Originally posted by
[email protected] 04, 2007 11:14 pm
Nostradamus' quatrains can be fudgeted to mean just about anything.
Exactly.
Here is a letter I wrote to a friend, some 10 years ago, on the subject:
Dear buddy,
I must confess that I am not in the mood to read Fontbrune, even if I find the subject, naturally, very interesting. On what it comes to Nostradamus, in a more generic way, I would two different sets of remarks to make:
First, I strongly doubt the prophetical character of the centuries. Setting aside the natural - and healthy - skepticism - towards everything God, or nature did not give me the opportunity to experiment directly, I think that for somebody be believed as having foreseen the happenings of the last four centuries, they should have pointed at least the following facts:
- Power crossed the Atlantic Ocean. A prophesy that does not account for a new power, bigger and stronger than those of Europe, and clearly distinct from Islam, Russia and China, is very little prophetic;
- The West went through a radical change. To talk about Christendom, today, is a complete abstraction. Where are the fanaticism an religious hate that characterised both Roman and Reformed religion? West is nowadays deist, atheist or agnostic, or, better, pratices the secular religion of Money God, and this is the reason why, except for the known and isolated pathologies, we no longer kill on religious in the West. Nostradamus' interpreters seem to ignore this fact, e it seems natural to them that Nostradamus would put in the same Western bag both the Holy See and the French Republic. But an integrist, medieval Catholic medieval, integrista, like Nostradamus, could not do it; rather, if he had seen something, he would have to strongly denounce the aposthasy of the whole West as a block (including Peter's See, which is no longer the same);
- Islam reappears today, but after a period of strong decadence. During almost two centuries, the political power of the Ottoman Empire - thence the emblematic Muslism State - declined to the nadir of 1918. Only from the fall of the Shah Islam starts to have political importance again (even the political-military arab ressurgence of 1973 has very little to do with Islam). Even so, we are far away from an imperial, centralised power like the one Nostradamus used to know empirically. Nothing like that seem to be found in the Centuries. In fewer words, the struggle between Christendom and Islam, as it would be prophecised by Nostradamus, is - as in the two madmen joke - among a different couple of entities.
Second, even if we admit Nostradamus' prophetical abilities, I think it would be necessary a new prophet to understand him. Individuals and groups get mixed, signs e significates are so confused that it is only possible to find nexus in the Centuries a posteriori, and under the condition that we willing accept the most blatant absurds. For instance, here is Fontbrune's interpretation for the following stanza:
Lait, sang grenouilles escoudre en Dalmatie,
Conflit donné, peste près de Ballenes,
Cri sera grand pour toute Esclavonie,
Lors naîtra monstre près et dedans Ravenne.
(trying to literally translate it into English,
Milk, blood, toads boil in Dalmatia,
Conflict given, plague near Ballenes,
Scream will be through all of Sclavonia,
Thence born shall be monster near and within Ravena.)
To Fontbrune, this stanza referes to three different, though related, facts: civil war in Yugoslavia (Dalmatia), an attempt to massacre de immigrants in Quedlingburg, near Ballenstedt, in ex-Eastern German, and a neo-fascist demonstration in Ravena. But such interpretation was only possible after those facts happened simultaneously. For, if it is admissible that the word "blood", in itself, make us thing of war, who would imagine that plague near Ballenes could be a political phenomenon, instead of an epydemiological one? And who would see in a neofascist march in Ravena the "birth" of a monster that had been long not only born but reborn? Just the date coincidence is not enough to put in the same level a genocidal war that remade forever Europe's political map, and two episodes, that, brutal and repugnant as they are, can be at most minor links in a chain of events much more complex.
In a stanza supposed to refer to the future, on the other hand, Fontbrune interprets the verse
De Negrepont les poissons demy cuits
(Of the Black Sea the half-baked fish)
as an ecological catastrophe ecológica. I ask: why not a massacre of Christians (the fish is their symbol, etc.)? Why not a cholera epidemics, caused by semi-cooked fish? And so on! When - and if - some of those things happen, or some other that someway can be connected to those words, then we will retrospectively say that Nostradamus was right. But to expect a nuclear explosion (la chaleur solaire sus la mer) to boil the fish in the Bosphorus is as much reasonable as betting on a semi-Mithraic (solaire), semi-Christian (poissons demy cuits) heresy... I didn't even read the book; this example, to me quite clear, of double standards, cost me fifteen minutes: to examinate three already fulfilled quatrains and two yet to come!
So, it is an indecipherable puzzle, because we have no key. And as the key is missing, keysmiths of every kind come to propose themselves. That's not the way to discover anything about the future; rational analysis is always more powerful (though, of course, prone to mistakes) than such kind of speculation. It is not necessar to be a prophet to foresee that capital's acumulation's crisis is going to get decisively deeper in the coming years, nor that mystical "explanations" of all kinds will be raised to "prove" that the incoming horrors are not to be blamed on capital, but on Islam, on the Jews, the Freemasons, the Communists, the left-handed, the vegetarians, the devil.
Luís Henrique