Reality Films.
His name was Michel de Nostredame,
and he was born in 1503 in Saint-RÃ©my-de-Provence, France.
He's known better as Nostradamus,
the apothecary and seer
who published his collections of prophecies.
From the rise of Adolph Hitler
to the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
From the terrorist attacks of 2001 to the end of the world,
Nostradamus has always been there.
But all of these prophecies were discovered after he died,
after he had written them down, and after the events.
The day of doom is coming!
Now then, his quatrains
are predicting our own immediate future:
The fall of technology,
and the almost total destruction of mankind as we know it;
the rise of a huge Islamic army led by the antichrist
that will begin a third world war;
the invasion of the West by the Chinese hordes.
All of these and more are being discovered
in the writings of a man from 16th century France.
Now we are seeing the interpretations of his predictions
before the events.
The question is: is it true?
Are we about to witness the most cataclysmic era
in mankind's history?
The world of Nostradamus was a world of secrecy.
He spent years building around himself an aura of mystery.
He claimed that the danger of his own time
required that his words were written down
in enigmatic sentences that he called cloudy obscurity.
In 1558, a text stated about Nostradamus
that he was: "a certain brainless and lunatic idiot
"who is shouting nonsense and publishing
"his prognostications and fantasies on the streets."
The astrologer Laurens Videl wrote in his
"Declaration of the Abuses, Ignorances
"and Seditions of Michel Nostradamus"
that, "If I wanted to recite all the ignorances,
"errors and idiocies that you have been putting
"in your works for the last four or five years,
"it would need a pretty big book."
Ever since the publication of his first book in 1555,
it has almost never been out of print.
It is said he predicted worldwide events,
births, catastrophes, and even world wars.
Most academics say that any associations with real events
and the prophecies of this 16th century man
are purely coincidental, mistranslations,
or are so thin as it takes nothing to make them snap.
But is this the truth?
As we are now well into the 21st century,
could there be prophecies that have new meaning?
Could there be a new science to explain
just how Nostradamus predicted the future?
Indeed, there are predictions that he made
and which are fast approaching.
Better now to know the truth before.
We will begin by taking a look at his life.
Michel de Nostredame was one of at least nine children
of the notary Jaume de Nostredame and ReyniÃ¨re,
the granddaughter of a physician in Saint-Remy.
His father's family had been Jewish
but had converted to Catholicism
and taken the surname Nostredame, meaning 'our lady'.
There is very little known
about the childhood of Nostradamus.
We know that at the age of 15
he entered the University of Avignon,
stayed there for one year,
and then was forced to leave when the plague broke out
and the university closed its doors.
According to the accounts of Nostradamus,
he then proceeded to travel the countryside for eight years
as he researched herbal remedies.
He then entered the University of Montpelier
to study medicine.
He was then expelled for practicing apothecary
and slandering other doctors.
The actual document still exists.
And so, even though his publishers would call him doctor,
the truth is that he never made it.
He continued life as an apothecary,
and became widely known for his invention, the rose pill,
which apparently protected against the plague.
By 1531, he was so well known
that a leading man of the Renaissance
invited him to Agen, where he married and had two children.
His new wife and children died in 1534 from the plague,
his rose pill presumably being of no use.
He then traveled again across France and into Italy.
In 1545, he then returned to France
and became the assistant of a famous physician
in his fight against the plague in Marseilles.
He then moved on to his home town and region to do the same.
In 1547, he finally settled down in Salon-de-Provence,
married a rich widow named Ann Ponsarde,
and had three sons and three daughters.
After a visit to Italy,
Nostradamus decided to move away from medicine,
and steered himself towards the occult world.
He wrote an almanac in 1550,
and this is the first time his name
becomes Nostradamus and not Nostredame.
It was a success, and so he decided to continue.
In total, he wrote over 6,000 prophecies.
Soon he was coming to the attention of the nobility
who began ordering their horoscopes
and asking for psychic advice.
He then proceeded to do something very strange:
he would write a book containing 1,000 quatrains
of undated prophecies.
These are the prophecies he is now known for worldwide.
And it is because these are undated
that they remain open to interpretation in every generation.
He believed what he was doing
was against the religious rules of the day,
and so he obscured what he was doing.
He mixed the languages, using Greek, Latin,
Italian and Provencal, and used word games.
In truth, he would have had to have practiced magic
to upset the Inquisition;
prophecy and astrology were permitted.
His book, The Prophecies, had a mixed reception.
Some believed he was a servant of Satan.
Others believed him to be insane.
But others thought him enlightened.
Many of these were from elite families, such as the Medicis.
Catherine de Medici summoned him to Paris
after she read about his omen
of threats to the royal families.
She had him draw up horoscopes for her family.
She made him councilor, and physician to her son,
who would be Charles IX of France.
Nostradamus suffered from gout, a type of arthritis,
and in 1566 it was making movement problematic.
In June of that year, he was drawing up his will.
By July the 1st, he told his secretary,
"You will not find me alive at sunrise."
The following morning, he was found dead.
It seemed this was one prophecy he did get right.
But the man left behind a vast volume of work,
and it is to these prophecies that we now must turn.
There are many problems with the works.
Firstly, the typesetting or printing in those early days
was done by word of mouth, and so each no edition different.
We cannot assume that the spelling,
of words for instance, contain codes.
Since his death, there have been over 200 editions
of his prophecies, and they remain as popular today
as they were in his own lifetime.
It has always been an easy task
to take the vague, undated ramblings
and associate them with any particular period in time.
He produced his works, he claimed, on astrological judgment,
or the possibility of events such as births and coronations.
There is evidence, however, that he stole
and adapted collections of ancient prophecies,
making them relevant to his own time.
It is fact that he stole from Livy, Plutarch,
Suetonius and more, and much of it word for word.
Today we would call this plagiarism,
but in the 16th century it was common.
There is, in fact, a method of prophecy called bibliomancy,
and it is believed he practiced this.
All you do is randomly select a book,
and whichever page it falls open on gives you your prophecy.
It's all very scientific.
In fact, Nostradamus refused to call himself a prophet.
He wrote, "Although, my son,
"I have used the word prophet,
"I would not attribute to myself
"a title of such lofty sublimity."
And again, "Not that I would attribute to myself
"either the name or role of prophet."
His book was entitled "The Prophecies by Nostradamus,"
not "The Prophecies of Nostradamus."
We do not know the specific methods Nostradamus used
when writing his prophecies down.
It is believed he did tell us
that he used flame and water gazing to enter trance,
but nobody is completely sure.
He did say that he emptied his soul, mind and heart
of all care, worry and unease
through mental calm and tranquility.
The majority of his prophecies speak of catastrophes;
earthquakes, wars, floods, plagues, murders and more.
All are undated.
Some deal in generalities and others in specifics
and particular people.
There is a major theme, and one that has been taken up today
by many believers: the impending nightmare
of a Muslim invasion of Europe.
They would follow the antichrist himself.
This, as today, was simply a mirror of current events.
In the days of Nostradamus, the powerful Ottoman Empire
was a constant threat, and many believed
they would soon invade.
It is this doom that could bring about the end of the world.
It was a popular theme, and even Christopher Columbus
published a collection of such prophecies.
So what is it that Nostradamus supposedly predicted?
Why has it become so infamous to the greatest of prophets?
In fact, these are difficult questions to answer,
because so many people have credited Nostradamus
with having predicted events by looking back with hindsight
and assuming that what he wrote
actually meant that particular event.
The great fire of London is one of the big disasters
he supposedly predicted.
The rise of Adolph Hitler is another.
In fact, even the attack on New York
on September the 11th has been claimed.
The famous skeptic, James Randy, said that Nostradamus
suffered from modern day manufactured reputation,
his words being fitted to events that have already occurred
or are so close that they are predictable anyway.
The truth of the matter is simple:
absolutely no prophecy written by Nostradamus
has been interpreted and proven to have predicted
a specific event before it became reality,
even those with dates.
Even the false claim that Nostradamus
said the world would end in 2012 is not only untrue
but never came true and wasn't even said by him.
Of course, it could be that none of his prophecies
have yet to come true,
and we're all waiting around for it to happen.
A simple search of the hundreds of websites and books
dealing with his prophecies reveals one thing:
that the words were so vague
that almost anything can be claimed.
If they were specific and clear,
then all the websites and books would agree.
The truth is they don't; they differ wildly,
and they do so because everybody
has a different ax to grind.
There are some major events that are agreed upon, though:
the birth of Hitler, the rise of Napoleon,
the French Revolution, the world wars,
and even the nuclear destruction
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The day of doom is coming!
Your blood will turn white!
Your face will turn green!
Your eyeballs will pop ...
with pressure!
Because our doomsday show is the living end!
The problem is when the academics
started to get involved in the 1980s,
they discovered that none of the actual
documentary evidence backed up any of these claims.
They had, in fact, been taken from commentaries
on Nostradamus by other people
and not the actual words of the man himself.
Even the prediction of the death of Henry II,
an event widely claimed to have been predicted
by Nostradamus was in fact not true;
It didn't appear in print until 55 years
after the king's death.
The academics discovered that the English translations
were so bad that they were worthless.
They did not take into account 16th century French,
and twisted the words to fit contemporary events.
None of the English translations
were based on the original source material.
It was, in fact, a complete mess.
The question now is this: if everything
that has been claimed for Nostradamus so far
has been hogwash, then could it be
that everybody is looking in the wrong direction,
that there are predictions about our relatively near future
that he made that will come true?
Let's have a look at some of the current theories
and interpretations.
One of the really big things that grabs the attention
of the world right now is Russia.
It is stated that Nostradamus wrote a lot about Russia,
that Russia was even good, and that events in Russia
will one day affect the entire globe.
Russia, he said, will be weak in the new century
compared with the West.
Well, in the 20th century this turned out to be true.
Russia will have a choice, to join the West
or to stick to its ideology.
By 2018, it is claimed, Nostradamus said
that Russia will unite under "his" rule,
whoever "he" is.
There will be a third world war from 2018 to 2020,
and Russia will capture Europe.
China will capture the whole of Asia, apart from India.
By 2025, Russia will be completely renewed
and then the messiah will rise,
bringing together the religions of the world.
Well, that's what they say.
It's not too far off, so we should know soon.
Of course, the other great threatening element
of our modern times is terrorism,
and specifically Islamic terrorism.
There is a lot of chatter on the internet
about how Nostradamus had already predicted this.
Here's how it goes:
in century two, quatrain 30, Nostradamus wrote:
"One who the infernal gods of Hannibal
"will cause to be reborn, terror of mankind.
"Never more horror no worse of days
"in the past than will come to the Romans through Babel."
Well, Hannibal isn't around anymore,
and wasn't when Nostradamus wrote this,
so he must have meant somebody else, somebody like Hannibal.
While Hannibal was obviously an enemy of Rome
and spent most of his life fighting them,
his gods will cause him to be reborn
and he will be a terror of mankind.
With our modern eyes we can now see this slight differently.
Hannibal attacked Rome, so it has to be somebody
who doesn't like Christianity,
the mother church of which is in Rome.
Hannibal originally lived in what is now known as Tunisia,
a Muslim state that rests neatly between Libya and Algeria.
So this new Hannibal will be a Muslim.
According to the chatter, this quatrain speaks
of the birth of an Islamic nation
that will terrorize the world.
Well, we have one of those, and we call it ISIS,
which strangely is the name of one of the old gods of Egypt.
ISIS is a self-proclaimed nation
that is the terror of mankind.
This terror appears to come through Babel.
This was a city in the country we now call Iraq,
a place where ISIS is currently strong.
So ISIS, the new Hannibal, will come through Iraq
and terrorize the Christians of the world.
Now we can truly see how easy it is, in almost any age,
to create something out of almost nothing.
Of course, world events are not so good right now:
there is terrorism and unrest;
jostling between Russia and the West
is constantly in the news.
But the truth is that at no point in human history
has it been any different.
Yes, immigrants are piling into Europe
from the wars in the Middle East.
And yes, among them are terrorists
hellbent on destroying this thing we loosely call democracy,
and bringing about one world for Allah.
But nowhere does Nostradamus predict
any of this specifically, and what he did say
could easily have been used in any century.
Before the first world war, the so-called Muslim hordes
followed the Mahdi and were rising again.
They murdered Gordon of Khartoum,
who was there to stop them.
After the end of that episode,
many then followed Lawrence of Arabia
in the First World War.
Was he the antichrist too?
So what else is supposedly predicted by Nostradamus,
and what truth is there?
This is one of his quatrains,
as has been manipulated a great deal:
"Volcanic fire from the center of the earth
"will cause trembling around the new city
"Two great rocks will make war for a long time.
"Then Arethusa will redden a new river."
This is the quatrain used and abused
to prove that Nostradamus predicted
the terrorist attacks on September the 11th.
The words themselves are often twisted and changed.
In fact, some even pop the city New York in there
for good measure.
The text mentions no New York or terrorists.
What they say is that two great rocks were the two planes
that crashed into the World Trade towers; a bit thin.
Arethusa, who will redden the new river,
is in fact a nymph from mythology
who changed into a fountain.
Any well-read person of the time would have known this.
Whatever he meant when he wrote this
is unknown, of course, but filling in the gaps
and changing the text is not scientific.
Of course, one of the most famous quatrains
is the one about Hitler.
Here's how it goes:
"In the place very near, not far from Venice,
"the two greatest ones of Asia and of Africa
"from the Rhine and Hister they will be said to have come.
"Cries, tears at Malta, and the Liburian side."
Hister, apparently, is Hitler.
And it is claimed this quatrain
is about a meeting of Hitler and Mussolini.
Now, that takes some serious twisting.
Hister is in fact a term used widely at the time
for the river Danube;
hence, the Rhine and Danube, or Hister.
Again, whatever else this all means is mere speculation.
Another man from history that is said to appear
in the prophecies of Nostradamus is Louis Pasteur.
Here's the verse:
"Lost, found, hidden for so long a time,
"the pastor will be honored as a demigod;
"before the moon finishes its full period
"he will be dishonored by other winds."
Apparently this is about the coming of Louis Pasteur
and his work with microbes.
It says nothing of the kind.
In fact, a pastor is simply a religious leader.
And then there is the famous prediction
that Henry II of France would die:
"The young lion will overcome the old one
"on the field of battle in single combat:
"He will put out his eyes in a cage of gold:
"Two fleets one, then to die a cruel death."
Four years later, Henry was in fact killed
from a lance in the eye at a match with Captain Montgomery.
It was not on the field of battle, but instead at a party.
Today, people say that this prophecy
made Nostradamus famous.
This is a blatant historical lie.
The prophecy itself was not even known
until 50 years after his death,
when it was first published posthumously.
We have to understand people do lie, often.
Another one of those prophecies
that is held up by believers as proven
is the concept that Nostradamus predicted World War II
and the arrival of the atomic bomb.
Here's what he supposedly said:
"Near the gates and within the cities
"there will be two scourges
"the like of which was never seen;
"famine within plague, people put out by steel,"
"crying to the great immortal God for relief."
A lot of interpretations get this completely wrong.
Firstly, they state the French word "portis"
is seaport; in fact, it means gate or doorway.
So the location of a seaport is totally wrong.
In fact, all this quatrain does
is explain the terrors of the plague
that we already know had spread across Europe.
This is not a nuclear attack.
The sentence "people put out by steel" is mistranslated.
It really meant some kind of Medieval weaponry.
It is almost beyond comprehension
that such a quatrain could be twisted and turned
to mean World War II and nuclear explosions.
Nostradamus apparently also predicted
the great fire of London.
Here's what he said:
"The blood of the just will commit a fault at London,
"burnt through lightning of 23 to the six:
"The ancient lady will fall from her high place,
"several of the same sect will be killed."
"The blood of the just will commit a fault;"
well, the just are either the religious or royal leaders,
and yet the fire was started by an ordinary person
as far as his name, and it is speculated
that it was in a bakery.
It is claimed that 23 sixes
somehow works out to the date 1666;
and yet, any schoolkid will tell you 23 sixes is 138,
which could mean almost anything,
such as a psalm in the bible.
The ancient lady falling from her high place
is simple enough: London was the ancient lady.
It is some kind of prediction that royal
or religious leaders of London will bring it down,
and some of their own kind brought down with it.
Well, that had already happened several times.
And in an age that just witnessed the monarch Henry VIII,
there is no wonder as it would be a common idea.
It is also said that Nostradamus predicted
the 17th century ruler Oliver Cromwell,
the man who would lead the armies of parliament
in a civil war against the royal houses of England
and bring about a period of a republic.
This is the quatrain the believers quote.
Remember that England had suffered many monarchs
who were brutal, and would again.
"More of a butcher than a king in England,
"born of obscure rank will gain empire through force.
"Coward without faith, without law he will bleed the land:
"His time approaches so close that I sigh."
Firstly, Cromwell, for all his faults, was no coward.
He was not without faith;
in fact, he was extremely religious.
He was not of obscure rank, because he was born
from landed gentry; so basically, the description
of the man himself is miles off the mark.
The next quatrain is claimed to have been a prophecy
about the children of Henry II of France:
"The seven children left in hostage,
"the third will come to slaughter his child:
"Because of his son two will be pierced by the point,
"Genoa, Florence, he will come to confuse them."
This one couldn't be more wrong.
Henry had 13 children, not seven,
and only one of them died an unnatural death;
so, completely wrong there then.
The problem with the prophecies of Nostradamus
is that they are so vague and undated
that they can be twisted
to mean almost anything at any time.
They are like scattering the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle
that never made a picture in the first place.
You cannot put the pieces together.
It is not a complex puzzle; it never was.
Do not look for insights into the future of mankind here,
for all you will find are the occult ramblings
from a bygone age that made little sense even then.
There is no code, cipher, algorithm or hidden secret.
Most of the interpretations that are out there
are biased by the individual creating them.
This can be for numerous reasons: religious,
conspiracy theorist, doomsayers, end-of-the-worlders,
and even alien hunters.
Nostradamus was financially supported by Catherine
de Medici, and he wrote numerous verses for her.
Some of these predicted the downfall of Queen Elizabeth I
of England, and even this didn't come true.
She was one of the longest-serving monarchs
England ever had.
In his own time, Nostradamus became a legend
because he spoke of disaster, death and disease,
and almost gave a sense of fate to it.
For if it were known that these things
were to come to pass, then that implied a plan,
and a plan implies a divine wisdom.
There would be hope from these words.
The people across Europe were suffering
from plague, fire and war; they needed hope.
We cannot technically say that he was a conman or hoaxer
because astrology and soothsaying was popular
and highly regarded in its day,
and he may well have believed in his own ramblings himself.
The real error, and even deception, comes after his death,
when his words were, and are, used for various agendas.
The language Nostradamus used was mainly an ancient form
of French, and with the ambiguity he created
it makes it doubly difficult to find any real truth.
He has been credited with predicting
the great fire of London, the end of the world,
the rise of Hitler, the Iranian revolution of 1979,
various terrorist attacks, World War II,
and even an invasion of aliens.
All of which were only ever stated
many years after his death, apart from the aliens.
Not once has a prophecy of Nostradamus
been accurately predicted before the event.
Nobody has ever said "Nostradamus will say
"this will happen tomorrow," and be proven correct.
Nostradamus has been used, and not always
by psychologically challenged individuals
posting blogs on the internet.
During World War II, the Nazis spread the propaganda
that he had predicted the rise of Hitler.
This is where that particular lie arose.
The Allies retaliated by saying Nostradamus
predicted the fall of Hitler.
The world is full of lies.
The real truth, behind all of this,
is much more sinister.
While stupid humans are running around
wondering what the regurgitated ramblings
of a 16th century occultist apothecary
are really all about, there eyes are diverted
from what is really happening in the world.
As we sit and watch the bullshit we are fed,
we don't question the reality.
Nostradamus was a man of his time.
The world of the occult gave answers to questions
they were not equipped to answer,
questions that science today have answers for.
Medicine, religion, the occult and science
were all one in those days.
Today we have divided them, because science and medicine
have deducted religion and the occult from the equation,
using hard, very viable, evidence.
Religion and the occult have never been able
to provide hard evidence for anything,
as we can see with the so-called prophecies of Nostradamus.
And yet, we still want to believe.
And because we want to believe,
the people in power and authority will allow us to
and will use that energy against us.
Do not search the internet for the truth about Nostradamus,
for what you will find are the unscientific ramblings
of people with their own agendas.
There are almost no unbiased references to his work.
It is like abstract painting; it can be so obscure,
that the viewer can see almost anything
he or she wishes to see.
We no longer have the excuse
of living in an age of uncertainty,
because we know that the future cannot be seen,
just as we can no longer revisit the past.
If it were possible, then science would be able to prove it.
A ball drops because of gravity.
We can predict that with mathematic equations,
and then prove it in laboratory conditions.
Under no circumstances do any of the Nostradamus predictions
meet modern scientific standards.
Neither do the claims of religions, psychics, mediums
and a whole host of other unverifiable ideas.
They exist only in the mind until they can be proven
in the real, physical world.
The problem is that evolution has given us a brain
that wishes to connect the dots,
to see a face in the cloud where there is none.
And when we read an enigmatic quatrain from Nostradamus
we endeavor to make sense of it, to join the dots.
And we all do this in our own era,
with our own knowledge of the world,
and make sense of the words from our own perspective.
It is therefore time to stop believing in such things
and to stop being the pawns of the power brokers,
to judge when best to join dots and when not to.
There is no face in this cloud; it is just a cloud.