the prophetic reputation of Nostradamus. The very ordinary manner in
which he conformed to the rules and ritual of the Roman Catholic Church,
would lead no one to infer that he enjoyed any extraordinary favour
from the Almighty; his proficiency in judicial astrology would furnish
matter of prejudice against him in the minds of many learned men; the
very devout suspected him of necromancy, and familiarity with the Angel
of Darkness; finally, the inherent obscurity of his style, has been
rendered still more difficult by the interminable faults introduced by
the copyists and the carelessness of printers. Now, it is admitted, he
says, and by its ablest defenders, that judicial astrology cannot enable
its professor to foretell such particularities as proper names and other
circumstances that hang upon the freewill of men; and, as our author does
foretell such things as these, he must have had recourse to the black
art to obtain his results. Accordingly Lord Florimond de Raimond, in his
“Birth of Heresies,” makes this charge against him; also Lord Spond, in
the third volume of his “Annals,” in 1566, devised this epitaph for him.
“Mortuus est hoc anno nugax ille toto orbe famosus _Michel Nostradamus_,
qui se præscium et presagum eventuum futurorum per astrorum influxum
venditavit, sub cujus deinceps nomine quivis homines ingeniosi suas hujus
modi cogitationes protendere consueverent, in quem valde apposite lusit
qui dixit: _Nostra damus_ cum falsa damus,” etc.[18]
Provoked thus, Garencières endeavours to prove Nostradamus to have been
enlightened by the Holy Spirit. We shall not follow him in this matter
any further than to avail ourselves of the facts we may light upon in the
course of his arguments, and to record a few of the eulogies upon him
that Garencières gathers from eminent authors in times past. To these we
may add some authorities who in modern times have named him; but these
mostly sum up his forecastings as springing from venality, vanity, and
imposture.
Of proper names, that Nostradamus has anticipated, the list is
considerable. He names the Lord of Monluc; Captain Charry; Lord de la
Mole, Admiral of the Galleys to Henri II.; Entragues, beheaded by Louis
XIII.; Clarepegne, the headsman; Sinan, the Pasha who destroyed Hungary;
Clément, who murdered Henri III.; the Attorney David and Captain Ampus;
Rousseau, the Mayor of Puy; Louis, Prince of Condé; Sixtus V., calling
him son of Hamont; Gabrielle d’Estrée; Lord Mutonis; Anthony de Sourdis,
Lord Chancellor of France; the Queen Louise; Antony of Portugal. Since
Garencières’ time other names have been identified: Narbon, the Minister
of War; Saulce; Lethuille, for the Tuilleries; Lonole, for Old Noll,
or Cromwell; Montmorency; Le Grand Chiren, anagram of Henri le Grand;
Mendosus, anagram of Vendosme; Norlaris, anagram for Lorrains; Robin,
anagram of Biron; Rapis, anagram for Paris; Esleu Cap, for Capet, or
Louis XVI.; Varennes, the place where Louis was arrested; the play
upon _bour_ and _bon_, for Bourbon (Cent. vii. 44); Ergaste, anagram
of Estrange for Marie Antoinette the Austrian; Mont Gaulfier, for
Montgolfier, the æronaut; the island of Elba, mentioned as Æthalia, the
ancient name of Elba; Sainct Memire, anagram for Sainct Meri; and the
play on “dort leans” for Louis Philippe. This is a goodly list of names
to guess at haphazard. Such chance as could so result would rival any
prophecy in the miraculous nature of its elements.
Again, as regards the curious things he mentions, one might make out a
long list. The date of the Fire of London. The five hundred Marseillais
that led the attack upon the Tuilleries. The naming of the very year
1792 for the French Revolution; the 22nd of September in that year being
the date from which the Republicans began to reckon anew their era. Many
more might so easily be gathered as to even weary the reader with their
enumeration.
He mentions the birth of persons that were born after his death. Now,
judicial astrology could give no help in such cases, since to commence
casting a nativity presupposes birth. In his epistle to his son César
we shall see what he says of himself and the gifts he possessed; but
even there he was obliged to be somewhat obscure, to protect himself
from the ridicule of the world on the one side, and from the severities
of the Church on the other. He tells his son to eschew the study of the
future astrologically, to avoid magic, as prohibited by the Church and
Scripture, and that he himself had burnt some books that taught the art
of prophesying, although it is pretty evident that he had first read them
through very carefully himself. He relates that a mighty flame burst
forth from them to the danger of his house, and this he interpreted
to be the consequence of their falsity. But yet he seems to have gone
through a good many of the magical forms when he was about to devote the
night to prophetical studies. He holds that inspired Revelation is “_a
participation of the Eternal Divinity_,” though he scarcely lays claim to
being a prophet in this sense of the word; in fact, he denies himself to
be such a prophet. But, failing to claim inspiration, and denouncing the
practice of astrology and the pursuit of magic, one is left somewhat in
the dark as to what he really did profess to be the source of fatidical
utterance possessed by him. That he had the gift in a marvellous potency
this book will show; and that he openly claimed to possess it his whole
life proves. It is, in fact, from this I should desire to establish that
at least he was no impostor, for he only told others what he began by
implicitly believing himself.
As to his obscurity, he himself admits it as a thing to be cultivated
both in the times he lived in and in those that were to follow. No
one can truthfully deny that obscurity and prophecy seem to be almost
interchangeable and convertible terms. The prophecies in Scripture are
of such ambiguity that Whitby was commended by many for concluding his
Commentary on the Bible with the General Epistle of Jude, without a word
bestowed upon the Revelations of St. John. There are those who will hold
that prophecies are useless, as they cannot generally be understood until
they have been fulfilled. It is obvious that many prophecies are of
such a nature as that, if they were clearly understood previous to the
event, they would prevent their own fulfilment, and so cease to have been
prophecies. What they foretold would never have occurred. The philosophy
of history is supposed to show that Providence shapes the course of
human events, how much soever humanity may seem at every instant to be
following out its own collective will. This theory is most in favour
amongst erudite modern thinkers, who incline very little towards
acquiescence in the old Church doctrine of Predestination. Yet inspired
prophecy is a collateral proof of the same principle as that which
underlies the philosophy of history. Both of them depend on the finger of
God shaping—first shaping chaos into things, and then things into their
continuous courses. The shaping is not needed more at the first creation
than it is at every successive stage, whether for preservation or for
progression. Again, the interest of uninspired prophecy is for mortal man
not much less vivid; for, if we have interpreted Nostradamus rightly, we
find in him a man living three hundred years ago talking intelligibly, if
not clearly, of things that are happening to-day. If there be a power in
human nature,—latent in the generality, but in a few alert and quick,—to
link far centuries together in anticipatory thought, I take it to be
quite clear, that that one fact must revolutionize the whole scheme of
human philosophy as accepted now, whether it relates to life, to death,
or to futurity. The fatidical capacity implies a spirit of immortality in
man. With that once established, we re-enter upon the domain of faith;
we recognize that the earth is drossy and the body sin; we re-create the
soul, and laugh at the fool (or the philosopher) who doubts, denies,
and ridicules it. It gives new ground to teach the immortality of man;
it lifts us above the dirt-doctrine of gold; it renders poetry once
again possible to lips hallowed with Apollo’s fire; it brings back a
possibility of worship upon earth, and, with that, prayer, praise, and
peace. Bates, the silver-tongued, says well, that for man “it is as
natural to pray as to breathe.”
Garencières is of opinion that the writings of our prophet were for a
century allowed to “be in darkness,” but we have seen that in his own
day Nostradamus attracted the notice of the learned, of the nobility,
and of the king himself. Garencières says that the first book they gave
_him_ at school after the primer was “The Centuries,” so it was not
neglected then; and M. le Pelletier remarks that Nostradamus’s fame has
now been before the world for three hundred years, with an always growing
reception. Of course, as time wanes, and as fresh quatrains become
interpreted after accomplishment, the series must shine with an ever
augmenting brilliancy and splendour. The kings of France have never been
quite indifferent to the Oracles, or at least to such of them as could
be shown to refer to them individually. It is reported of Charles Edward
Stuart, the Pretender, that he to the last conned[19] over the volume,
anxiously hoping to find in it some stanza promising to his royal line
restoration to the throne of England, but in vain (Chambers’ “Book of
Days,” ii. 13).
In modern times prophecy is derided, and our seer, obscurely hinting
his strange forecasts, is voted incoherent, rhapsodial, or an impostor.
Almost every one has heard his name mentioned, but that is all. Few who
come across his work accidentally on a bookshelf can make head or tail
of his Provençal and half obsolete terms. Without special study you
cannot understand him; and to study a work that lies under a general
ban of imposture, in a time when only lucrative study is pursued, is
a thing not to be thought of by a _littérateur_ of any intelligence.
Consequently in England it is a name, floating far and wide it may be,
that nevertheless remains but a name and nothing more. I hope, however,
when this book comes to be read by the competent few, it will be seen
that there exists far more than a mere name to be dealt with here;
that in Nostradamus we have the greatest fatidical seer, not divinely
accredited, that the world has ever beheld; that if accepted as being
endowed with a rare and curious foresight,—after the severest inquiry
into what he has done has been instituted by grammarians, historians,
and philosophic critics,—it will next become necessary to try to look
into the causes, and so ascertain how he operated. If we cannot succeed
in that, and yet cannot deny his work, we must add the faculty, so
remarkably developed in him, to the perceptive powers of the human race,
as a sixth sense,—generally latent but sometimes developed,—the faculty
of anticipating the future. Science, so called, must enlarge its narrow
categories, and admit, though never so grudgingly, that a new faculty of
vast import must henceforth be accredited to humanity; a faculty which
the superstitious and the profoundly religious alike have immemorially
admitted, but which philosophers, as such, have as persistently ignored,
denied, or even ridiculed. It has often been said by troubled thinkers,
with a pretentious flourish of baffled profundity, that “true philosophy
begins in doubt.” I would whisper it down the wind, but not in Gath,
that for the most part there it also ends. Anatomy cuts up a dead man to
find life. Analysis reduces final investigation to a _caput mortuum_.
Philosophy begins in doubt, and travels a wide circle to close in doubt
again. Perhaps, after all, the best basis might be faith. Beginning with
faith, haply a man might find God accompanying investigation with him
step by step through life, even in this world and its miraculous garden,
till the hour come for him to step, through the six-foot wicket, into the
Paradise of that glorious world that is adjacent to us but not seen,
where sighs are not heaved, and whose glories are incorruptible.
When we come to enumerate some few of the opinions that have been
expressed on the writings and character of Nostradamus, it will be seen
that a vast number of them condemn him for charlatanry and imposture,
especially as we approach our own day. For now what is denominated
science accepts nothing for true but what is deducible from the reason;
it takes for granted that nothing can be known respecting the future,
beyond what cultivated prudence can gather from a politic acquaintance
with the past, coupled perhaps with a sagacious estimate of the
principles now at work, and the fruit they are likely to engender. In
fact, what the knowledge of a wise man can enable him to foresee, covers
for such theorists the whole extent and province of all prophecy possible
to man,—the sagacity of Mazarin, which detected the revolutionary element
in the Cardinal de Retz whilst still a youth; or the prediction of Bishop
Butler, in 1741, that the _levelling spirit_ then visible, under the
direction of principles that were atheistic, threatened dangers that
might menace Europe. But to call this prophecy is to be ignorant of what
the word prophecy means. To state it thus, or so to limit it, is to deny
the existence of the prophetic faculty altogether. A direct denial of
the thing is better than a sceptical definition of it. Scepticism, then,
in our day, not believing there can be such a thing as a true presage,
concludes that Mother Shipton and Nostradamus stand on precisely the same
footing. They read a quatrain of Nostradamus, only understand one line
out of four, and say that, although that one may be intelligible, the
Sphinx itself could make nothing of the others, and that out of a number
of such verses it would be marvellous if something curious were not
occasionally let fall. The next inference is that the author set up for a
gift that he did not possess, and soon found the imposture was far more
lucrative than the dull routine of medical practice, as in those times
the superstition of the public was unlimited. The ignorance of the Middle
Ages is pointedly contrasted for us now with the wisdom and knowledge of
our own day. What, prejudice apart, does this mean, if briefly summed
up in an aphorism? Only this: that the wisdom of to-day gives us the
Nihilist of _no faith_, in place of the Astrologer of _too much_.
We ought to remember in all this that our author had reached the mature
age of fifty-two before he printed one word of the work that we are
spending time over. He tells us that for generations the family of
Nostradamus had inherited and transmitted some share of the prophetic
gift (Garencières’ Preface, p. 16), that it came to him as a natural
genius; in which it seems that his sons partially shared. He had
cultivated it long for his private pleasure, and the request in which his
almanacs stood seems to have first led him to think he might more largely
utilize the faculty. He never appears to have made any large sum of money
through it. He supported himself and brought up his family by steady work
in his professional calling. On the very brink of publicity, anticipating
malign influences, he still hesitated to take the final plunge; and,
when he did take it, he was in his fifty-third year. Men seldom pass
though life performing all its duties with credit and decorum, earn
a competency, and at fifty-two enter upon a career of contemptible
imposture. No; this is not according to human nature. We must acquit him
of imposture.
Michel Nostradamus was one of the most learned men of his day, the friend
of Jules César Scaliger. He knew many modern languages, and the Hebrew,
Greek, and Latin. He had followed medicine from the age of twenty-two,
took his Doctor’s degree at twenty-six, filled a professorial chair at
Montpellier, and late in life devoted himself to judicial astrology;
in which, and in an intuitive forecast beyond what that can bestow,
he has distanced by far all other competitors in the same line. Let a
reader thoroughly acquaint himself with all that is here set before him
as to Charles I. in England, and its bloody re-enactment in the French
Revolution, letting all the rest stand aside; and, if he can rise from
the perusal, feeling that there is any kind of imposture discoverable
throughout those strange and wonderful revelations, then he himself
possesses so miraculous a form of judgment, as to leave me without a word
further to advance upon the subject.
M. le Pelletier conceives that the _Commun Advénement_, or _l’avénement
au règne des gens du commun_, which I have rendered “The Vulgar Advent,”
extending from the death of Louis XVI. to the reign of Antichrist,
is the grand object of Nostradamus. It is to paint this lurid epopee
that he devotes three-quarters at least of his quatrains, according
to le Pelletier. Myself, I think this proportion to be overstated.
But our prophet returns to it again and again, elaborates the most
minute details, and concentres upon it as in a focus the brightest
rays of his mystical genius. Some think that Catharine de Medici was
largely influenced in her firm and far-seeing policy by the counsels of
Nostradamus, whom she visited expressly at Salon de Craux, in 1564, with
her son, Charles IX. This may have been so, but it is a great question
whether Nostradamus, for all his visions, curiously as they realize
themselves in time, could advise the queen or anybody else at all better
than any other wise man of elaborate culture could. His visions would
come to him as verses to a great poet, and when written down and the
afflatus fled, he would drop back to the ordinary condition of humanity.
He would drop back to the level of reason and the discourse of science,
with nothing to specially distinguish him from other men well placed to
learn such wisdom and knowledge as this world has to bestow upon them.
To expect more of him is to expect with the commonalty that if you met
Milton in Bread Street he would address you in blank verse, and strain
“Good morning” into metre. Great men cut very plain figures in common
broadcloth. It is the impostor who is magisterial, and puts on the airs
of a Cagliostro.
Nostradamus is sometimes a pillar of fire, but oftener is he a pillar of
cloud. He is a past master in words, and depicts events with a terseness
that almost baffles parallel; but still his employment of these same
words is more practical than artistic, for he never rises to poetry. As
an accepted visionary he is perhaps less swayed by the imagination than
any man of at all kindred type that one can mention. With him words are
as often used to veil as to unfold his meaning. His contempt for simple
persons, the ignorant, is very broadly marked. Men of knowledge are to
constitute his audience; the heaven of prophecy is in his opinion a
region unfit for children. He, clean contrary to the example set forth
in St. Mark (x. 14), will suffer none such to approach him.[20] He
chiefly predicts the _evil_ to come; what is good only figures in his
pages incidentally, and at long intervals. But here it is to be observed
that the staple of true prophecy must always run parallel with that of
history; whilst, as to the latter, it has grown into an axiom, “Happy is
the country that has no history.” He fatigues while he fascinates us amid
the variety of his combinations; yet a deeper examination will often end
in clothing these riddling and vext allusions in a magical and floating
investment that lifts them up into a calm sublimity.
Still he is clearly no prophet in the old and Hebrew sense of the
word—like Isaiah, Daniel, David, John,—a man who neither respects his
own person as regards its safety, nor the person of other men as regards
their position. You cannot say of him: “_Scimus quia verax es, non enim
respicis personam hominum_” (St. Matt. xxii. 16), which is the test-touch
all the world over of a true prophet. Le Pelletier’s summing-up is:
_c’est un artiste en pronostics_. There is a Pythic ring in all he
writes and says; a sub-flavour, too, of cabalistic lore far gathered from
those ancient compromising books which he saw fit to burn. The outward
signs of his procedure and methods are palpably magical, as set forth
in the stanzas that open his first Century to the reader. If we know
that he professed Christian orthodoxy, equally we know that he practiced
judicial astrology, and made unquestionable use of the Pagan ritual of
incantation. These rites, uncomprehended by all the erudite in books who
wrote about them, were by the divines and fathers of the early Church
ignorantly attributed to prestidigitation, Toledan art, and fraudulent
compact with the sable fiend. Perhaps they may turn out to have been
merely natural excitations, empirically discovered, tending to enable the
subject of them more fully to reach a state of semi-conscious ecstasy; to
place the cerebral light in the current of latent light that pervades all
space (if such an expression be permissible), and so elicit results that
are ordinarily unattainable by man. Bouys, who wrote in 1806, plainly
considers him to have been a clairvoyant. The animal magnetizers call
him a _crisiaque_. Possibly all these processes only served to place him
in a position favourable to clairvoyance; but on all this, respected and
gentle reader, construct your own opinion. Let the man be to you prophet,
sorcerer, or clairvoyant. Call him what you will, so you free him from
the stigma of impostor. M. le Pelletier’s judgment as to that ought to be
regarded as final: “_L’ampleur de son génie, et la sureté inimaginable de
son coup d’œil, ne permettent guère de la croire._”
It has been well said that the man and his works are an enigma.
Everything in our author is ambiguous: the man, the thought, the style.
We stumble at every step in the rough paths of his labyrinth. Once we
enter, jeering voices seem to deride us from behind each stanza, strophe,
word. We try to interrogate, but grow silent before a man of emotionless
nerve and of impenetrable mask. What are these “Centuries”? What is
Nostradamus? In them and him all may find something; but no man born of
woman can find _all_. The Sphinx of France is here before us; a riddler,
riddling of the fate of men: a man at once bold and timid; simple, yet
who can plumb his depth? A superficial Christian, a Pagan perhaps at
heart; a man rewarded of kings: and yet, so far as we can see, furnishing
no one profitable hint to them that could make their life run smoother,
or remove a single peril from their path. He leaves a book of things
malign, written by one who, albeit, never spoke a word that _à tous ne
seroit agréable_. Behold this Janus of a double face; his very breath is
double; the essence of ambiguity lies wrapped incarnate in him, and it
moulds the man, the thought, the style.
PRÉFACE À MON FILS.
THE PREFACE OF MICHAEL NOSTRADAMUS TO HIS PROPHECIES.
To Cæsar Nostradamus his son, life and felicity. Thy late arrival,[21]
Cæsar Nostradamus my son, has made me bestow much time, through nightly
vigils, to leave you in writing a memorial to refer to, after the
corporal extinction of your progenitor, that might serve for the common
profit of mankind, out of what the Divine Being has permitted me to learn
from the revolution of the stars. And since it has pleased the immortal
God that thou shouldst come into the natural light of this terrene abode,
and shouldst say that thy years are not yet calculated astronomically,
and thy March months are incapable to receive in their weak understanding
what I must necessarily record [as to happen] after my time:—seeing also
that it is not possible to leave thee in writing what might suffer
injury and be obliterated by time; for the inherited gift of occult
prediction will remain confined to my own bowels:—considering that events
of human proposal are uncertain, whilst all is governed and directed by
the incalculable power of Heaven, guiding us, not by Bacchic fury, nor
yet by Lymphatic[22] motion, but by astronomical assertion—“_Soli numine
divino afflati præsagiunt et spirito prophetico particularia._”[23]
Although for years past I have predicted, a long time in advance, what
has afterwards come to pass, and in particular regions attributing
the whole accomplishment to divine power and inspiration, also other
unfortunate and fortunate occurrences have been pronounced with
accelerated promptitude which have since happened in other parts of the
world,—for I was willing to maintain silence and to pass over matters
that might prove injurious [if published] not only as relates to the
present time, but also for the most part of future time, if committed
to writing, since kingdoms, sects, and religions will pass through
stages so very contrary, and, as regards the present time, diametrically
opposed,—that if I were to relate what will happen in the future,
governors, sectaries, and ecclesiastics would find it so ill-accordant
with [_si_] their auricular fancy, that they would go near to condemn
what future ages will know and perceive to be true. Considering also
the sentence of the true Saviour, “_Nolite sanctum dare canibus neque
mittatis margaritas vestras ante porcos, ne forte conculcent eas pedibus
suis, et conversi dirumpant vos_” [Matt. vii. 6].