Translation, Historical Commentary, and Biography
By
Richard Smoley
The Lure of Nostradamus
An Interview with Richard Smoley
Copyright c 2010 by Richard Smoley
What drew you to study Nostradamus?
I wanted to see what, if anything, there was to his prophecies. Was he really able to see the future, or was he just indulging in mumbo jumbo? To some extent, it was the latter. Some of his prophecies were cobbled together from earlier books of prophecies that had been circulating in his time. There are, however, a few striking hits, so his predictions can't be dismissed wholesale.
Why is Nostradamus still the subject of intense fascination nearly 400 years after his death?
Nostradamus wrote oracles, and oracles are notoriously obscure. He was clever enough not to make specific prophecies, or not at any rate for anything in his own lifetime. Dates he mentions -- 1607, 1702, 1999 -- are all well after his lifetime, so he could never live to be proved wrong. Nothing particularly important happened in those years, by the way, and nothing resembling what he forecast.
All that said, there are instances where he seems to have seen things in the future that relate to the destiny of France in particular. Most of his striking successes have in one way or another to do with France -- for example, a verse predicting that Monaco (under Spanish rule in his time) would eventually become part of France. Practically the only date that he specifically mentions in which something significant did happen was 1792 -- when the French monarchy came to an end.
Similarly, there are a few remarkable prophecies that have to do with England: one that suggested that its king would be put to death -- something unthinkable in Nostradamus's time, but which did happen in 1649: the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell beheaded Charles I.
The further Nostradamus's prophecies get geographically from his own country -- he lived in the south of France -- the more spotty his predictions become. I doubt, for example, that there is anything in his prophecies that really applies to America, which in his time was a remote, savage backwater.
Finally -- and this really should not be overlooked -- Nostradamus was in his curious way a superb poet. His verses are broken, jagged, cryptic, cobbling together puns and anagrams from any number of languages. This did not enhance his literary reputation in his own day -- since tastes were geared toward strict classical models -- but it does create powerful, evocative poetry. Had he written in the twentieth rather than the sixteenth century, he might have been acclaimed as a great surrealist poet.
How have previous translations and interpretations obscured Nostradamus's vision?
Nostradamus's vagueness can be easily exploited, and has been. Let's take one of his most famous predictions: "Forty-five degrees, the sky will burn, / Fire to approach the great new city." Even before 9/11, this was being applied to New York -- a city in some strange way seems to serve as a magnet for the fears and dreads of Americans.
Was Nostradamus was thinking about New York? Probably not. New York wasn't even founded until almost sixty years after his death. He was probably thinking of Naples, whose name was originally "Neapolis" -- meaning "new city" in Greek. Naples is extremely close to Mount Vesuvius, which has erupted in historical times and occasionally still threatens to do so. I think it's much more likely that Nostradamus had this in mind.
Explanations like this are not very popular, because frankly it's not very sexy to predict a volcanic eruption near Naples. Thus it's not in the interest of the typical interpreter of Nostradamus to go in this direction, even though that's the most likely explanation.
So we have all sorts of fanciful interpretations. The wilder and more alarming these are, the more avidly the public eats them up. The interpreters thus have a vested interest in this view of Nostradamus.
But I didn't want to write another Nostradamus book of this kind. There are already plenty of them, and in any case I didn't want to have my name on something like that. I really tried to focus on what Nostradamus himself was likely to have been thinking about when he wrote these verses.
How have Nostradamus's predictions influenced leaders throughout history?
The most intriguing example has to do with the Nazis and World War II. As has often been noted, some of Nostradamus's verses mention a figure called "Hister." It's easy to take this as a prophecy of Adolf Hitler, not only because of the similarity of names, but because (some say) Hitler was born in a town on the Danube River, and "Hister" is an old name for the Danube.
Did Nostradamus have Hitler in mind? Probably not. As a matter of fact, Hitler was born in a town called Braunau-am-Inn, "Braunau on the Inn," which, as its name suggests, is on the Inn River, not on the Danube. (Admittedly the Inn is a tributary of the Danube.)
When he talked about Hitler, Nostradamus was almost certainly thinking of Austria under the Hapsburgs, which in his day was probably the most powerful nation in Europe. Again, how sexy is it to say that Nostradamus was making prophecies about sixteenth-century Austria? Who cares?
Nevertheless, these prophecies about Hitler did have an interesting effect on history. Magda Goebbels, wife of the infamous Nazi propaganda minister, came across them, and they made her think of Hitler. Whether the Nazis themselves believed in them is highly questionable, but they did find Nostradamus useful as propaganda. In 1940 they published -- pseudonymously and in foreign countries -- books claiming that Nostradamus predicted a Nazi victory.
Nostradamus was found to be useful in other ways as well. When the Germans invaded France in 1940, for some tactical reason they wanted to block the French army's retreat to the southeast. So they dumped batches of brochures with a spurious Nostradamus prophecy hinting that the southeast would be spared. Later the chief of German espionage wrote, "I never imagined that [these brochures] could have had such an effect. All the efforts of the [French] civil and military authorities to prevent a great outpouring of refugees toward the southeast were fruitless."
Finally the Allies caught on and started turning Nostradamus to their own purposes. MGM even made four movies about him during the Second World War. As a result Nostradamus became a popular figure in the U.S. for the first time.
How are the prophecies of Nostradamus connected to fears about the year 2012?
To begin with, Nostradamus said nothing about 2012. He just didn't. The year is a point of focus because the ancient Mayan calendar supposedly predicts the end of an age in that year.
Some people who are focused on 2012 view it in a positive sense -- the renewing of a cycle and so on. But as 2012 has become more and more a part of mass imagination, it has merged into popular fantasies based on the book of Revelation, so many people think -- and many TV documentaries have portrayed -- 2012 as a year of Armageddon.
Do I personally believe this? No. In fact I don't believe in prophecies in general. Most of them -- and I include those in the Bible -- just haven't turned out to be true. Take what is called the Apocalyptic Discourse in the Gospels, found in Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21. (These versions are substantially similar.) If you read this and take it totally literally -- without any preconceptions -- you will conclude that Jesus predicted that the Romans would invade Judea and that the world would then come to an end.
This didn't happen. The Romans did invade Judea in AD 66, sacked the Temple, and laid the whole territory waste. But the world didn't end. The world went on much as it had, for better or worse.
This is true of most prophecies. People do have genuine glimpses into the future, but they are for the most part very specific and very personal -- you will be told what you need to know if you need to know it. Beyond that it is all very speculative.
Why, then, is there such an incredible appetite for apocalypse? Why do people want so badly to believe that the world is coming to an end in a few years?
The answer is complex, and I talk about it at length in my book. In essence, some of it is habit. Christianity in particular has been predicting the end of time for so long in our civilization that it's become a kind of habit of mind to believe it. Some of it is escapism. Many people are bored with their lives, and the idea that all this might go up in smoke in a few years makes life a little more interesting -- so long as the likelihood remains extremely small.
Then there is the sobering fact that we all know, inexorably and irrefutably, that our personal worlds are going to come to an end soon. Maybe tomorrow, maybe ten or twenty or fifty years from now. It's hard to face the thought of your own death, and most of us would rather not do it. If this anxiety can be displaced onto something else -- a fancifully imagined apocalypse that, deep down inside, very few of us really believe in -- it makes this disturbing truth a bit more manageable.