Happy Birthday Beard of the Day

Nostradamus

Nostradamus, the author of the famous Centuries, was an unusual man for his time. He was a practicing physician, astronomer and astrologer who lived in the mid 16th century (1503¬1566) who turned his hand to prophecy later in life. As a physician he treated those suffering from the Bubonic plague and then in a twisted irony lost the members of his family to the disease. He was a devout student of pagan methods of divination at night who wore the mask of a devout Catholic during the day to avoid persecution from the Spanish Inquisition. In the end he predicted his own death, and some say also cursed the marauders from the French Revolution that he foresaw would desecrate his own burial tomb.

Nostradamus wrote messages from the past to the future in the form of short poems consisting of four lines each called Quatrains. In his lifetime Nostradamus completed a total of 942 quatrains, which he organized into groups of 100 quatrains called Centuries. However one century only has 46 quatrains.

His followers say he predicted the French Revolution, the birth and rise to power of Hitler, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He also predicted other events, such as the Great Fire of London (1666) and the exile of Napoleon to Alba. You can find out more information about these predictions in the Fulfilled Prophecies section of this book.

His cryptic missives about the future seem almost exponential in their ability to reveal about current event. Recently the writings of Nostradamus have been shown to reveal the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger to the destruction, the death of Lady Diana and the destruction of the Twin Towers on 9/11/01. The fact that so many of his grimmest predictions in the past have indeed come true has given him the nickname "The Prophet of Doom".

After he resigned from treating the victims of the bubonic plague and settled down in a psychic studio in Salon, France, this self-styled soothsayer was in the habit of writing long letters to world leaders warning them of future events, that is until the Vatican decided that magicians were evil. The fact is that Nostradamus did indeed qualify as a magician according to the definitions of those days, which was anyone who produced visions and predictions through scrying. Scrying was considered to be a form of conjuring spirits and Nostradamus taught himself this skill by reading ancient texts about Egyptian and Alexandrian magic.

Unfortunately this great prophet also lived during the time of the Spanish inquisition. Conjuring spirits (or channeling as we call it today) was a crime punishable by death, which meant that he was force to scramble up the meaning and the order of his quatrains so that he could not be tried and executed for being a soothsayer. Even though his quatrains are divided up into books called Centuries they do not chronologically represent the timeline of any centuries. Scrambling the quatrains so that they did not follow a time line was one of the tricks that Nostradamus used to disguise his work as the ramblings of a mad poet. This explains why when you read the quatrains, he seems to be referring to incidents from all of the centuries at the same time.

The rhymed quatrains of Nostradamus were written mainly in French with a bit of Italian, Greek, and Latin thrown in to throw the Spanish Inquisition off if they should ever discover his manuscripts. This is because the Spanish Inquisition had been dealing with metaphysical literature by holding public burnings in the public squares.

To disguise his own metaphysical manuscripts also used words from the “Languedoc” or Provencal dialect of southern France and swaps words around so that the quatrains don't make sense. That is why so many of his prophecies are left wide open to interpretation and also great debate, particularly among English speaking scholars who have a habit of interpreting the quatrains with the French phrases that suit them best. In this book we are using the public domain verses of Charles Ward, an English scholar who was one of the first to translate the quatrains from the original Latin, French and other dialects and leave them as naked as possible.

The result of all of Nostradamus secret magical studies, pagan rituals, coding and conjuring is the Ten Centuries. Each Century is one of the most cryptic longest and most poetic letters ever written to citizens of the future. The quatrains consist of a mystic vision that was capable of scanning events that would take place over thousands of years. The quatrains are in essence missives from a prophet who was directly warning both you and me of the apocalypse to come.