiguous and require a huge leap of faith to get what Marco Reading is taking from them. There are some universal themes: conflict between Christianity and Islam; global warming; and the Antichrist that are given much attention. So let’s take a closer look: According to the clip, the source of the information was Nostradamus' 1555 book Les Prophéties, or The Prophecies, a collection of poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events. The prediction, claimed the video, was interpreted by Mario Reading, a British author who passed away in 2017. In 1522 he entered the University of Montpellier to complete his doctorate in medicine. He sometimes expressed dissension with the teachings of the Catholic priests, who dismissed his notions of astrology.even when the book was first published in 2005, global warming was a serous issue; there has long been conflict between Christianity and Islam; and predictions of an Antichrist predate Nostradamus. It was also claimed in the 3-minute video—which has been flagged by Facebook as containing false information—that Nostradamus predicted King Charles III would have a short reign due to public "resentment," with an "unexpected man" replacing him. The series of events, it was claimed would lead to the end of the monarchy. And the fact that Nostradamus was unable (or unwilling) to make exact predictions about precise dates means that his writings will be dismissed out of hand by many. So this should be read with some caution. I am aware that Marco Reading was considered an expert on Nostradamus and if you want to believe his interpretations of these prophecies for the future that’s okay. However, there are 3 important facts that must be remembered when reading this and other books on Nostradamus. More recently, enthusiasts claim that Nostradamus predicted the rise of COVID-19 when he wrote, “Near the gates and within two cities/There will be two scourges the like of which was never seen. Famine within plague, people put out by steel/Crying to the great immortal God for relief.”