The Prophecies

by Nostradamus

  Because thou hast hid these things from the wise & prudent, that is, from the powerful & the kings, & hast revealed them unto the small amid the poor & to the Prophets: by the grace of everlasting God & the good angels these have received the spirit of prophecy, by which they see distant causes & come to foresee future events, for nothing can come to pass without Him, whose power & goodness is so great to his creatures that even if He remains withdrawn into Himself, one & indivisible, nonetheless to each according to its proper shape & genius this prophetic heat & power visits us as do the rays of the sun whose influence works upon bodies both elementary & non-elementary.

  As for ourselves, mere humans, neither our natural knowledge nor the bent of our ingenuity can lead us to know anything about the dark secrets of God the Creator, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons &c.

  Although it is possible that even today there may appear & exist people to whom God the Creator has deigned to reveal, through imaginative impressions, some of the secrets of the future by recourse to judicial astrology, just as in the past a certain power & faculty of will were given by the gods, appearing like a flame of fire which, acting to inspire them, allowed others to judge of their human & divine inspiration.

  For those divine works which are totally absolute are accomplished by God: medial works, in the middle, by angels: the third kind, by evil spirits.

  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.

  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: for a Prophet, my son, is properly speaking someone who sees distant things with the natural knowledge possessed by all creatures.

  But it can happen that the Prophet, infused with the perfect light of prophecy, receives a manifest revelation of things both divine & human, which is normally impossible, given the huge span of future prediction.

  For the secrets of God are inscrutable, & effective virtue, which is ultimately contingent on the far reach of natural knowledge & whose most immediate source lies in free will, causes things to appear which, in & of themselves, cannot attract the knowledge either of human clairvoyance or any other occult power in this world below, precisely because of the fact that eternity contains within itself all of time.

  But precisely because eternity is indivisible, things can be known through the Herculean trances of epilepsy, through the movement of the heavenly stars.

  I am not saying, my son (lest you misunderstand me, given that knowledge of such matters cannot yet imprint itself upon your tender mind), that the very distant things of the future lie beyond the knowledge of any reasonable creature: on the contrary, the intellective soul can grasp things both present & distant if they are not too occult or too closed off: but the perfect knowledge of things cannot be acquired without divine inspiration, seeing as how all prophetic inspiration derives its prime moving principle from God the creator, then from good fortune & nature.

  It is thus that, any given thing being produced or not produced in a given fashion, the prophecy is in part fulfilled as predicted.

  For intellectual understanding cannot predict which way things of the future shall tend, unless it be through the voice heard at the hem by means of the slender flame.

  Moreover, my son, I beg you never to devote your mind to such fancies & vanities which desiccate the body, drive the soul to perdition, troubling the feeble faculty of judgment: to wit, the vanity of that more than execrable magic that was long ago condemned by the Holy Scriptures & the canons of the Church, with the exception of the judgment of judicial astrology, by means of which & thanks to the inspiration & divine revelation accorded by continuous nightly vigils & calculations, we have drawn up our prophecies in writing.

  And because this occult Philosophy is disallowed, I have never wanted to offer to view its heady persuasions, even if a number of volumes hidden for ages did come into my hands.

  But for fear of what might happen, after reading them I offered them up to Vulcan, & while the fire was devouring them, the flames that licked the air gave off an unaccustomed brightness, brighter than any natural flame, like the fulguration of a jet of fire at once illuminating the entire house as if it had suddenly burst into flames.

  For this reason, lest you one day be deceived by the pursuit of the perfect transmutation of silver or gold, or of those uncorruptible metals buried in the earth or hidden underwater, I reduced these books to ashes.

  But as concerns that prophetic judgment which is rendered perfect by divine inspiration, let me explain it to you: it is this judgment that enables you to have knowledge of future things, projecting into the distance the fabulous imaginings of things to come &, under supernatural inspiration, precisely locating the particularity of places, attuning the places & dates to their celestial figures thanks to a virtue, a power & a faculty divine possessed of occult properties, for which the three dimensions of time are comprehended within eternity & whose revolution includes things past, present & future: all things are naked & opened &c.

  Thus, my son, despite your tender mind, you can easily grasp that those things which are bound to happen can be foretold by recourse to the stars in the heavens at night (which are natural) & by the spirit of prophecy, not that I arrogate for myself 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.

  But sometimes surprised over the course of the week by prophetic inspiration & my lengthy calculations lending a pleasant scent to my nightly studies, I composed prophetic books each of which contained one hundred quatrains of astronomic predictions, which I intentionally cobbled together somewhat obscurely: these being perpetual prophecies which reach from now to the year 3797.

  Some might well raise their brows, seeing such a great extension of time, yet these things, my son, shall take place & shall be known within our sublunar realm: which is to say universally & throughout the earth.

  And if you live until the age of your natural manhood, you shall see these future events take place even in the specific skies of your own native clime.

  For the only eternal God is He who alone knows the eternity of the light that proceeds from Him, & I frankly maintain that to those to whom He has chosen to reveal, in their long & melancholy inspiration, the immensity of His grandeur (which is without measure & incomprehensible), by means of this occult thing which is the manifestation of the divine, He infuses one of the two principal things which shape the understanding of the inspired Prophet, clarifying the supernatural light to the person who makes predictions on the basis of astrology & who prophesies by inspired revelation, which inspiration provides a definite participation in the eternity of God, allowing the prophet to come to judge what his divine guiding spirit has revealed to him through God the Creator & through natural instigation: which is to say, what he predicts is true & of celestial origin: & this light & slender flame is efficacious & most sublime, no less than the natural brightness or natural light that bestows certainty upon philosophers who, reasoning forth from the principles of the first cause, manage to penetrate into the deepest depths of the loftiest truth.

  But, my son, lest I digress into matters too deep for the future capacity of your mind, & because I feel that the world of letters shall undergo such a massive & incomparable collapse, I find that so many deluges & major floods shall befall the world before
the universal conflagration that there shall remain scarcely any land that is not covered by water, & that this shall go on for such a long time that, were it not for the surviving oenographies & topographies, all would be completely lost: likewise, before & after these inundations, in many lands the rains shall be so slight & so much fire & so many white-hot stones shall fall from the sky that nothing shall remain that has not been consumed: & all this shall come to pass, in short, before the final conflagration.

  But now that the planet Mars is completing its cycle & is at the end of its latest period, it shall recommence again: but with some of the planets grouped in Aquarius for several years, others in Cancer for longer & continuous periods.

  And now that we are governed by the Moon, under eternal God’s omnipotent sway, before it has completed its full circuit, the Sun shall reign & then Saturn.

  For according to the celestial signs, the reign of Saturn shall return, the whole thing having been calculated, the world is approaching a revolution that breaks wholly with the past :

  & from the present day on which I am writing this until before one hundred seventy-seven years, three months & eleven days, the world shall be so diminished by plagues, by extended famines & wars & even more by floods, between this moment & the time I have just indicated, before & after this repeatedly, the world shall be so diminished that no one shall be found willing to work the fields, which shall remain fallow for as long a time as they were subjected to the plow :

  & all this, by interpreting what is seen in the stars on high : even though we be in the seventh millennium which brings everything to a close, we are approaching the eighth, the seat of the firmament of the eighth sphere, at the altitude where great God most eternal shall accomplish the revolution by which the signs of the zodiac shall return to their movements & to that higher movement which renders our earth stable & firm & which shall not vary from age to age: except that all this come to pass as His will be done, but not otherwise.

  Whereas by ambiguous opinions exceeding all natural reasonings by Mohammedan dreamings, it shall come to pass that on several occasions God the creator, through the ministry of his messengers of fire, should propose to our exterior senses (& even to our eyes), in the form of this expediting flame, the causes of our predictions of the future, causes that are the signs of those future happenings which are bound to occur to persons engaged in prognostication.

  For the prediction that is shaped by outer light infallibly ends up contriving with & depending on inner light, even though in truth that part which seems to see through the eye of understanding does so only by inhibiting the imaginative faculty: the reason for this is only too obvious, for everything is predicted through the afflatus of God & through the angelic spirit breathed into the man who prophesies, illumining him, stirring his fantasy with various nocturnal visions, to the same extent that, during the certainty of day, he prophesies on the basis of astronomy, in conjunction with that most holy prediction of the future, which moreover derives from nothing less than the exercise of free will.

  Now come listen, my son, as I divine by my calculus of revolutions, in accord with the inspiration that has been revealed to me, how the sword of death now threatens to lay us low by plague, by a war more horrible than seen in three generations, & famine, a sword that shall swoop down on earth & shall often return, for the stars are in harmony with the revolution, & moreover our Lord has said: Then will I visit their transgression with the rod, & their iniquity with stripes, for the mercy of our Lord shall not have had the time to work its effect, my son, before most of my prophecies shall be fulfilled & accomplished in due revolution.

  Then at several points during these ominous storms, the Lord shall say I will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy them & therefore will I also diminish thee; neither shall mine eye spare, neither will I have any pity, & many other things shall occur through the floods & continual rains, as I have set out more clearly in writing in my other prophecies which are composed throughout in prose, in which I stipulated the places, the times, & the preordained ends which those who come after us will be able to see, realizing how these events infallibly occurred just as we have noted them down in other prophecies, speaking more clearly: even though their meaning shall be hidden in a cloud: but when ignorance is cast aside, the thing will become clearer.

  To bring this to a close, my son, accept this gift from your father M. Nostradamus, in the hope that one day he might explain to you each of the prophecies included here. Begging immortal God that He might grant you a long life in lovely & prosperous happiness. From Salon, this first of March, 1555.

  CENTURY I

  1.1

  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.

  1.2

  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.

  1.3

  When whirlwind turns the litter upside down,

  And faces are covered over by cloaks :

  The republic shall be vexed by new folk,

  The whites & reds judging the wrong way round.

  1.4

  In the world one monarch shall be proclaimed

  Who shall have little peace & little reign :

  Then shall the fisher’s barque now lose its way,

  Be steered toward ever greater disarray.

  1.5

  They’ll be dispatched without much resistance

  And greatly harried through the countryside :

  Town & city shall fight with more persistence :

  At Carcas., Narbonne their courage be tried.

  1.6

  The eye of Ravenna shall be deposed

  When his wings finally fall at his feet :

  The two of Brescia having thus proposed,

  The Gauls shall sack Turin & Vercelli.

  1.7

  Arrived late, execution taken place,

  Wind against them, letters seized en route :

  The conspirators, fourteen of a sect :

  By the Redhead their schemes shall be approved.

  1.8

  How often shall you be taken, City

  Of the Sun, change laws barbaric & vain :

  Your doom draws nigh. Sucked ever more dry,

  Adria the great reopens your veins.

  1.9

  The Punic heart shall emerge from the East

  To vex Adria & Romulus’s heirs

  Accompanied by the Libyan fleet :

  Malta shall tremble & nearby isles lie bare.

  1.10

  Serpent is placed into the iron cage

  Where the king’s seven children now do pine :

  From this hellhole the forebears shall emerge,

  Die, having seen the death throes of their line.

  1.11

  The motion of the senses, hearts, feet, hands,

  Naples, Leon, Sicily shall unite :

  Sword, fire, flood : into wells noble Romans

  Plunged, killed, dead because of a feeble mind.

  1.12

  It shall soon be said that this false frail brute

  Shall be swiftly lifted from low to high :

  Then soon turn disloyal & swing in mood,

  He who shall have seized Verona’s reins.

  1.13

  In rage & intestine hate the exiles

  Shall hatch a most bold plot against the king :

  Secretly send enemies through tunnels,

  Among allies of old foment sedition.

  1.14

  The songs & chants & prayers of the enslaved

  Kept captive in prisons by princes & lords :

  In the future these shall all be rated

  Divine supplications by headless dolts.

  1.15 />
  Mars threatens us with his power of war,

  Seventy times shall he cause blood to flow :

  Bringing the Church to new heights & new lows,

  Plus those who’d rather not be in the know.

  1.16

  Toward Sagittarius, Scythe joined to Tin,

  And at the APOGEE of ascension :

  Plague, famine, death at military hands,

  Thus does the age approach renovation.

  1.17

  For forty years the rainbow shall not shine,

  For forty years be seen every day :

  The parchèd earth waxing ever more dry,

  And great flooding should it show in the sky.

  1.18

  The quarrelsome negligence of the Gauls

  Shall open a passage to Mohammed :

  The Sienese land & sea soaked in blood,

  The Phocaean port covered with sails & ships.

  1.19

  When the altar is encircled by snakes,

  Trojan blood by the Spaniards shall be vexed :

  By them a great number shall meet their fates :

  The chief fleeing, hidden among marsh reeds.

  1.20

  Tours, Orléans, Blois, Angers, Reims, & Nantes,

  Cities beset by all too sudden change :

  Tents shall be pitched by those of foreign tongues,

  Sandy rivers, land & sea all aquake.