by Nostradamus
The first page of the Prophecies invited its readers of 1555 to imagine the Magus alone at night in his study, seated on a metaphorical bronze tripod like the Pythia of yore, intoxicated by the vapors emanating from the pit where Apollo once slew the Python, and moved to prophetic utterance by the flickering flame of the gases produced by its decomposing body—a description derived from the De mysteriis Aegyptiorum of Syrian Neoplatonist Iamblichus and the De occulta philosophia of German occultist Cornelius Agrippa :
Estant assis de nuict secret estude
Seul reposé sus la selle d’aerain :
Flambe exigue sortant de solitude,
Fait proferer qui n’est à croire en vain.
This was first rendered into English by Theophilus de Garencières in 1672 as :
Sitting by night in my secret Study
Alone, resting upon the Brazen stool.
A slight flame braking forth out of that solitude,
Makes me utter what is not in vain to believe.
Garencières justified his literal translation by claiming that “the Crabbedness of the Original in his own Idiome can scarce admit a Polite Eloquency in another.” But on closer inspection, his translation proves far less literal than it pretends, for he invents first-person pronouns (“my secret Study,” “makes me utter”) where there are none in the original, entirely missing the point that these Prophecies enact a proto-Mallarméan “elocutory disappearance of the poet who henceforth leaves the initiative to words”—indeed, in the entire thirty-five-thousand-word corpus of the Prophecies, there are only five occurrences of the pronoun “I.” Within this poetics of vatic anonymity, the crucial verb that leaps out in the lines above is proferer—from the Latin pro-ferre, “to carry forward,” hence “to utter”—a verb whose subject is not a person, but rather the “narrow flame” emanating from (decomposed) tradition. In my translation of this same quatrain, I have inflected this verb toward its etymological cognate, “prophecy”—from the Greek pro-phetes, “one who speaks beforehand,” or perhaps more accurately, “the one who speaks for, that is, who translates the vaporous images of the oracle into concrete poetry :
Being seated at night in secret study
Alone upon a stool of bronze at ease :
Slim flame issuing forth from solitude
Fuels prophecies not futile to believe. (1.1)
Still paraphrasing Iamblichus in Latin, the subsequent quatrain moves from Delphi to the ancient oracle of Didymus at Branchidai (or Branchus) in Asia Minor. Nostradamus maintains his impersonation of a female sibyl (in the third person this time), while throwing in an erudite pun (capitalized so the printers would get it) on the branchlike legs of the tripod :
Wand in hand set in the midst of BRANCHES,
With water he wets both his hem & feet :
Vapor & voice aquiver in his sleeves :
Splendor divine. The god here takes a seat. (1.2)
In the original French the closing hemistich reads, “Le divin près s’assied.” Or in Marsilio Ficino’s terse neo-Latin, “subito deus adest.”
In the volume’s preface, addressed to his infant son César, Nostradamus further elaborates upon these moments of divine visitation. Arising, as they do, as he studies at night, scanning the stars for signs, their sacred intensity (or furor) guarantees the authenticity—and, more importantly, the veracity—of his prophetic utterance :
But, my son, I’m speaking to you here a bit too abstrusely: as for the occult vaticinations inspired in us by that subtle spirit of fire which sometimes exercises our minds as we sit up nights contemplating the stars on high, finding myself (to my surprise) prophesying, I write it all down, pronouncing myself without fear, free from immodest loquacity. How so? Because all these things were flowing from the almighty power of Eternal God, from whom all bounty proceeds.
He continues (paraphrasing the Latin of the Italian firebrand Savonarola):
Note, however, my son, that if I have made mention of the term prophet, far be it from me to arrogate a title this exalted, this sublime, in these present times: For he that is now called a Prophet was beforetime called Seer [I Samuel 9:9]: for a Prophet, my son, is properly speaking someone who sees distant things with the natural knowledge possessed by all creatures.
Nostradamus is proceeding with extreme caution here. Lest he be accused of arrogance, madness, or, worse, heresy—Savonarola’s public incineration by a Borgia pope was still within recent memory—he prefers to present himself as a “seer” (videns), in the same eidetic sense that Rimbaud will later use the term voyant. Although he alludes in this same preface to his “hereditary gift of prophecy”—in which some commentators have seen a veiled allusion to his distant Jewish ancestry—and although he mentions being seized by “trances of epilepsy” during what appear to be veritable episodes of automatic writing, he is careful to insist that he has abjured all the occult arts of magic and that he does not claim for himself “the name or function of a prophet, but that of a mortal man possessed of revealed inspiration, whose senses are no less distant from heaven than his feet from the ground : I can err, fail, be deceived, there is no greater sinner on this earth than I, subject to all the afflictions of man.” Which was apparently good enough for the Catholic Church, for his Prophecies never appeared on its newly established Index of forbidden books.
William Blake observed in 1798 that “Prophets, in the modern sense of the word, have never existed. Jonah was no prophet in the modern sense, for his prophecy of Ninevah failed. Every honest man is a Prophet; he utters his opinion both of private & public matters. Thus: If you go on So, the result is So. He never says, such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. A Prophet is a Seer, not an Arbitrary Dictator.” For today’s readers, it seems to me, the Nostradamus who will matter as a poet is the Seer and not the authoritative prognosticator of the future. If he has typically been read in the latter fashion, it is because (as he argues in this same preface) he was convinced that his divinely inspired “imaginative impressions” were validated by what the Renaissance unanimously accepted as a legitimate science, namely, “judicial astrology.” This art of forecasting future events on the basis of the recurrence of planetary alignments or “conjunctions” was a practice that reached back to seventh-century Baghdad, subsequently popularized in Europe by the medieval translation of Albumasar’s De magnis conjunctionibus. For a poet inhabiting the vast Renaissance echo chamber of sympathies and similitudes (see Michel Foucault’s Order of Things), the doctrine of conjunctions was bound to appeal to his sense of rhyme; he even coined a lovely adjective for it, “harmotic”—from the Greek harmotikos, “fit for joining.” The stately, inevitable procession of the planets through the houses of the zodiac in turn provided him with a corresponding master rhythm: lesser conjunctions occurred every 20 years, major ones every 240 years, great ones every 960 years—the rarer the conjunction, the more disastrous its impact. Conjunction and procession, rhyme and rhythm: as in the heavens, so on the page.
Richard Roussat’s Livre de l’estat et mutation des temps (1550) encouraged the Nostradamus of the Prophecies to move from the merely annual and short-term calendrical predictions of his almanacs into a sweeping, millennial vision of universal history, divided into three great celestial cycles of 2,380 years, each ruled by a different planet. The current third cycle had begun with the reign of Saturn in 329 B.C.E., followed by Venus (116), Jupiter (470), Mercury (824), Mars (1179), Moon (1533), Sun (1887), and finally, at the End of Days (2242), Saturn again. Here is Nostradamus translating Roussat into verse, with a rare appearance of the first-person singular and an even rarer specification of date (only nine explicit dates occur throughout the entire Prophecies and their prefaces):
Now that the Moon for twenty years has reigned, [i.e., 1553]
Seven thousand more shall it last as king : [biblical chronology]
When the Sun resumes its remaining days, [i.e., in 1887]
My prophecy’s fulfillment it shall bring. (1.48)
Long before the above things come to pass,
Those from the East by virtue of the moon
In seventeen hundred shall launch attacks,
Bringing much of the North under their rule. (1.49)
As a prophet who described himself as driven by “melancholy inspiration,” Nostradamus was especially susceptible to the influence of Saturn. According to Roussat, the next great renewal of this distant planet would occur around 1789–91, a fact not lost on the readers of the Prophecies after the French Revolution :
Ten revolutions of dread Saturn’s scythe
Shall effect changes in ages & reigns :
It assumes its place in the mobile sign
Where the two are equal, their angles same. (1.54)
Rewriting Virgil’s celebrated Fourth Eclogue (“redeunt Saturna regna”), the poet forecasts the transfer of empire (translatio imperii) to a mysterious place called Brodde (from the Latin Ebrodunum, a region of the Alps?), if and when (?) a vulture (?) plucks out an eye (kills a leader?) in a particular town on France’s southern coast near the border of Spain :
The world’s final age drawing ever close,
Slow Saturn again making a return :
Empire transferred toward the nation of Brodde,
Vulture plucking out the eye at Narbonne. (3.92)
At times he is capable of a fierce, almost Blakean irony, as in this quatrain where the conjunction of Saturn (“Scythe”) and Jupiter (“Tin”) in Sagittarius produces a “renovation” that proves to be merely another screw-turn of horror :
Toward Sagittarius, Scythe joined to Tin,
And at the APOGEE of ascension :
Plague, famine, death at military hands,
Thus does the age approach renovation. (1.16)
Contemporaries of Nostradamus such as Laurent Videl were quick to pounce on his incompetence as an astrologer; more recently, Pierre Brind’Amour’s Nostradamus astrophile (1993) has provided a devastatingly detailed critique of his amateurish dabbling in star lore. The current scholarly consensus has it that the astrology-based predictions of the Prophecies are well-nigh worthless as futurology. I tend to see them as T. S. Eliot took the theological lumber of Dante’s Divine Comedy, that is, as a mere scaffolding device—somewhat akin to the wheels and gyres that inform the verse of the later Yeats. The latter described the cosmological gimcrackery of A Vision in a 1937 letter as “a last act of defense against the chaos of the world”—and so it was for Nostradamus living through what he called a most “sinister age,” with early modern Europe crashing down about his ears. But the spirits also said to Yeats: “we have come to bring you metaphors for poetry.”
To dismiss Nostradamus as a reliable futurologist, however, is not to deny the immense force of the futural that lies stored within his Prophecies. I know of no other long poem in any language that is cast so consistently in the future tense—a tense that (somewhat like the imperfective aspect of biblical Hebrew) cumulatively contains within itself that which once was, that which still is, and that which lies ahead. In my translation I have therefore made use of the slightly archaic auxiliary verb “shall” throughout to indicate not just simple futurity, but also (according to the Usage Note in the American Heritage Dictionary) various shades of determination, promise, command, and compulsion, often colored by the more optative uncertainties of doubt, anxiety, and desire. The Nostradamian sublime, linked as it is to this uncanny apprehension of time past as time future, places its reader into a state of acute anticipatory angst, hermeneutically alert to tokens and traces portentous of great changes to come—Shakespeare’s “precurse of feared events, /As harbingers preceding still the fates /And prologue to the omen coming on.”
Omens—signs taken for wonders—occasion the most dramatic intimations of futurity in the Prophecies. In his important study La nature et les prodiges: L’insolite au XVI siècle, historian Jean Céard has called the chaotic period between 1552 and 1559 in France “the golden age of marvels.” Like his fellow poets (notably Ronsard), Nostradamus found inspiration in the extremely popular Book of Prodigies of Julius Obsequens, which had been recently reissued (with illustrative woodcuts) in 1552. A fourth-century epitome (or abridgment) of the Roman historian Livy’s annals, Obsequens’s book offers a compendium of the wonders and portents recorded in Rome during the second and first centuries B.C.E. The Prophecies are infused with the cultural memory of ancient divination :
Of kings & princes images they’ll unfurl,
Haruspices, augurs, their crooks raised high :
Victims’ horns, gold, lapis lazuli, pearl,
Entrails to be interpreted for signs. (3.26)
Among his many stray abridgments of Roman historians, Nostradamus evokes the ominous darkening of the skies after the death of Julius Caesar :
The moon obscured within the shadows’ maze,
Its brother wan, as dull as iron rust (1.84)
Or, via Suetonius, the portents announcing the birth of Augustus—
Near her royal bed the lady apprehends
A snake : not a dog shall bark that night (4.93)
—or the assassination of Emperor Domitian :
When the crow shall caw for seven hours
Without cease upon its high brick tower :
A death foretold, statue running with blood,
Tyrant stabbed, people praying to the gods. (4.55)
Most frequently, however, Nostradamus introduces the kinds of spectacular prodigies and marvels that were the staple of contemporary almanac literature—comets streaking through the sky, lightning strikes, earthquakes, hailstorms, eclipses, plagues, hermaphrodites, amphibious fish, rains of frogs, monstrous births (such as the celebrated “Monster of Ravenna,” discovered by invading French troops in 1512 and thought to have augured their subsequent military reverses in Italy). Nostradamus’s strategy is to heap omen upon omen until a kind of mantic hysteria is achieved :
Milk, blood, frogs showering Dalmatia,
Battle breaking out, plague near Balenna :
A great cry throughout all Slavonia,
Then monster born near & in Ravenna. (2.32)
Often the causal relation between the monstrous portent (announced in the first distich) and its aftermath (in the second) remains completely garbled. Colons replace logical connectives :
Sans foot or hand & sharp & strong of tooth,
Born of ram & sow, with a glob for a face :
The traitor sidles toward the gate : the moon
Shines : led away are the small & the great. (2.58)
We end up with something like a series of screaming tabloid headlines—or prophetic tweets :
A golden flame from sky to earth is seen :
Struck from on high : a newborn babe amazes :
Major massacres : the lord’s nephew seized :
Deaths at the theater : the proud one flees. (2.92)
The spear of the sky shall streak far & wide :
Many executed, talking as they die :
Stone striking tree : proud people on its knees :
Man-beast monster born : purge & purify. (2.70)
Always monitory, always remindful of the violent and inexplicable designs of God, these traumatic omens bespeak the prophet’s deep anxiety about humanity’s Job-like sufferings in a world so clearly fallen from grace. But much as these portents point forward in time, they also hearken back to an equally uneasy past. Nostradamus has a whole series of quatrains featuring persons or objects that have been entombed and forgotten and that now enigmatically resurface, enacting a kind of pre-Freudian return of the repressed. In a scene straight out of a horror film, someone who was mistakenly buried alive during an attack of apoplexy returns from the grave, announcing the burning of a heretic (Savonarola again?):
Not dead when buried, just apoplectic,
He shall be found to have his hands all gnawed :
When the city condemns the heretic
Who, so it seemed to them, had changed their laws. (3.36)
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Having grown up near the impressive Roman ruins of Glanum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, Nostradamus was fascinated by the ghostly persistence of the past: his Prophecies are the direct contemporaries of the sonnets of Du Bellay’s Les antiquitez de Rome (1558). The quatrains of his great serial poem are filled with archaeological allusions to buried treasure or to the chance and ominous resurgence of antiquities from beneath the ground. For instance, heavy flooding in southern France in 1557 had led to the discovery of various pagan artifacts from the ruined temple of Diana, originally thrown into the Sacred Lake of Nîmes with the coming of Christianity :