|
All Prophecies of Nostradamus
The Prophecies. In this book
he compiled his collection of major, long-term predictions. The first installment
was published in 1555. The second, with 289 further prophetic verses, was
printed in 1557. The third edition, with three hundred new quatrains, was
reportedly printed in 1558, but nowadays only survives as part of the omnibus
edition that was published after his death in 1568. This version contains
one unrhymed and 941 rhymed quatrains, grouped into nine sets of 100 and
one of 42, called "Centuries".
Given printing practices
at the time (which included type-setting from dictation), no two editions
turned out to be identical, and it is relatively rare to find even two
copies that are exactly the same. Certainly there is no warrant for assuming
– as would-be "code-breakers" are prone to do – that either the spellings
or the punctuation of any edition are Nostradamus' originals.
The Almanacs. By far the
most popular of his works, these were published annually from 1550 until
his death. He often published two or three in a year, entitled either Almanachs
(detailed predictions), Prognostications or Presages (more generalized
predictions).
Nostradamus was not only
a diviner, but a professional healer, too. It is known that he wrote at
least two books on medical science. One was an alleged "translation" of
Galen, and in his so-called Traité des fardemens (basically a medical
cookbook containing, once again, materials borrowed mainly from others),
he included a description of the methods he used to treat the plague —
none of which, not even the bloodletting, apparently worked. The same book
also describes the preparation of cosmetics.
A manuscript normally known
as the Orus Apollo also exists in the Lyon municipal library, where upwards
of 2,000 original documents relating to Nostradamus are stored under the
aegis of Michel Chomarat. It is a purported translation of an ancient Greek
work on Egyptian hieroglyphs based on later Latin versions, all of them
unfortunately ignorant of the true meanings of the ancient Egyptian script,
which was not correctly deciphered until the advent of Champollion in the
19th century.
Since his death only the
Prophecies have continued to be popular, but in this case they have been
quite extraordinarily so. Over two hundred editions of them have appeared
in that time, together with over 2000 commentaries. Their popularity seems
to be partly due to the fact that their vagueness and lack of dating make
it easy to quote them selectively after every major dramatic event and
retrospectively claim them as "hits"
source
'Nostradamus, Bibliomancer'
by Peter
Lemesurier
Translations and notes Copyright
© Peter Lemesurier 2009
|
|