Nostradamus: which “fulfilled” prophecies fall apart

What the prophecy says

Nostradamus left a book, not a single prophecy. Les Prophéties is a run of four-line verses, or quatrains, grouped into “centuries” of a hundred and written in ten-syllable French lines, as the Lyon municipal library described it in a 1997 exhibition. The verses scramble names and only hint at dates, so lists of Nostradamus predictions that came true can run long: a verse with no year and no clear subject can be matched to almost anything after the fact.

The claims fall into two groups. Most attach old verses to events that had already happened: the death of Henry II of France in 1559, the rise of Hitler, the attacks of 11 September 2001. One famous verse carries its own date and can be checked against the calendar.

Where it first appeared

Who was Nostradamus? The Lyon library’s chronology gives the essentials of his biography. Michel de Nostredame was born on 14 December 1503 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, into a family of converted Jews. He studied medicine at Montpellier, where he also learned astrology, then believed to influence the course of disease. In 1547 he was called on in Lyon, Marseille and Aix-en-Provence during outbreaks of plague. He married Anne Ponsard, settled in Salon-de-Provence and had six children.

He finished the manuscript at Salon on 1 March 1555. A Lyon official authorised the printer Macé Bonhomme to print it on 30 April, and it was printed on 4 May: Centuries I to III and 53 verses of the fourth, 353 quatrains in all. Catherine de’ Medici invited him to court in 1555 and came to consult him at Salon on 17 October 1564. He died on 2 July 1566. Centuries VIII to X first appear in an edition printed in Lyon in 1568, two years after his death, bringing the total to 939 quatrains by the library’s count; Sky HISTORY puts it at 942.

So is Nostradamus real? Yes: a practising physician with a documented life, and a book whose printing is on record to the day. What fails is the claim that it foretold particular modern events.

How the date spread

The book has been reprinted for more than four centuries, and demand rises in bad times. The Lyon exhibition argued that bibliographies of the editions and commentaries show a close match between crises and new editions, with a verse found in turn for the Catholic League, the Fronde, the Revolution, the Empire, both world wars and the fall of communism. An English translation with commentary by Theophilus Garencières was printed in London in 1672.

Japan had its own boom. A best-seller published there during the oil shock of the 1970s sold more than two million copies, the Associated Press reported in May 1999, and two dozen Nostradamus books appeared in Japan in 1998 alone. A Tokyo University anthropologist told the agency that such theories gain ground in times of social uncertainty.

The internet added forgeries. Soon after 11 September 2001, an email circulated a “Nostradamus” verse about the attacks. According to the Museum of Hoaxes, its first four lines came from an article by a college student, Neil Marshall, who was debunking Nostradamus by showing that vague enough writing can mean almost anything; the rest was apparently added after the attacks by an anonymous prankster. The Skeptic’s Dictionary dates Marshall’s essay to 1997, at Brock University in Canada. One version was signed “Nostradamus 1654”, 88 years after his death, and for a while his name was the most popular term on the major search engines.

What happened on the day

July 1999. The dated verse is X.72. In the 1672 edition it begins “L’an mil neuf cent nonante neuf, sept mois, / Du Ciel viendra un grand Roy d’effrayeur”: in the year 1999 and seven months, from the sky will come a great king of terror. TIME reported on 19 July 1999 that believers expected earthquakes, tsunamis and falling satellites that month. July came and went, as Sky HISTORY puts it. The details had drifted too: TIME dated the verse to 1555, but the Lyon library places Century X in the 1568 edition, and the “Angoumois” that Garencières read as Francis I, once Duke of Angoulême, had become a king of the Mongols in TIME’s translation.

Hitler. The claim rests on II.24. In the 1672 edition its second line reads “Plus part du Champ encontre Ister sera”, and Garencières’s note says simply that Ister is a river. Other editions print the word as Hister. The Skeptic’s Dictionary sets two modern translations side by side: Erika Cheetham turned the line into a battle against Hitler, while James Randi rendered the word as the lower Danube. Sky HISTORY calls Hister a period term for the lower Danube, and the word appears again in V.29 as a bridge over the river Hister.

Henry II. The oldest claimed hit is I.35: “Le Lion jeune le vieux surmontera, / En champ bellique par singulier Duelle, / Dans Cage dor Lœil il lui crevera”, the young lion will overcome the old in single combat and put out his eye in a golden cage. Henry II died on 10 July 1559 after being wounded in a tournament, four years after the verse was printed, and the Lyon library says the verse seems to describe it. It contains no name, place or year. Garencières credited the identification to Nostradamus’s son César, whose history of Provence appeared in 1614, and read the golden cage as a gilded helmet. The same note credits another astrologer, Luke Gaurick, with foretelling that death.

11 September 2001. The genuine verses offered for 9/11 fit no better. NBC News, reviewing the claim in 2011, cited the Nostradamus scholar Peter Lemesurier, who reads the “new city” of I.87 as a place whose name means new city in Greek or Latin; the verse’s earth-shaking flames, NBC adds, come from the centre of the world, not the sky. Lemesurier’s conclusion: “Of New York or the 9/11 tragedy he is clearly saying nothing.”

Verdict

Nostradamus was a real Renaissance physician and astrologer, and his book is real and well documented. The fulfilled prophecies are not. His most precisely dated verse failed. The Hitler verse names a river. The 9/11 verse was begun by a student debunking Nostradamus and finished by a prankster. The best early case, Henry II, is a verse without names or dates, matched to a king’s death after it happened: what NBC’s reviewer calls post-diction. Real or Legend files the Nostradamus predictions that came true as debunked.