That said, at least Nostradamus predicted his own death in 1566. Mind you, given that the prediction was made a day before he died, and that he was almost bedridden with arthritis, dropsy and arteriosclerosis, perhaps this was not so much a symptom of his prophetic genius as a statement of the obvious. In desperate times, soothsayers have a ready audience for their nonsense. It’s the meeting point of cynicism and gullibility Dan Jones

But not everywhere. It will mark the commencement of what will long endure. For beginning with this year the Christian Church will be persecuted more fiercely than it ever was in Africa, and this will last up to the year 1792, which they will believe to mark a renewal of time. So much so that persons of future times may be seen in present ones, because God Almighty has wished to reveal them by means of images, together with various secrets of the future vouchsafed to orthodox astrology, as was the case in the past, so that a measure of power and divination passed through them, the flame of the spirit inspiring them to pronounce upon inspiration both human and divine. God may bring into being divine works, which are absolute; there is another level, that of angelic works; and a third way, that of the evildoers.Ever since my long-beclouded face first presented itself before the immeasurable deity of your Majesty, O Most Christian and Most Victorious King, I have remained perpetually dazzled by that sovereign sight. I have never ceased to honor and venerate properly that date when I presented myself before a Majesty so singular and so humane. I have searched for some occasion on which to manifest high heart and stout courage, and thereby obtain even greater recognition of Your Most Serene Majesty. But I saw how obviously impossible it was for me to declare myself. Perhaps Nostradamus is an unreliable guide to the future. Between about 1547 and 1555, he reportedly dictated 942 poetic, prophetic quatrains to his secretary while high on nutmeg, which causes hallucinations when taken in large doses. Even in his lifetime he was trolled mercilessly. “A certain brainless and lunatic idiot,” ran 1558’s First Invective of the Lord Hercules the Frenchman Against Monstradamus, “who is shouting nonsense and publishing his prognostications and fantasies on the streets.”

The world has been shaken by seismic economic shifts in recent times, with the soaring cost of living affecting everything from food to fuel. Nostradamus seemed to have seen this coming with his grim prediction: ‘So high will the bushel of wheat rise / That man will be eating his fellow man’. Michel de Nostradame was born in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in 1503. Though Catholic, he later traded on his Jewish ancestry by saying his natural instinct for prophecy was “inherited from my forebears”. He made his early living as a travelling apothecary, much in demand for the treatment of plague victims. “His time was comparable to ours,” says historian Dan Jones. “He lived when there were also massive social divisions and catastrophes. It was also a time in which the new invention of the printing press made the transmission of ideas, and crazy mad bullshit, incredibly easy. It was the social media of its day.” The sepulcher, for long an object of such great veneration, will remain in the open, exposed to the sight of the heavens, the Sun and the Moon. The holy place will be converted into a stable for a herd large and small, and used for profane purposes. Oh, what a calamitous affliction will pregnant women bear at this time. All these figures represent the just integration of Holy Scriptures with visible celestial bodies, namely, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and others conjoined, as can be seen at more length in some of the quatrains. I would have calculated more profoundly and integrated them even further, Most Serene King, but for the fact that some given to censure would raise difficulties. Therefore I withdraw my pen and seek nocturnal repose. However, not everyone was enamored with Nostradamus’ predictions. He was criticized by professional astrologers of the day for incompetence and assuming that comparative horoscopy (the comparison of future planetary configurations with those accompanying known past events) could predict the future. How Did Nostradamus Die?I am not saying, my son - mark me well, here - that knowledge of such things cannot be implanted in your deficient mind, or that events in the distant future may not be within the understanding of any reasoning being. Nevertheless, if these things current or distant are brought to the awareness of this reasoning and intelligent being they will be neither too obscure nor too clearly revealed. Nostradamus developed some very progressive methods for dealing with the plague. He didn’t bleed his patients, instead practicing effective hygiene and encouraging the removal of the infected corpses from city streets. The said reign of the Antichrist will last only to the death of him who was born at the beginning of the age and of the other one of Lyon, associated with the elected one of the House of Modena and of Ferrara, maintained by the Adriatic Ligurians and the proximity of great Sicily. Then the Great St. Bernard will be passed. As the year comes to a close, it’s time to talk doomsday forecasts, my babies, and no one grips us with grim quite like Nostradamus.

Nostradamus’s prediction of a fiery Mars has received newfound interest in light of our current fascination with the Red Planet. I have calculated and composed all during choice hours of well-disposed days, and as accurately as I could, all when Minerva was free and not unfavorable. I have made computations for events over almost as long a period to come as that which has already passed, and by these they will know in all regions what is to happen in the course of time, just as it is written, with nothing superfluous added, although some may say, There can be no truth entirely determined concerning the future.During this time, young Nostradame was taught the rudiments of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and mathematics. It’s believed that his grandfather also introduced him to the ancient rites of Jewish tradition and the teachings of astrology, giving Nostradame his first exposure to the idea of the heavens and how they might drive human destiny. Education

The supporting common people will rise up and chase out the adherents of the legislators. From the way realms will have been weakened by the Easterners, it will seem that God the Creator has loosed Satan from the prisons of hell to give birth to the great Dog and Dogam, who will make such an abominable breach in the Churches that neither the reds nor the whites without eyes or hands will know what to make of it, and their power will be taken from them.

DISASTROUS EARTHQUAKE

The countries, towns, cities, realms and provinces which will have abandoned their old customs to gain liberty, but which will in fact have enthralled themselves even more, will secretly have wearied of their liberty. Faith lost in their perfect religion, they will begin to strike to the left, only to return to the right. Holiness, for a long time overcome, will be replaced in accordance with the earliest writings. God's mysteries are incomprehensible and the power to influence events is bound up with the great expanse of natural knowledge, having its nearest most immediate origin in free will and describing future events which cannot be understood simply through being revealed. Neither can they be grasped through men's interpretations nor through another mode of cognizance or occult power under the firmament, neither in the present nor in the total eternity to come But bringing about such an indivisible eternity through Herculean efforts, things are revealed by the planetary movements. There are some who would attribute to me that which is not mine at all. The eternal God alone, who is the thorough searcher of humane hearts, pious, just and merciful, is the true judge, and it is to him I pray to defend me from the calumny of evil men. These evil ones, in their slanderous way, would likewise want to inquire how all your most ancient progenitors, the Kings of France, have cured the scrofula, how those of other nations have cured the bite of snakes, how those of yet other nations have had a certain instinct for the art of divination and still others which would be too long to recite here. Over the next several years, Nostradamus traveled throughout France and Italy, treating victims of the plague. There was no known remedy at the time; most doctors relied on potions made of mercury, the practice of bloodletting and dressing patients in garlic-soaked robes. Further material was gleaned from the De honesta disciplina of 1504 by Petrus Crinitus, [46] which included extracts from Michael Psellos's De daemonibus, and the De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum ( Concerning the mysteries of Egypt), a book on Chaldean and Assyrian magic by Iamblichus, a 4th-century Neo-Platonist. Latin versions of both had recently been published in Lyon, and extracts from both are paraphrased (in the second case almost literally) in his first two verses, the first of which is appended to this article. While it is true that Nostradamus claimed in 1555 to have burned all of the occult works in his library, no one can say exactly what books were destroyed in this fire.