Did Nostradamus Really Predict the Future? How His 'Hits' Are Made

No, not in any way that can be tested. Nostradamus (1503–1566) was a French apothecary, physician and astrologer whose book Les Prophéties, first published in 1555, contains 942 short verses called quatrains. Fans credit him with foreseeing the French Revolution, Napoleon, Hitler and the September 11 attacks, but no quatrain is known to have been interpreted as predicting a specific event before it happened, other than in vague terms that could fit many other events. The "hits" are found afterwards, by reading old, deliberately obscure verses in the light of whatever has just occurred. That does not make him uninteresting. His real life, as a plague doctor and best-selling almanac writer, is a remarkable Renaissance story.

A doctor from Provence

Michel de Nostredame was born in December 1503 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in the south of France. His father's family had originally been Jewish; his grandfather had converted to Catholicism around 1459–60 and taken the surname "Nostredame", Our Lady. Michel was one of at least nine children of a notary.

At fourteen he entered the University of Avignon, but after little more than a year the university closed during an outbreak of plague. By his own account he then spent years travelling the countryside researching herbal remedies. In 1529 he entered the medical school at Montpellier, but he was soon expelled when it was discovered that he had worked as an apothecary, a "manual trade" banned by the statutes, and that he had been slandering doctors. The expulsion document still exists in the faculty library.

Plague, loss and a "rose pill"

Plague shaped his life. He became known for a "rose pill" that supposedly protected against the disease. Around 1531 he married and had two children, but in 1534 his wife and both children died, presumably of the plague. Later he helped the physician Louis Serre fight a major outbreak in Marseille in 1545, then tackled outbreaks in Salon-de-Provence and Aix-en-Provence.

His own medical writing is less heroic than the legends suggest. In a book that was essentially a medical recipe collection, he described the methods he used against the plague, including bloodletting, and none of them apparently worked. In 1547 he settled in Salon-de-Provence, married a rich widow, Anne Ponsarde, and had six children with her.

From almanacs to prophecies

Around 1550 Nostradamus turned towards the occult. He wrote an almanac for that year, and for the first time printed his name in Latin form as "Nostradamus". It sold so well that he produced one or more every year until his death. The almanacs, which together contained at least 6,338 prophecies, were by far his most popular works in his lifetime. Wealthy clients began asking him for horoscopes, although professional astrologers criticised him for incompetence, and he often made errors when he had to calculate charts himself.

Then he began the project that made him famous: a book of about a thousand verses grouped in "Centuries" of one hundred. To protect himself from religious opposition, he obscured his meaning with Latin-style syntax, word games and a mix of Greek, Italian, Latin and Provençal. The first instalment of Les Prophéties appeared in 1555 with 353 quatrains, and the full posthumous edition of 1568 contained 942.

Friends in high places

The book got a mixed reception. Some people thought he was a servant of evil, a fake or insane; many of the elite thought otherwise. His most important admirer was Catherine de' Medici, wife of King Henry II of France. After reading almanacs that hinted at threats to the royal family, she summoned him to Paris to explain them and to draw horoscopes for her children. He feared he might be beheaded, but by the end of his life she had made him Counsellor and Physician-in-Ordinary to her son, King Charles IX.

He was not a persecuted heretic, as some stories claim. Prophecy and astrology were not heresy in themselves. His brief imprisonment in 1561 was for publishing an almanac without a bishop's permission, in breach of a royal decree.

A death "foretold"?

By 1566 his gout had turned into edema. On the evening of 1 July, he is alleged to have told his secretary Jean de Chavigny, "You will not find me alive at sunrise", and the next morning he was reportedly found dead. Even here the legend has been helped along: one of his verses was later edited by Chavigny to fit what happened. He was buried in Salon, and his tomb now lies in the Collégiale Saint-Laurent.

Where the sources really came from

Research suggests that much of his prophetic work paraphrases older end-of-the-world prophecies, mostly Bible-based, mixed with historical events and collections of omens, then projected into the future. That is why the quatrains mention ancient figures such as Nero, and describe "battles in the clouds" and "frogs falling from the sky". Most verses deal with disasters: plagues, earthquakes, wars, floods and invasions, all without dates.

How the famous "predictions" work

Over two hundred editions and over two thousand commentaries have appeared since his death. The quatrains survive partly because their vagueness and lack of dates make it easy to quote them after any dramatic event and claim a "hit". Popular authors have claimed he predicted whatever had just happened when their books came out, from the Moon landing to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Sceptics such as James Randi call this "retroactive clairvoyance", fitting words to events that have already occurred. The claim that one verse predicted King Henry II's death did not appear in print until 1614, 55 years after the event. The famous "1999" verse describes no event anyone has identified, and no quatrain says the world would end in 2012. Many English translations are also very poor, sometimes altered to fit events. During the Second World War, both Nazi Germany and the Allies even used Nostradamus in propaganda, a sign of how flexible the verses are.

Learn with Nostradamus: English phrases about predictions

Phrase	Meaning	Example
with hindsight	looking back after it happened	With hindsight, any verse can look like a prophecy.
to read between the lines	to find hidden meaning	Fans read between the lines of every quatrain.
vague enough to fit anything	too unclear to be tested	The verses are vague enough to fit anything.
to take it at face value	to accept it without question	Don't take viral prophecies at face value.
a self-fulfilling prophecy	a prediction that causes itself to come true	Panic can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Try this: Find a news headline from this week and write a fake "Nostradamus quatrain" that could fit it. Then explain in English, using "with hindsight", why it would not count as a real prediction.