Summary
After having studied him for more than 40 years, I believe that Nostradamus deserves a place within the pantheon of Renaissance geniuses. Maybe one day soon Nostradamus will receive the scholarly recognition that he deserves.
Michel de Nostredame, aka Nostradamus, has been the most renowned psychic astrologer for the past 500 years. Even today, when a disaster or something really unusual happens, social media is filled with references to his predictions.
He was a Renaissance genius who spoke at least four languages, was a doctor who saved hundreds or thousands of lives from the plague, and was advisor and doctor to the French King and Queen and many others.
His two most-famous books “The Prophecies” have survived the many years and demonstrate his unswerving abilities. He was human – therefore his predictions were not always perfect.
Yet the accuracy of most of them is nothing short of amazing, and his foresight about the progress of Western civilization from his time until now has eerily paralleled what is written in our history books.
“The Prophesies” contained predictions written in two forms. Most were written as poems – ten Centuries, each having about one hundred Quatrains, with four-lines that alternately rhymed. Others were written in prose form, where many events were presented in sequence.
His and his family’s lives were constantly threatened because powerful people did not always like what he predicted.
The books which had been written by previous seers containing predictions made openly had been hidden away by the powerful. So he encrypted most of his prophecies in secret codes to protect their survival, predicting that some people in the future would be able to decipher them.
He hoped that they would remain in public long enough to be decoded or to become apparent after the events had unfolded.
He made a few predictions openly, and many of them came true during his lifetime, launching his legend.
He used a classical form of astrology to determine the dates and places and general descriptions of future events. Like Judicial Astrologers for millennia before him, he particularly used the patterns of the conjunctions of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, when every few decades the planets appear close together in the night sky.
He may have used a mechanical computer designed in ancient Greece to make those calculations for many centuries into his future.
He then put himself into psychic mode, usually at night, perhaps with the help of a mirror from the Aztecs.
His used the astral projection of his mind to travel to the times and places specified by his astrological calculations to see the details of what would happen, sometimes to even hear names and words spoken.
Nostradamus wrote that some events like natural disasters or supernovae are beyond the control of humans, but that he did not believe in “fate” – he believed that people have choices.
However he held that most people make the “obvious” choice, and those lead to the most probable outcomes which he foresaw.
It is very likely that he predicted meteors, comets and supernovae, using knowledge from ancient Greek and Egyptian manuscripts written at least 2,000 years before his time, and perhaps 9,000 years before. Some of that knowledge may be more advanced than ours today.
In a future article about Precession and the Golden Age, I will examine how his prophecies fit into the temporal framework of an astrological cycle tens of thousands of years long as recorded by the ancients.
I will detail how this long cycle is broken-down into shorter cycles measured by the patterns of the grand conjunctions of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars (and the other Outer Planets).
That article will reveal how seers have used the patterns of these conjunctions down through history to predict world events, and what they tell us about our future.
I will explore just what “The Age of Aquarius” means. Some people in the past thought it had already begun. Our American Founding Fathers knew all about this, and hid that evidence in plain sight in secret code.
I would like to thank you for reading these articles and for sharing my passion about Nostradamus.
I also want to send a warm thank you to Celeste Nash-Weninger at the American Federation of Astrologers for her kind words of encouragement, and her patience in reformatting my work for publication in the journal Today’s Astrologer; and Kathryn Silverton of the Metropolitan Atlanta Astrological Society for her proofreading, and assistance getting this online.