Nostradamus

Nostradmus may have lived in the sixteenth century, but if you believe what his followers say (and I would encourage you not to), his gaze extended far into the future. He’s been credited with predicting numerous major world events such as the great London fire of 1666, the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the Iranian revolution of 1979.

Of course, the big problem with Nostradamus’s predictions is that he’s never very specific about anything. You can never tell he’s predicted something before the event actually happens. Everything becomes clear only in hindsight. And when I say ‘clear,’ I mean that in the most ambiguous, murky sense.

Soon after 9/11 an email began to circulate around claiming that he had foretold the terrorist attacks. A number of ‘genuine Nostradamus quatrains’ were offered as proof of this claim. There were a couple of different versions of these quatrains that got passed around, but the most popular set read as follows:

In the City of God there will be a great thunder,
Two brothers torn apart by Chaos,
while the fortress endures,
the great leader will succumb.

The third big war will begin when the big city is burning.

On the 11th day of the 9 month,
two metal birds will crash into two tall statues
in the new city,
and the world will end soon after.

Wow! Sure sounds like Nostradamus nailed that one. Just one problem. These quatrains don’t appear in any of Nostradamus’s writings. He never wrote them. So he can’t get credit for them.

The final five lines appear to have been written after 9/11 by an anonymous prankster. More intriguing, however, are the first four lines. They were written before 9/11 by a college student named Neil Marshall. He included them in an article in which, ironically enough, he was debunking Nostradamus. He wanted to show that if you write something vague enough it can be interpreted to mean almost anything. Evidently he succeeded a little too well in his imitation of Nostradamus. (Or maybe Neil possesses hidden powers that he was never aware of. Maybe he’s the next Nostradamus!)

Numerous people were taken in by these phony Nostradamus quatrains, and interest in Nostradamus rose to an all-time high. For a brief while his name became the most popular search term on all the major internet search engines. And I bet that’s something that not even Nostradamus predicted would ever happen.

Text copyright © 2002 Alex Boese