SOURCE: "Seer, Scientist, or Biblical Scholar?" in Nostradamus: Prophecies of Present Times? The Aquarian Press, 1984, pp. 13-32.

[In the following excerpt, Pitt Francis engages the question of Nostradamus's legitimacy as a prophet of future events, focusing upon factors that may account for Nostradamus's successful predictions.]

The Man, and the Enigma

For over four hundred years, with the sole exception of Bible prophecy, no set of predictions has stimulated such an infectious interest as those credited to Nostradamus. They were consulted with religious fervour by some members of the French monarchy, and held in high regard by them until 1781, when they were officially condemned by the Church, by being placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, only eight years before the French Revolution. In the nineteenth century, Nostradamus's ten Centuries (sets of a hundred verses each) were denounced as Satanic by Protestant religious fundamentalists, and Nostradamus himself was regarded as something of a witch. The present century has witnessed spasms of revival of interest in his writings, partly because they seemed to provide detailed descriptions of some modern events, such as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and partly because of their effect on the course of the Second World War after Hitler had been introduced to them by Frau Goebbels. Hitler's interest is indeed curious. He frowned on the Bible and on Christianity, because of their Jewish origins, yet failed to appreciate that Nostradamus, whose works he seemed to worship, was also a Jew.

Hardly a month passes without the probability that some new event has been pronounced by Nostradamus. For example, quatrain I: 63 foresees a period of relatively safe air travel, followed by 'battles'. Could this be a reference to the advent of air-travel competition, of the kind that forced Sir Freddie Laker into insolvency? If Nostradamus is so accurate, then he deserves an answer….

The Centuries

The writings of Nostradamus are virtually unique, because several of his quatrains indisputably relate to events many decades ahead of his own time. In this respect, he differs from the great majority of 'fortune-tellers', who may be able to predict events that are a few years ahead of their predictions but would never pretend to know of events centuries into the future. Most make their predictions about individuals or governments. They must be fulfilled in a single lifetime, and the great majority of personal predictions, from simple premonitions to horoscope readings (using successful data), are fulfilled within an average period of less than thirty years from the time when they are delivered.

There are, of course, some rare exceptions. I have already mentioned the Bible. Some biblical prophecies have very long fulfilment spans. One of the prophecies of Moses in the second millennium BC presented the Jewish nation with a 'thumb-nail' sketch of its history from that period to modern times, including a series of identifiable invasions, its dispersion by the Romans in the first century of our era, and the return to its homeland in the present century. Even if the book of Deuteronomy had been written later than the time of Moses, as some scholars maintain, such a prophecy would still be long-term in its validity. Later Old Testament prophecies in the sixth century BC foretold the destruction of Tyre by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC in vivid and astonishing detail. A large number of other cases of valid long-term biblical prophecy could be given. Further, the Bible often helped to ignite prophetic foresight in its interpreters, who, though wrong in their interpretations, became valid prophets in their own right when commenting on its prophecies. For example, expositors of the Book of Revelation of John were led by their interpretations to assume, from the early seventeenth century, that the Turkish empire would decline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of our era. Well-known writers, such as Joseph Mede and Isaac Newton held these beliefs, and their truth has been confirmed within the past century.

But, other than Nostradamus (and to a much greater extent than his writings), the Bible is the only main exception to the theory that most valid prophecies do not have long fulfilment-spans. There are only a handful of other wellresearched cases. Buddha, in the sixth century BC, was reputed to have accurately predicted the entry of Buddhism into China in the first century of our era, but there are no manuscripts that survive to prove that the prophecy did not postdate the event, and it was a single prophecy without much detail. In the twelfth century, a Cistercian friend of Bernard of Clairvaux, Malachy of Armagh (1094-1148), predicted the papal succession to the end of the twentieth century, using a series of mottoes, and some of his intuitive flashes were remarkably accurate. But they have little real value in the scientific study of prediction, for it can be reasoned that:

(i) some of the cardinals who are responsible for choosing each successive Pope are aware of Malachy's prophecies;

(ii) it is quite easy for each successor of the papal chair to 'participate' in fulfilling Malachy's prophecies, if he wishes to do so; and

(iii) within a given 'lifetime' it is quite easy to find events that fit each successive 'motto'.

Nostradamus is the great exception to the principle that fulfilment-spans are usually short. No other famous non-biblical prophet produced nearly four thousand lines of closely-packed detail about events centuries beyond his own lifetime. What explanations can be rendered for this remarkable achievement?

His short-term prophecies can be explained, like all other short-term predictions, by simple reference to his own psychic gifts. These are evidenced by the incident that was reputed to have occurred during Nostradamus's visit to Italy in the late 1540s when he addressed a young monk as 'Your Holiness'. The monk, Felice Peretti, within twenty years of Nostradamus's death, became Pope Sextus V. If the story is correct, it is evidence of a 'gift' of personal intuition; but we must be cautious about jumping to a conclusion that these gifts necessarily spring from a knowledge of astrology, the practice of crystal-gazing, or of some other branch of the occult sciences…. Nostradamus was as much a scientific astronomer as an astrologer—for his age tended to mix the two sciences—and it would have been difficult for him to have studied the one without also studying the other. Yet he was to some extent, anti-astrological. Not that he tried to debunk astrology—nor would have it been entirely correct for him to have done so, for recent researches suggest a strong correlation between birth-patterns and personal characteristics. But, like the prophets of Israel before him he perceived that astrology was not without its dangers and could lead people into wrong directions, and as most of the astrologers of Nostradamus's times were unreliable, his warnings were even more appropriate.

For example, there are direct warnings, as in VI: 100:

Let those who read this verse think about it maturely
and let the profane, unknowing crowd stay away.
Let astrologers, fools and barbarians keep off
Whoever does otherwise, let him be priest to the rite!

To couple the astrologers of his day with barbarians and idiots may sound like an insult to those who look today for helpful correlation between birth charts and personal characteristics. But Nostradamus lived at a time when astrology in Christian circles was at its peak and when the distinction between astronomy and astrology had not been clarified. He was not simply trying to be 'biblical' in his apparent condemnation of astrologers; as the last line indicates, he is trying to tell us that there is a truer science of prediction, and that such science is a sacred one.

The distinction between astrologers and 'sacred ones' is clarified in a later stanza (VIII: 71):

The number of astrologers will become so large that they will be driven out, and banned, and their books censored
…
None will be assured from the sacred ones

Some of his predictions, assumed to have astrological references, are in fact curious 'puns' on language. The mention of a 'sickle' early in his prophecies may seem like an astrological reference to Saturn, but perhaps may instead refer to 'd'Estang', while it has been shown that 'Taurer' much later is not 'Taurus', but a variant for 'Tory' or a reference to a local church…. There is no doubt of his 'reputation' as an astrologer because he was asked to cast horoscopes for the dowager Catherine, whom he could scarcely refuse. But his knowledge of astrology was incidental to his greater gifts. Were these gifts acquired by using other occult practices?

He condemned many of these with greater zeal than that which he vented on astrology. For example I: 42:

The fire is extinguished, and the devilish gatherings
Seek the bones of the demon of Psellus

could be a reference to Psellus, a writer on demonology who lived some centuries earlier, or it would be a corruption of 'Phallus' and indicate the sexual nature of some witchcraft practices of Nostradamus's time. In either case, he is not at all complimentary about the practices, and we cannot imagine his indulging in them.

Alternatively, was he a 'diviner' or a 'scryer'? There is only one apparent reference to divination in the quatrains, where he is also explicitly a participant. It refers to a wand, a flame, a tripod and the sprinkling of hem and feet with water. This is usually taken to mean that there was a bowl of water on the tripod, into which Nostradamus was assumed to gaze in order to obtain his inspiration. The mention of a wand passing between the legs of the tripod is obscure, but at least, the whole thing seems, at first reading, to indicate some practice of magic. The lines (I: 1-2) actually read in translation:

Sitting solitary at night in secret study
It is at rest on a tripod of brass
A scanty flame comes out of the solitude
and prospers that which should not be believed emptily
The wand in hand is placed between the branches [tripod's legs]
He sprinkles fringe and foot with water [literally 'with a wave']
A voice, be afraid, he trembles, robed!
Splendour divine—God is near!

Note, firstly, that the lines do not refer to a bowl of water on the brass tripod, but that a flame rests on them. Secondly, as the first line indicates, the lines are not about magical practice, but about study. Thirdly, the reference to the scant flame in the third line has a double meaning, for in French the word is exigue (= slight or scantly), which is similar to the word exegete and its Latin equivalent. The study is to interpret something or other. It is not empty ('solitude') inspiration (line 3) to assist empty (croire vain) beliefs, but the study of something that is positively symbolic.

So, the connection with magical practices may be entirely superficial, and even Laver, who suggests that Nostradamus copied the ritual practices of the fourth-century Neoplatonist philosopher Iamblichus, may also have been entirely wrong. If the other quatrains of Nostradamus are to be interpreted symbolically, why should not these two also be symbolic in meaning? 'It', resting on the brass tripod, is clearly the flame. Thus, we can infer that the brass tripod held the only lamp with which Nostradamus 'burned the midnight oil' in study. It caused him to reflect on the Deity—on God. This would have been quite easy, for the figure of a tripod holding a lamp is a close depiction of the Neoplatonist doctrine of the three primal hypostases, the three 'substances' or 'faces' of God—a teaching that later affected the Church as the doctrine of the Trinity. Note that there is no reference in the stanzas to a bowl of water. Indeed, the only reference to water is l'onde, which also means a 'wave'. Bodily distractions have to be swept aside (splashed clean) while the 'waves' of inspiration do their work. There is a series of collapsed biblical references, including those to the practice of feetwashing, and the fringes of garments. The whole impact of the two introductory stanzas is that external distractions must be held in check, while inspiration (in interpretation) does its work. In this sense they are innocent of any suggestion of 'black magic' and compare favourably with medieval mystical writings such as The Cloud of Unknowing and the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius.

Nostradamus may thus be cleared of being simply an astrologer, or simply a clairvoyant. He was much more than that; but what was he?

The Statistics of the Stanzas

The predictions, published in 1555, are grouped into Centuries (sets of one hundred, four-line stanzas, or 'quatrains'). The first impression that these stanzas give is that they are not arranged in any apparent order. There is no 'time-series' or chronological order of prediction from Nostradamus's time to our own, but each of the ten Centuries contains prophecies relating to each of the periods between the sixteenth century and our own time, and thus each set of a hundred stanzas (Centuries) also contains a small residuum of unfulfilled, or at least unidentifiable, predictions.

Thus, if we take one interpretation of the first Century as an example, the proportion of assumed fulfilments is shown below, using several accepted modern interpretations of Nostradamus.

Time Period	Number of Stanzas
1555-1600	18
1601-1700	5
1701-1800	16
1801-1900	20
1901-1983	25
Future twentieth century	4
Unidentifiable	12
Total	100

This table illustrates the apparent jumble, and it is sometimes claimed on behalf of Nostradamus that he deliberately jumbled the historical order of the stanzas so that they would escape easy interpretation. The proportions of fulfilments (with the above date-intervals) in the other Centuries are different, but the order is equally 'random'. There are a few cases where groups of stanzas in a given Century relate to a single event or set of events. For example, there is a high concentration of stanzas relating to the French monarchy of Henri III's time in the first half of Century III. Also, in the middle of Century VIII, there is a group of apparent predictions of the English monarchy during the Civil War, while Century IX has a seemingly high 'cluster' of predictions relating to the House of Bourbon. Predictions of the French Revolution are also apparently clustered in Centuries I and IX. But these exceptions are only illusory. If a well-known statistical test, known as the chi-squared test is applied to the above frequencies to test the relationship to later Centuries they can be proved 'random', not significantly different from later ones, though there are more unidentified stanzas in later Centuries, perhaps because people have thought less about them.

This randomness seems like ammunition for cynics, who sometimes suggest that the prophecies contain so many movements backwards and forwards in history that it is quite easy within four hundred years to identify any number of random events with each of the stanzas. Yet the apparent disorder is probably the greatest clue for the real investigator, for it would have been much too easy for Nostradamus simply to have placed them in historical order. Any number of other arrangements are possible. For example, the 114 suras of the Muslim Qur'an seem to be 'disarrayed' to a casual reader, for the 'creation' narrative appears late, and later events are arranged early on. But this is because the suras are placed in order of size. Nostradamus's predictions appear to be arranged topically, some of them showing his scientific insight, and some based on the Bible; and there are whole sequences of stanzas indicating that he 'drew' (whether subconsciously or by interpretation) on his knowledge of the biblical Apocalypse of John.

Nostradamus and Modern Inventions

Let us now explore the 'scientific' and 'biblical' bases of Nostradamus's insight, before trying to provide a number of possible explanations of the apparent accurate fulfilment of many of his prophecies. First, the scientific insight….

One of the earliest of these predictions describes the invention of the submarine, and the firing of a missile from it:

When the fish that journeys over land and sea
Is cast on the shore by a great wave—
its shape, strange, smooth and horrific
—the enemies soon reach the walls from the sea [I:29]

This prediction is not only an example of Nostradamus's knowledge of inventions to come, but also of the principle of 'topical arrangement' suggested in the previous section. It comes only four quatrains later than his prophecy of Pasteur, and though that quatrain may mean something different in context, the 'Pasteur' prophecy could mean medicine before its time. He was certainly not the first to conceive of the submarine as a possibility. In fact, over fifty years earlier, the painter Leonardo da Vinci had sketched a drawing of a submarine in one of his notebooks, together with plans of missiles that could be ejected from them. He wrote: 'The evil nature of men is such that they will practice assassination by breaking the hulls of boats and wrecking them….' Nostradamus would have needed no foresight to be able to copy the works or words of Leonardo. His genius lay in arranging this information alongside other prophecies of scientific invention that have also been accurately fulfilled.

For example, the very next stanza predicts death and pillage despite 'palm-branches'.

Despite the signs of palm-branches,
—afterward, death and pillage,
—good counsel arrives too late [1:30]

On first reading this seems like a prophecy of a reversal of peaceful intentions, but it is, in fact, an extraordinary prophecy of nuclear war, in which he not only 'drew' on his knowledge of the direction of modern inventions, but also on his knowledge of biblical prophecy. At some time between the eighth and fourth centuries BC, the Hebrew prophet, Joel, had written: 'I will show wonders in heaven and on earth—blood and fire and pillars [lit. palm trees] of smoke'. This was an early biblical prophecy of nuclear war, and used a Hebrew word for 'pillar' (timorah) that derives from the word for 'palm-tree' (tomer) because the pillars of ancient buildings were often structured to look like palm trees. The word is frequently used in the Old Testament for an artificial palm tree, and aptly describes the spreading shape of a 'cloud' of nuclear 'smoke'. As a Jewish Catholic, Nostradamus acquired a thorough knowledge of Hebrew from his grandfather, Jean.

The prediction, held in isolation, is remarkable enough but its position in the Centuries is even more remarkable. Not only is it a curious piece of double-entendre, but it occurs immediately after the submarine prophecy, thus indicating that nuclear power will have originally been discovered with 'peaceful intent'. Yet it associates the submarine with nuclear power (e. g. nuclear warheads) and describes the great havoc that such weapons (as Polaris and its successors) can cause.

Nostradamus and the Revelation of John

Many of Nostradamus's quatrains look like cryptic apocalyptic writings of the style that imitates biblical prophecy, yet recasts its symbols. In Jewish history, such 'apocalypses' were common from the third century BC onwards, and I have shown elsewhere that the Revelation of John was intended to be a Christian 'answer' to such cryptic, apocalyptic writing. Medieval interpreters did not know this, however, and often imagined that the Book of Revelation was simply a sequential political prophecy. Nostradamus would have been aware of their interpretations, some of which were fulfilled, because history sometimes tends to be self-repeating. It may have required an effort on his part to have arranged the 'scientific' stanzas I: 25-30 in a sensible topical order, but it would have required very little effort to have consciously or unconsciously reproduced some of the themes from the Apocalypse of John in the very order in which they occurred there. Take, for example, the following sequence, again from Century I.

Revelation of John	Nostradamus
1. A warrior with a bow (6:1-2)	1. A reference to "Mars" (I: 15)
2. Bloodshed (6:3-4) associated with the "seventy-sevenfold" ref. to Cain (see Genesis 4:24)	2. Blood to be shed, and a reference to "seventy times" (I: 15)
3. "Archer" symbols (6:1-8)	3. Reference to Sagittarius, the "archer" (I: 16)
4. Plague, famine and death in that order (6:5-9)	4. "Plague, famine and death" (I: 16)
5. Plagued earth (6:7-8)	5. "parched earth" (I: 17)
6. Earth soaked with blood to be avenged (6:9-10)	6. Land and sea soaked with blood (I: 18)
7. "Souls under an altar" (6:9)	7. Snakes around an altar (I: 19)
8. A "great earthquake" (6:12)	8. "Shaking of land and sea" (I: 20)

Does this sequence seem to be unconvincing? It is one of a number of such sequences. Some of the items contain several specific elements of detail that are also in order, as the 'plague, famine and death' of 4; but even if each of the eight elements only contained one item the chances of their being arranged in the same given order would be 1:8! (a mathematical factorical notation) which means 1/40320. But the chance that, in the mass of possible items, the same elements themselves occur in both the Apocalypse and Nostradamus is much greater and it is not the only case of such a sequence. Others occur in later Centuries.

This is not to say that Nostradamus provided the 'best' possible interpretation of John's Revelation. His viewpoint was conditioned by the limitations of the time in which he lived, and history tends to be self-repeating, as far as interpretations of John's Apocalypse are concerned. For example, he used the cipher 'Babylon' of Revelation 17 to mean Paris because, just like ancient Babylon (situated between Tigris and Euphrates), Paris is also situated on two rivers (the Seine and Marne). Such a meaning would never be accepted by modern biblical scholars, but was useful to Nostradamus, because Revelation's predictions are capable of multiple fulfilment in the vast time-continuum of history, and Nostradamus, 'cracked' only one set of meanings of its ciphers—something akin to what is known as the 'historical' school of interpretation, whereby interpreters such as Newton, Mede and Eliott were able to predict some events in the future of France, including the French Revolution.

Some Possible Explanations

The challenge of Nostradamus is an outstanding one on two counts. To a materialist, who believes that the future cannot be predicted successfully, the success of Nostradamus in doing so has to be explained. To the Christian fundamentalist, who may believe that only biblical prophecy accurately anticipates future events, the astonishingly reliable detail of some of the Centuries can present a curious problem. The second part of this chapter attempted to show that Nostradamus was no charlatan but an educated healer, who was, in many respects, ahead of his time. We have seen that Nostradamus was not simply an astrologer, a crystal-gazer, or a black magician. On his own admission he was deeply engrossed in interpreting something. If so, what was he interpreting? Lastly, we have seen that though the Centuries appear to be jumbled, they seem to be arranged in a topical order, reflecting his knowledge of science and of biblical prophecy. If this is so, then scientific foresight and biblical interpretation may be added to the list of part-explanations of his foresight. This being done, we are now in a position to offer some preliminary explanations of his success in forecasting future events.

The first of these explanatory factors is random fulfilment. Toss a coin, and there is a 0.5 chance of obtaining a desired head or tail. The chance of a 'six' is less (0.16) if a die is cast. If no time limit is specified there is always a greater chance that at some remote time any given combination of events (or cluster of numbers) can occur (or be cast), and this chance increases with the passage of time. If all of Nostradamus's predictions provided only one fulfilment-date and no other, and each fulfilment date had been matched exactly by a fulfilment, the Centuries would be easily vindicated. In some cases, however, the prediction actually failed in its intended fulfilment.

To quote two examples:

1. In Presages CXLI he predicted the details of the events surrounding his death. He would return from an embassy, put away the King's gift and fall on a bench near his bed, where he would be found dead. However, the date of his death was wrongly predicted.

2. In 1:51 he implicitly quoted Roussat's work, and thus predicted a revolution in 1702. The revolution did not come until nearly ninety years afterwards.

So there is a statistical case against Nostradamus, a case that, in a sufficiently long time-span, all its details will be fulfilled, and that when there were references to specific dates these did not see the events that were sometimes intended to fit them.

Secondly, some early fulfilments can be attributed to a personal gift of foresight. This gift may be intuitive or logical and varies from one person to another. Some small fulfilment-spans can be anticipated, because of existing conditions. The death of Brezhnev in 1982 could have been foreseen, so could the Falklands crisis. At the time of writing there is a likelihood of a conflict between Venezuela and Guyana over territory around the Esequibo river. Not everyone has the intuitive foresight of a Jeanne Dixon. Some may project trends, as in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock; others may construct a model of the future, while yet others may engage in collective 'polls' of opinion about the future. Douglas McGregor, of the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, and Hadley Cantril, of Princeton University, both independently encouraged people in 1936 to make forecasts about near events, including Hitler's war and other matters, and the extent of 'collective' accuracy was astonishing. Later in 1953, Richard Auerbach, a New York primary school headmaster repeated the experiment, this time using children, by trying to get them to project the world of 1978. Their projections were locked away, and examined in 1978. Again the projections were astonishing.

Astrological studies of correlation between horoscopes and character profiles suggest that astrology has some predictive value. However, in all these cases, the timespan between prediction and fulfilment is a short one (less than a century), and there is no evidence that it could be used successfully to explain much of Nostradamus's apparently long-range perception of the future, though the statistical explanation (see above) enhances accuracy, given that the timespan is not specific.

A third set of explanations, as we have seen, involves prescriptive prophecy. If a doctor tells a patient that he (the patient) is ill, it may have the effect of making him feel worse than otherwise would be the case. In the same way, an accountant (misusing accounting information) may judge a firm to be nearing bankruptcy. A bank takes the accountant's opinion and refuses credit. Other banks follow suit, and thus an otherwise healthy firm can easily be bankrupted.

A fourth explanation is similar, except that the 'subject' of the prophecy voluntarily fulfils it. It is participative fulfilment. The popes probably know of the prophecies of Malachy of Armagh mentioned earlier in the chapter, and some may have set about trying to fulfil them. Similarly, Hitler, who believed Nostradamus, attempted in some respects to fulfil Nostradamus's prophecies….

A fifth reasonable explanation is interpretational 'fudge'—the variety of conflicting and diverse interpretations that hang on a single line. When the Pythoness at Delphi was consulted about the battle between Lydia and Persia she wisely but ambiguously replied that if it occurred a great empire would be overthrown. It was a 'heads I win—tails you lose' prophecy. Both contenders were great empires, and one had to be overthrown. In this context is the obscurity that surrounds much of Nostradamus's crabbed French. For example, an anagram of only six letters may have up to 720 meanings, dependent on the arrangement of the letters, though most arrangements may not have necessary meanings. But there are sufficiently obscure arrangements of anagrams to suggest the most diverse meanings. For example, Lonole is variously interpreted as Oliver Cromwell by James Laver and as London by Erika Cheetham in two equally convincing interpretations of one of Nostradamus's stanzas.

These five explanations exhaust many of the non-specific prophecies—those that seem to have 'worked out' because of chance, preceptiveness, involuntary and voluntary participation on the part of the subject, and the very fact that obscurity of language often enhances the chance of prophetic fulfilment because of the variety of interpretations that such obscurity can produce.

We can also add two more sets of explanations. The first of these is scientific perceptiveness. Nostradamus's foresight regarding modern inventions was not unique. This is because we all possess the desire to imagine the impossible, and then set about accomplishing it. I showed earlier that Nostradamus was not alone in anticipating the invention of submarines; Leonardo da Vinci, for example, had done so fifty years before him. Several factors combine to produce scientific predictiveness in people.

The first of these is that design often anticipates discovery by several hundred years. The ancient Greeks were known to have made some progress towards aeronautics; the Egyptians had used Pythagoras's theorem long before Pythagoras propounded it; and other pieces of important data, such as the value of pi (to calculate the circumference of a circle) are known to have been discovered independently by different people at different times.

Secondly, inventions are not necessarily accredited to their 'first' inventors, who often live and die in obscurity—thus there is another time-gap between first discovery and popularity.

Thirdly, scientific vision entails 'hit-and-miss' speculation about seemingly impossible inventions—as is clear from much science fiction writing. This very 'scientific vision' itself thus produces expectations, goals and objectives in the minds of people who would like to see them invented.

A fourth factor is that the very expectation of such discoveries carries considerable popularity, and that this, itself, drives people to work, trying to discover how a particular feat (such as radio communication or underwater travel) can be accomplished.

Finally, as with the first factor above, there is no necessary time scale. If people sufficiently believe that a given invention is 'possible', some will carry on working until it is realized. Thus, although I have listed 'scientific perceptiveness' as a special explanation of the accuracy of Nostradamus's predictions, it does combine some of the earlier explanations. Apart from the discovery-popularity 'lag', it combines random speculation with a large element of prescriptive and participative fulfilment. If some 'prophet' can 'dream up' a seemingly impossible feat, and the desire to perform it becomes sufficiently popular, some people will carry on trying to discover how it can be accomplished, until it becomes a reality.

A seventh explanation, or set of explanations, derives from a knowledge of biblical prophecy. This was discussed briefly earlier in this chapter. If the Bible's prophetic claim is correct, and it reflects Divine foresight of human events—as some of the cases quoted earlier, such as the history of Israel and the destruction of Tyre, suggest—then any human 'prophet' can be reliable to the extent that he consciously or unconsciously interprets or recasts biblical prophecy. Some of Nostradamus's predictions, such as his prophecy of the re-creation of the State of Israel, clearly fall into this category, for such an event was foreseen much earlier by Biblical prophets. Even false prophets of a much lower moral calibre, and of much more spurious intentions than Nostradamus, are known to have made 'capital' for themselves, by reinterpreting biblical prophecy. To use a simple illustration, Moses 'warned' Pharaoh that the waters of Egypt would 'become blood' (whatever that meant). The Bible tells us that subsequently: 'the magicians of Egypt did the same by their secret arts'.

It is difficult to imagine that the waters of Egypt 'became blood' twice. It is much more probable that the 'magicians' realized the reliability of Moses' prediction, and simply copied it, claiming it to be their own, and telling a credulous Pharoah that Moses had obtained it from them. Anyone who reads Nostradamus's work will realize that his prophecy of the restoration of Israel is accurate; but it needs a working knowledge of the Bible to give it the credit for having predicted the event nearly 3,000 years earlier.

Finally, there is the ex eventu explanation—that some prophecies of Nostradamus may have been written (or 'tampered with') after the events to which they relate occurred. Some biblical scholars are often quick to point out that later books of the Old Testament, such as Daniel, which contains a summary of the histories of Greek dynasties of Egypt and Syria from 330 to 165 BC, may have been written after the event. This is not the place to discuss such a claim, but it is fairly certain that some alterations occurred to the Centuries after Nostradamus's death. The first edition (1555) of the Centuries is incomplete, and only contains the first few centuries. It is also known that there were forgeries later attributed to Nostradamus, such as that relating to Mazarin, Richelieu's successor and that relating to the final supremacy of Louis XIV.

There, then are the eight factors that have helped to make the prophecies of Nostradamus successful predictions of future events. None of these alone is sufficient: all are necessary. Even so, not all of them will necessarily explain the 'genius' that has survived as 'Nostradamus'….

[I believe that, as Nostradamus's career demonstrates] someone with an outdated knowledge of scientific invention and Biblical interpretation could (and therefore can!) demonstrate overwhelming powers of foresight. If this was possible in the leisurely unsophisticated times of Nostradamus, how much more possible is it to do so in our own days!