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Prophecies Nostradamus

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Prophecies Nostradamus

The first major literary presentation of Nostradamus's Prophecies, newly translated and edited by prizewinning scholars

Penguin-Hardback-Classic

The mysterious quatrains of the sixteenth-century French astrologer Nostradamus have long proved captivating for their predictions. Nostradamus has been credited with anticipating the Great Fire of London, the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the September 11 terrorist attacks. Today, as the world grapples with financial meltdowns, global terrorism, and environmental disasters—as well as the Mayan prediction of the apocalypse on December 21, 2012—his prophecies of doom have assumed heightened relevance.

How has The Prophecies outlasted most books from the Renaissance? This edition considers its legacy in terms of the poetics of the quatrains, published here in a brilliant new translation and with introductory material and notes mapping the cultural, political, and historical forces that resonate throughout Nostradamus's epic, giving it its visionary power.

Working with what he called “natural instinct” and “poetic furor,” and wearing laurel crowns and a sky-blue stone ring, he composed hundreds of quatrains that mix what the French historian and Nostradamus biographer Stéphane Gerson calls, in his introduction to this volume, “astrology, prophecy, melancholy poetry, magic, and history.”

You can read almost anything into Nostradamus’s verse — he intentionally kept things vague — and over the centuries people have. Certain lines are said to have predicted Napoleon’s rise, Hitler’s fall, Hiroshima, the arrival of the Kennedy brothers

(“... three fine children shall be born:/Ruin to the people when they come of age”), the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Sept. 11, among hundreds of other events.

Credit...Alessandra Montalto/The New York Times

Among the daft pleasures of reading Nostradamus has always been plucking out word clusters that might apply to one’s own neuroses. When he writes, “I feel that the world of letters shall undergo such a massive & incomparable collapse,” was he predicting the end of independent bookstores? Does his line about “a great nation caught up in dubious war” apply to America’s folly in Iraq?