The Prophecies

by Nostradamus

  The Prophecies

  NOSTRADAMUS

  The Prophecies

  A DUAL-LANGUAGE EDITION WITH PARALLEL TEXT

  Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

  RICHARD SIEBURTH

  Historical Introduction and Supplementary Material by

  STÉPHANE GERSON

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  This translation first published in Penguin Books 2012

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Translation, introduction and notes copyright © Richard Sieburth, 2012

  Historical introduction and “Five Hundred Years of Reading the Prophecies” copyright © Stéphane Gerson, 2012

  All rights reserved

  This work, published as part of the program of aid for publication, received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Service of the French Embassy in the United States.

  Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France représenté aux Etats-Unis.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58886-4

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  Printed in the United States of America

  Set in Sabon

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  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  Contents

  Historical Introduction: Nostradamus’s Worlds

  by STÉPHANE GERSON

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Translator’s Introduction: The Poetics of Futurity

  by RICHARD SIEBURTH

  A Note on the Translation

  A Note on the Text

  Chronology

  THE PROPHECIES

  Preface to César

  Century I

  Century II

  Century III

  Century IV

  Century V

  Century VI

  Century VII

  Epistle to Henri II

  Century VIII

  Century IX

  Century X

  Appendix: Five Hundred Years of Reading the Prophecies by STÉPHANE GERSON

  Notes by RICHARD SIEBURTH

  Historical Introduction

  Nostradamus’s Worlds

  The Prophecies of Nostradamus published as a classic? The last time someone tried it in the United States was in 1942, when the Modern Library, Random House’s esteemed collection, released the Oracles of Nostradamus. Nostradamus had entered the country a century earlier, but he became a household name only during World War II. He was everywhere—in newspapers, on movie screens, even in Nazi propaganda—and Random House’s president, Bennett Cerf, paid attention. Priced at ninety-five cents, and with a cover teaser telling readers that the book made “for fascinating reading when related to the catastrophes announced daily while the world is in crisis,” the Oracles was a hit. Only five Modern Library titles sold more copies that year, among them W. Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. “We have our ears to the ground as editors,” Cerf told a journalist, “and I point to such titles as Nostradamus to prove to you what I mean.” Cerf had dug up these Oracles—an 1891 publication whose author, an Englishman named Charles A. Ward, had selected and commented on random verses by Nostradamus—and simply patched on an afterword and a new cover. Nostradamus had entered the Modern Library, but strangely enough the Prophecies themselves were nowhere to be found.

  This tells us a few things about Nostradamus in modern times. His Prophecies are ubiquitous, especially during times of crisis, and yet they remain elusive. They often play upon the mercenary instincts of cultural promoters high and low. And the people and institutions that bestow symbolic recognition seldom acknowledge the book’s literary qualities. The ever-candid Cerf confessed that he had included the book in his collection with his tongue in his cheek. Could he do otherwise when respected journalists were denouncing Nostradamus’s disjointed words and uncouth French? Ever since the Frenchman Michel de Nostredame (pen name Nostradamus) published Les premières centuries, ou Prophéties in Lyon in 1555, no secular or religious canon has deemed his predictions fit for inclusion. The book has not made it into school curricula or college syllabi or onto the lists of prestigious publishing imprints. No institution, no political or religious group, has taken on the task of consecrating or preserving the Prophecies. If a classic, following one definition, refers to an old work canonized by widespread admiration, then the controversial Nostradamus was doomed. The Nobel Prize–winning novelist J. M. Coetzee once suggested that a classic is a book that has drawn the attention of professional critics and overcome them. This has not been the case with the Prophecies.

  Until recently, that is. Over the past decade or so, scholars have begun reconsidering this book and its mix of astrology, prophecy, melancholy poetry, magic, and history. The first reputable dissertation on Nostradamus’s poetics was defended in Stockholm in 2005, by a scholar named Anna Carlstedt. Other books and articles have followed. Did this happen because of turn-of-the-millennium enthusiasm? Because scholars came to see the modern age as one not only of scientists and engineers but also of magicians and Spiritualists? Or because they had to recognize that Nostradamus’s predictions continue to capture the West’s collective imagination (if not the world’s at this point)? A bit of all three, no doubt. But there is a paradox at work. The Prophecies of Nostradamus have outlasted most of the writings published during the late Renaissance. People have read and parsed the work for close to five centuries. And yet, it seems to float in some distant realm, out of our reach, broken up into fragments or hidden behind interpretations.

  The time is ripe for a new translation and a new look at a work whose formal organization, stylistics, evocative powers, and enduring resonance defy comparison. Beyond the predictions that may or may not have come true, beyond the intimations of world’s end, beyond the strange tales about a wizard who buried himself alive in his grave, the Prophecies contain the universe—as the avant-garde writer Max Jacob, a fervent reader of Nostradamus, once proclaimed. The singular book that sought to encompass its worlds—past, present, and future—tells us as much about its era as it does about our own and about yearnings that remain as conflicted today as they were during the Renaissance.

  When the first edition of the Prophecies came out, Nostradam
us (1503–66) was fifty-two and living in the southern French town of Salon-de-Provence, halfway between Avignon and Aix. He was something of a celebrity by then. In the 1530s he had made a regional name for himself as a plague doctor. Epidemics afflicted Provence every other year, and many physicians fled. Nostradamus, however, braved physical danger and potential threats to his reputation (remedies and prophylactics could fail, after all) and stayed. Salon summoned him when the plague reached the town, and he liked its climate enough to settle there, start a family, and set up a medical practice. His diagnostics, like those of other Renaissance physicians, rested on bodily humors as well as the stars, which were believed to govern parts of the body and mirror character traits. Nostradamus soon branched out and began calculating detailed horoscopes that provided insights into people’s character and destiny. He knew what his customers expected: not a stream of favorable predictions, but truth and sufficient warning to chart the best course of action. They wanted an astrologer who would unveil the workings of fate and reinforce their faith that humans, if warned, could parry the worst blows. Illness and misfortune were unavoidable, but people also expected a satisfying existence and reason to hope. Nostradamus provided it all. Valleys follow peaks, he said. Pleasure and joy are intermingled with sorrow. But moderation and perseverance outline a sound path forward.

  Nostradamus’s thriving practice enhanced his reputation. His customers addressed him as their friend, and this was what he provided: friendship as a virtuous bond of equality, reciprocity, and moral commitment between reasonable, virtuous men who shared interests and professional goals and sometimes emotional attachments as well. This was a humanistic notion, and Nostradamus was a Renaissance humanist through and through. He had learned the traditional curriculum in Avignon: grammar, rhetoric, and logic coupled with arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. He had then studied medicine at the University of Montpellier, built a sizable library, and mastered Latin, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, Spanish, and perhaps Arabic in addition to his native French and Provençal. He read widely—poetry, the classics, history—and worked on a French translation of the Greek physician Galen. (Renaissance doctors frequently engaged in such pursuits, partly to garner prestige.) One of his earliest projects was a verse riff on the hieroglyphics of Horapollo, which had been discovered in 1419 and translated into Greek in 1505. He exchanged letters with educated men throughout Europe and interspersed references to Lucillius and other classical authors in his missives.

  But Nostradamus ventured beyond such circles. In 1550 he published his first almanac, a short and flimsy publication that contained a calendar, tables of the phases of the Moon (known as ephemerides), and weather forecasts. He wrote at least one almanac per year, along with prose narratives called prognostications, which described weather patterns, epidemics, wars, and even the behavior of men with soft or bellicose temperaments for the year to come. Like his horoscopes, these publications rested on his astrological calculations of planetary conjunctions and revolutions and cosmic cycles. Almanacs had become the popular medium of the day. The world of print was booming: printers and publishers created new genres and altered the ways in which people organized knowledge. Nostradamus flourished in this market, partly because he managed his editorial ventures with skill, and partly because he was in sync with his world. He read other astrologers and classical authors and almanacs and synthesized all this material into publications that were sold across France and abroad as well. His massive output of cheap vernacular publications exemplified the media culture that was now taking form and would grow in the West.

  The prose writer was also a poet. He adorned his almanacs with four-line predictive poems—called présages, or portents—that he claimed to have composed out of natural instinct and poetic frenzy. Each almanac contained one portent for the whole year, one for each month, and sometimes a fourteenth one at the end. This was Nostradamus’s signature. The blend of prose and poetry was characteristic of a man who moved constantly from one realm to the next, who was present in all of them and yet confined to none. He was Catholic and French but a resident of Provence (recently incorporated into France), with two grandparents who had converted from Judaism. His family of middling merchants was close to the local elite, yet not quite part of it. He attended a prestigious medical school but contested his teachers’ formal course of study and spent decades on the road, a peripatetic adventurer who followed his curiosity wherever it led him. The French queen Catherine de Médicis invited him to the court of France, but he never became a courtier. Nostradamus was both an insider and outsider, an establishment figure who followed the rules and a maverick who skirted around them. His liminal position enabled him to encounter people from various walks of life, to tap different forms of knowledge, and to grasp the aspirations and fears, the violence and contradictions of his world.

  Nostradamus’s Prophecies built upon his almanacs and went further. The fundamental similarity: the quatrains, which were now arranged in series of one hundred called Centuries. The 1555 edition contained 353 quatrains and a preface to Nostradamus’s eldest son, César. Over the next few years, publishers in Lyon and Paris released other editions—sometimes with additional quatrains. In 1568, two years after Nostradamus’s death, there came a final edition with 942 quatrains spread over ten Centuries. It also contained a second preface, addressed to the late king Henri II. The odd number of quatrains remains mysterious. We do not know whether Nostradamus intended it as such or simply lacked the time to complete his work. It is also possible that some quatrains went astray in publishers’ workshops or, less likely, that he fit as many as he could in the sixteen-page leaves that publishers routinely used. Nor do we know why the last three Centuries were published posthumously. Some commentators believe that someone else composed them after Nostradamus’s death, but this is conjectural. Regardless, most readers believed at that time and afterward that Nostradamus had penned the 942 quatrains and two prefaces. This is the core of the book that has traversed the centuries.

  There were other book-length predictions and other collections of Centuries during the Renaissance, but none that built on the author’s preexisting fame and that mixed poetry, astrology, and prophecy in this fashion. Astrologers provided interpretations of celestial signs according to a method. Prophets, in contrast, were elected by God to convey augurs to humanity; they typically proffered warnings or requested renewed devotion. Nostradamus did not resemble familiar prophetic types. He was neither a lowly, unorthodox man nor a pure figure who disregarded his body nor a divine envoy who interpreted Scripture to help a leader overcome adversity. After all, he claimed that no human being could comprehend the secrets of God the Creator and assured his readers that he would never arrogate such a sublime title for himself. Still, the book’s title is revealing. While he stayed within the boundaries prescribed by the Catholic Church, Nostradamus combined facets of the Jewish prophet who brought together past, present, and future; the Christian prophet who could accomplish nothing without divine power; and the melancholy, Aristotelian prophet who could connect with the soul of the world. Alone in his study, scrutinizing the sky, guided by “natural instinct & accompanied by poetic furor,” overcome by prophetic inspiration, and dabbling in white magic (he wore laurel crowns and a sky blue stone ring during these sessions), Nostradamus composed what he called “nocturnal & prophetic calculations.”

  The Neoplatonists believed that poets could contemplate and render meaningful mysteries that startled ordinary mortals, and in this spirit it is important to emphasize the primacy of words in Nostradamus’s enterprise. Like formulas and incantations, words had obtained therapeutic or magical powers during the Middle Ages. They embodied hidden verities and divine ideas and the essence of things and people. By the Renaissance, they brimmed with meaning and could modify the natural world and sometimes transcend the symbolic realm to become analogies of the cosmos.

  The following quatrain provides a taste of Nostradamus’s words. It is the sixty-fourth of the fi
rst Century (1.64):

  At night they shall believe the sun does shine

  When at the half-human pig they get a peek :

  Noise, song, battalions battling in the sky

  Shall be perceived & brute beasts heard to speak.

  These verses capture the book’s distant authorial voice (Nostradamus rarely uses the first person in the quatrains) and the imposing authority it conveys. They also display the opacity that, even in an age of mystifying prophecies, allegorical engravings, and analogical means of reasoning, befuddled many contemporaries. The prophet seems to have relished obscurity. Perhaps he sought to capture the volatility of his era, the instability of the human condition, the hidden workings of the world, or the mysteries of the cosmos. Perhaps he sought to join a brotherhood of prognosticators whose authority rested on arcane language and expert knowledge. And perhaps he understood the value of dissimulation—and the dangers of exposure—while coming of age in tumultuous times. To succeed as a soothsayer in the sixteenth century, one had better learn how to assuage secular rulers as well as religious authorities.

  This quatrain also captures Nostradamus’s terse bleakness. Even if readers did not fathom all the verses, they could not miss the gloomy tidings, the harrowing violence, the apocalyptic battles that expressed the eschatological mood spreading across the continent during a century of diseases, wars, marauding armies, inflation, and famine. Signs that the Last Days approached seemed to multiply, from the Protestant Reformation to the sack of Rome by troops of Charles V in 1527 to Ottoman advances. Astrological prophecy, which focused on the Last Judgment and the struggle against Satan, made inroads. Even if many Christians contemplated their future with equanimity, a sense of foreboding permeated European society. Nostradamus voiced the two dimensions of Apocalypticism. Readers of the Prophecies could find looming cataclysm and suffering as retribution for a society that had succumbed to sin. They could also uncover a more optimistic horizon, with prospects of universal peace, empathy for people who had sinned out of ignorance rather than evil, and a merciful God whom devout and humble Christians could placate.