Word: nostradamus
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...historical figure, Nostradamus cannot help but fascinate. Born Michel de Nostredame in 1503 in St. Remy, Provence, to a family of converted Jews, Nostradamus achieved celebrity as a physician long before his foray into prophesy. After excelling as a medical student at Montpelier, he enjoyed unprecedented success in treating the 1546 charbon, the Black Death. Always the iconoclast, he achieved his results by rejecting traditional treatments such as bleeding and, instead, stressing hygiene and diet, and giving his patients lozenges made of rose petals and other herbs (really, vitamin C). He seems truly to have been ahead of his time...
...current celebrity derives from his many prophesies. His Les Propheties, begun in 1554, consists of 10 volumes, each containing 100 cryptic quartrains (hence the work's common English name, "The Centuries"). John Hogue, a self-styled "Nostradamian," has edited a recently published version of the work entitled Nostradamus: The Complete Prophesies. Hogue fancies himself something of a prophet in his own right and his commentaries give new meaning to the term "exegesis." Nonetheless, he does reproduce the original, archaic French text, so I sat down with his volume to discover what all the clamor was about...
...Nostradamus does indeed seem to predict a major catastrophe on the verge of the millennium...
...course, people only pay attention to Nostradamus's doomsday prophesies because of his alleged success in predicting other major events. But actually reading these famous prophesies would make a skeptic out of even the most enthusiastic investigator. Take, for example, the quatrain that Hogue and company take to be Nostradamus's prophesy of the Kennedy assassination...
Hogue employs a "seek and ye shall find" method of prophesy-hunting. Nostradamus wrote 1,000 quatrains, so anything has got to be in there somewhere. As for Nostradamus's prophetic powers, we'll be able to judge better in three years. But I for one won't be holding my breath waiting for Genghis Khan to come back. I am confident that the Class of 2000 will be welcomed into "the community of educated men and women" on a sunny June day in Harvard Yard...