BY NOW YOU HAVE PROBABLY HEARD the e-mail hoax about the Arab who warned his girlfriend not to be in New York on September 11 and not to be in a mall on Halloween. You’ve heard about the thousands of Jews who did not show up to work at the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks (thus pointing to a Mossad conspiracy). And the one about the man who safely rode down 80 floors on top of the rubble as one of the Twin Towers collapsed. But of all the electronic hoaxes to come out of the terrorist attacks last month, there’s one that is a hardy perennial: That the French prophet Nostradamus had predicted this all along. In the most prevalent version of this tall tale, Nostradamus is said to have predicted in 1654 that “In the city of York, there will be a great collapse, two twin brothers will be torn apart by chaos. The third big war will begin when the big city is burning.” Wrong on three levels. This prophecy was written for a college term paper in 1997; Nostradamus wrote in a distinctive style of cryptic quatrains and anagrams; and he couldn’t have written anything in 1654 because he died in 1566. Still, the prophet haunts us with regularity. Ten years ago, college students in the Northeast were terrorized by a Nostradamus prediction that on the night of October 31, there would be a mass murder on a campus located somewhere between a reservoir and a cemetery. At Georgetown University, more than a few students thought this was a reference to their school, which has a dormitory located between a Jesuit graveyard and Washington’s Reservoir Road. At other colleges, the prediction involved a “U” shaped building. In other places, it was a “T” shaped building. Basically, the murders would occur at your college and the prediction would be modified to fit your surroundings. And of course, none of this came true. DESPITE THE ASSOCIATION OF HIS NAME WITH HOAXES, Michel de Nostradame was a real person, born in Saint-Remy in 1503. You can still see his tomb in the Church of Saint Lawrence in Salon, France. He came from a Jewish family well grounded in the sciences, a family forced to convert to Catholicism by an edict of Louis XII. Young Michel studied mathematics, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. In later years, he attended the University of Montpellier where he studied medicine and received his medical license in 1525–just in time to treat the victims of the plague. It was there that he made a name for himself, apparently having cured several patients by concocting his own drugs. Nostradamus settled in Agen, married, and had two children. But then the plague returned, and this time it took his wife, son, and daughter. Having thus lost his reputation as a competent physician, he first wandered Europe and then settled in the tiny town of Salon around 1546. By this time, he had become something of a seer, and in 1550 he published his first almanac. As biographer Edgar Leoni explains in his definitive “Nostradamus and his Prophecies,” “from the very beginning of his stay in Salon he was the subject of abuse as a minion of Satan, as a Jew (though converted, a fact that did not impress the mob), and as a suspected Huguenot sympathizer.” Still, his first almanac proved a success and Nostradamus would continue publishing almanacs each year. According to Leoni, “The profit and the renown that he obtained from the fast-selling almanacs soon led him to conceive the most pretentious plan for a book of prophecies ever held by any man.” This, of course, was Nostradamus’s magnum opus, “The Centuries.” The book was supposed to contain predictions for the next two thousand years. Each century would contain one hundred quatrains. In reality, some centuries have less than a hundred quatrains; Century Seven was never completed; some centuries are repeated. Worse: It turns out that Nostradamus’ use of the term “century” bears no relationship to the calendar. Predictions for the 1600s are found in Century Eight while predictions for the 1900s are in Century Three. Very few exact dates are provided. Some are given using the alignment of planets. Thus any of the quatrains can be read in any number of ways–and they certainly have been ever since, especially in times of war. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels was an avid reader of Nostradamus and was fascinated by the quatrains dealing with the reemergence of a German empire, one that was supposed to conquer France. No doubt he skipped the later quatrains that deal with the fall of “Hister” and Germany’s ultimate defeat. Perhaps the most memorable latter day interpreter of the French prophet, though, is Orson Welles, host of the 1980 docudrama “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow.” (Welles is a giant on screen–quite literally. The man must have weighed 300 pounds. He wore what can only be described as a black tent and he chomps on a stogie throughout the entire film, never bothering to even take it out of his mouth while talking to the audience.) “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow” deals primarily with predictions of three Antichrists: One born in Italy who would reign in France as a dictator for fourteen years, defeated in Russia, and ultimately losing in a battle against “the leopard.” That man is Napoleon (the leopard was a nickname for Lord Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo). The second would lead “Germania” and overrun much of Western Europe. He “does worse than Nero, How much human blood to flow, valiant, be gone: He will cause the furnace to be rebuilt . . .” This is supposedly a reference to Adolf Hitler. And what of the third? Welles lingers over the quatrain that reads: “Out of the country of Greater Arabia shall be born a strong master of Mohammedan law. This king will enter Europe wearing a blue turban. He is one that shall cause the infernal gods of Hannibal to live again. He will be the terror of mankind, never more horror.” Welles thinks (though he stresses these are simply the opinions of “experts”) that this means the third Antichrist will come from the Middle East. Worse, from yet another quatrain, “the sky will burn at 45 degrees, fire approaching the Great New City.” Tracing the 45 degree latitude, says Welles, this could only mean New York City. (But New York City is closer to 40 degrees latitude–one city that intersects exactly at 45 degrees is Minneapolis. The producers must have thought death and destruction in Minnesota would be less impressive than in New York.) So what are we to make of all this? Is Osama bin Laden the man in the blue turban? Saddam Hussein was once the obvious candidate for Antichrist, since he was soundly defeated–as predicted 450 years earlier–thanks to an alliance “when those of the arctic pole are united together.” The arctic pole being a reference to the northern hemisphere powers, the United States and the Soviet Union. Still, some intriguing predictions were set forth by Orson Welles in 1980. He mentions a major earthquake to take place in 1988: The earthquake in Armenia in 1988 killed more than 55,000 people. The movie, of course, has you thinking the big quake will occur in San Francisco (the major earthquake that struck San Francisco happened in 1989). Also, the Third World War was supposed to commence sometime around 1999. Most shocking of all, though, is the prediction that still has me shuddering. Welles mentions a quatrain that may refer to the Kennedys: “The youngest son shall be slandered by a detractant, when enormous and martial deed shall be done, the least part shall be doubtful to the eldest. Soon after, they shall be equal in government.” As Orson Welles so deftly predicts, “This last line of the quatrain could suggest that 1984 may be Ted Kennedy’s year.” Predicting the future just isn’t what it used to be. Victorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.
