Nostradamus

From RationalWiki
Jump to: navigation, search
Nostradamus trying hard to look like a real scientist.

Nostradamus was a sixteenth-century French chemist who predicted a lot of stuff. As with all visionaries, his success rate has been found to be perfect in hindsight. This is mostly due to the fact that he wrote his predictions in such broad and obscure language that they can be shoehorned to fit nearly any set of events:

The river that tries the new Celtic heir Will be in great discord with the Empire: The young Prince through the ecclesiastical people Will remove the sceptre of the crown of concord.

In the sacred temples scandals will be perpetrated, They will be reckoned as honors and commendations: Of one of whom they engrave medals of silver and of gold, The end will be in very strange torments.

Nostradamus was a Protestant in a time and place when Catholics were burning them at the stake. He couched his letters to other Protestants in obscure symbolism. These writings are today being reinterpreted as prophesies.

[edit] The end of the world

Some predictions by Nostradamus suggested that the world would end in 1999.[1] Obviously, that didn't happen. Then, some Nostradamus supporters suggested it would be in 2012, which obviously didn't happen either. And they wanted you to pay for the news.

Available as a Book Download ($14.95) or Softcover ($19.95)!

Perhaps they hoped people wouldn't remember 1999.[2] Nostradamus' believers will probably revise the date yet again—you don't need precognition to predict that.

Up until 1991 (when the USSR broke up) Nostradamus' books supposedly "predicted" a war between the United States and Soviet Union. None of them predicted the breakup of the Soviet Union. Cecil Adams, himself no slouch as a seer, put it best: "Nostradamus did for bullshit what Stonehenge did for rocks."

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

  1. "King of Terror: 1999". Morgana's Observatory. 2006. http://www.dreamscape.com/morgana/1999.htm
  2. "The Nostradamus Code: World War III, 2009-2012". NostradamusOnline.com. 2009. http://www.nostradamusonline.com/?a=383
Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Community
Toolbox
support