Nostradamus

French astrologer, physician, and writer

• Born: December 14, 1503
• Birthplace: Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France
• Died: July 1 or 2, 1566
• Place of death: Salon-de-Provence, France

A prominent physician and political adviser, Nostradamus achieved widest fame with collections of veiled prophecies in poetical form.

Early Life

Nostradamus (nohs-truh-dah-muhs) was born Michel Notredame in southern France. Although he would later claim that his father and grandfather were physicians, it appears more likely that they were prosperous grain merchants. What is certain is that the family had converted from Judaism to Christianity and dropped its original name in order to remain in Catholic France.

The young Michel received his earliest education from his grandfathers, who found him a promising student. He was able to continue his studies at two nearby cities renowned for their intellectual and cultural life, Avignon and Montpellier. Michel began secondary school at the former in 1517, where the prescribed course of study included grammar, rhetoric, logic, music, mathematics, and astronomy (which encompassed astrology as well). At the time, Avignon was under direct control of the Catholic Church; there, as in all seats of learning, classes were taught in Latin.

Michel went on to study medicine at the University of Montpellier in 1522, where once again astrology played a role alongside such subjects as anatomy and surgery. Tradition has it that he concentrated on pharmacology and various methods of treating the plague. When he graduated in 1525 at the age of twenty-two, he followed the custom of signaling his accomplishment by Latinizing his last name to Nostradamus, thus adopting the form by which he is best known today.

Life’s Work

Nostradamus was now fully qualified to practice medicine and did so for several years, but he undertook further study and teaching at the University of Montpellier, from which he received an advanced medical degree. He eventually apprenticed himself to eminent physician and scholar Jules-César Scaliger of Agen in 1532. Soon afterward, he married, and the couple had two children.

Nostradamus’s family, however, died of the plague in 1537 while he was traveling to treat other victims. He subsequently quarreled with the notoriously irascible Scaliger and was accused of making heretical remarks, events that were to lead to his quitting Agen. After ten more years of travel, practice, and teaching in France and Italy, Nostradamus met and married Anna Ponce Gemelle of Salon de Provence, a town not far from his birthplace. The couple eventually had six children.

Nostradamus began compiling astrological almanacs popular and highly salable publications in 1550. He followed with two collections of medical and cosmetic formulas in 1552, Traicté des fardemens and Vray et parfaict embellissement de la face. These were combined in 1555 as Excellent et moult utile Opuscule à touts necessaire qui desirent auoir cognoissance de plusiers exquises Receptes (excellent and very useful treatise necessary for all those who desire to have knowledge of several exquisite recipes). Nostradamus also published Orus Apollo, fils de Osiris, roi de Ægipte niliacque (the book of Orus Apollo, son of Osiris, king of Egypt), a collection of maxims of dubious origin. More important was his translation from Galen, the classical Greek physician, Paraphrase de C. Galen sur l’exortation de Menodote, in 1557. This translation was criticized as inaccurate, although Nostradamus may have been working from an imperfect manuscript.

Nostradamus’s most famous works, however, were his Centuries , originally published in French as Les Prophéties de M. Michel Nostradamus, a series of ambiguously worded prophecies. Unlike his almanacs, which forecast events one year at a time, these new works predicted events to the year 3797, although in no particular order. The first three series appeared in 1555; by 1558, seven more had been published, although their exact dates are not certain. Referred to as “centuries” because each ostensibly included one hundred verses, their total actually comes to somewhat less than one thousand. A complete collection seems to have been published in 1558, but no copies of this edition are known to survive.

Cast in quatrains (stanzas of four lines), the Centuries are notoriously obscure. They mix local allusions, references to France’s unsettled political situation, and generalized predictions of disasters and calamities as cynics have noted, always a safe bet. Although claims have been made for Nostradamus’s skills as a poet, his work is oddly punctuated and his grammar and syntax wayward. It has never been clearly established what Nostradamus intended to express in these writings, nor whether profit was his motive in publishing them.

Public reaction to the Centuries varied, with the wide range of responses illustrating the intellectual and social ferment of the times. Wealthier readers found the verses’ daunting obscurity both a compliment and a challenge to their erudition. The masses, on the other hand, seem to have disliked and distrusted Nostradamus, partly because of his growing wealth and partly because of his presumed league with supernatural powers. Two other groups openly ridiculed him: those who dismissed astrology as nonsense and, ironically enough, astrologers themselves, who protested that the astrological content of the Centuries was defective. Despite or, more likely, because of such opposition, Nostradamus’s works sold well and were routinely reprinted and pirated.

In any case, Nostradamus’s fame spread quickly, and he soon found an important and suitably superstitious reader in the French court. So impressed was Catherine de Médicis , the queen of France, that she invited Nostradamus to Paris. He subsequently visited the city in mid-1556 (a trip of a month in those days) and was asked by the queen to cast the horoscopes of her sons. He seems to have remarked in guarded terms that her sons would be kings a prediction both gratifying and not, after all, unlikely and returned to Salon more famous still. When the French court visited southern France nearly a decade later, they made a point of visiting Nostradamus and bestowing official honors on him.

Throughout the latter part of his life, Nostradamus seems to have increased his income by moneylending, which in at least one instance had long-lasting consequences. Approached by an entrepreneur anxious to link the Rhône and Durance Rivers with a canal and thus irrigate the surrounding region, Nostradamus helped finance the project, which was completed in 1559.

Nostradamus has routinely been portrayed as both an astrologer and an orthodox Catholic, roles not regarded as necessarily contradictory during his lifetime. A cache of letters discovered by scholar Jean Dupèbe has revealed, though, that Nostradamus’s sympathies were Protestant which could easily have led to his execution in passionately Catholic France had the letters fallen into the wrong hands.

Nostradamus was described in his prime by an apprentice as being slightly shorter and stockier than average, heavily bearded, energetic, and short-tempered. The same source praised his quick intelligence, keen memory, and outstanding generosity, although the ascription of such qualities may strike modern readers as being somewhat generalized and formulaic. He is traditionally pictured wearing the four-cornered cap typical of a medical doctor of his time.

Nostradamus suffered from arthritis, gout, and dropsy toward the end of his life and by 1566 was confined to his house, where he died in early July. One of his predictions had suggested that his body would be found near his bed and bench. Nostradamus had placed a bench in such a way as to help himself into bed, and he was indeed found sprawled near or on it after death another example of a prophecy both tantalizingly suggestive and yet far from unlikely.

Significance

Nostradamus lived during a period in Western civilization torn between two divergent systems of thought. One was the occult, which strove to interpret the world supernaturally and which was even then falling out of favor. The other was the scientific, which had increasingly but never totally predominated.

It was a time of enormous upheaval. France’s political situation was chaotic, and Protestantism vied with Catholicism for supremacy throughout Europe. The plague ravaged southwestern Europe several times during Nostradamus’s lifetime, and although he seems to have established a reputation as an effective plague doctor, he lost his own family to the dreadful disease. Thus his preoccupation as expressed throughout the Centuries with disaster of all kinds is easy to understand and may have been fueled by fears for his own safety as a Protestant sympathizer.

Neither is it difficult to understand the keen interest that subsequent generations have taken in Nostradamus. Although Europe has experienced periods of stability since his day, the desire to know the future seems to be a constant. Scholars have demonstrated that Nostradamus filled his many prophecies with topical and contemporary references a great many of them lost to modern readers but the poet’s allusive style lends his work mystery and ambiguity. Thanks to these characteristics, later readers have discovered “references” to such leaders and tyrants as Napoleon and Adolf Hitler and have been able to make persuasive arguments for their discoveries. The mirror that Nostradamus holds up to his readers is so clouded, it seems, that almost anything for which one looks may be found there.

Bibliography

Dumézil, Georges. The Riddle of Nostradamus: A Critical Dialogue. Translated by Betty Wing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. A serious academic study of Nostradamus written in dialogue form. Seeks to understand the function of riddles in prophecy and society. Asks if it is possible that Nostradamus could have predicted the future without understanding it. Includes bibliographic references.

Gould, Rupert T. “Nostradamus.” In Oddities: A Book of Unexplained Facts. 3d ed. New York: Bell, 1965. A noted but skeptical student of anomalies, Gould compares Nostradamus with other “prophets” and astrologers. He concludes that Nostradamus produced puzzlingly accurate prophecies in a few cases.

Laver, James. Nostradamus: Or, The Future Foretold. London: Collins, 1942. Reprint. Maidstone, Kent, England: George Mann, 1973. An influential historian of art and fashion, Laver summarizes Nostradamus’s life and devotes most of his attention to the prophecies, which he argues are valid.

Leoni, Edgar. Nostradamus: Life and Literature. New York: Exposition Press, 1961. Still the most thorough study of the Centuries to have appeared in English. Leoni’s book contains complete texts and translations of the Centuries and a survey of pertinent literature. Reprinted as Nostradamus and His Prophecies in 1982.

LeVert, Liberté E. The Prophecies and Enigmas of Nostradamus. Glen Rock, N.J.: Firebell Books, 1979. Written under a pseudonym by acknowledged speculative fiction expert Everett Bleiler. Bleiler argues that Nostradamus was a fascinating personality and a skillful, though not great, poet, and that the Centuries repay careful study for these reasons alone. Objective and evenhanded.

Randi, James. The Mask of Nostradamus: The Prophecies of the World’s Most Famous Seer. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993. Intensely skeptical and at times sarcastic, Randi surveys Nostradamus’s life, examines the early editions of his works, analyzes the mind-set of those he calls the “Nostradamians,” and places the Centuries within a framework of similar prophecies.

Shumaker, Wayne. The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Shumaker outlines five occult systems of thought and practice common to the Renaissance, including astrology. The works of Shumaker and Lynn Thorndike are the best sources for locating Nostradamus and his writings within the intellectual context of his time. Good bibliography.

Thorndike, Lynn. A History of Magic and Experimental Science. New York: Macmillan; Columbia University Press, 1923-1958. Thorndike’s vast survey complements Shumaker’s narrower study. Especially pertinent are Volumes 5 and 6 (The Sixteenth Century) and Volumes 7 and 8 (The Seventeenth Century), all of which discuss Nostradamus. Extensive bibliographical references.

Ward, Charles A. Oracles of Nostradamus. New York: C. Scribner & Welford, 1891. Reprint. New York: Dorsett Press, 1986. Ward opens with a biography of Nostradamus drawn from the first translator of the writer into English. Arguing that Nostradamus foresaw the future, he explicates the prophecies that he believes relate to subsequent events. A good example of the involved literature produced by believers in Nostradamus’s occult powers.

Wilson, Colin. “The World of the Kabbalists.” In The Occult: A History. New York: Random House, 1971. This chapter from a standard work on the subject compares Nostradamus with two roughly contemporary figures in the occult tradition, Cornelius Agrippa and Paracelsus.

Wilson, Damon. The Mammoth Book of Nostradamus and Other Prophets. Introduction by Colin Wilson. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1999. Study of prophets and oracles through the ages, from the Delphic Oracle through the twentieth century. Places Nostradamus in the context of other possible prophets and seers, including fellow sixteenth century occult figure Mother Shipton. Includes index.

Wilson, Ian. Nostradamus: The Man Behind the Prophecies. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002. Straight biography of Nostradamus, attempting to bracket off the question of whether he was really a prophet and instead produce a fully realized profile. Includes illustrations, bibliographic references, and index.