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The familiar topic of Nostradamus, the famous doctor and quatrain writer/future predictor is finally taken on, with mostly interesting results.
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00:00This series presents information based in part on theory and conjecture.
00:17The producer's purpose is to suggest some possible explanations, but not necessarily the only ones, to the mysteries we will examine.
00:25Four hundred years ago, a renowned French doctor decided to put in writing strange visions that he summoned up by occult means.
00:38He believed they foretold the future, and they have become known as the prophecies of Nostradamus.
00:46Many people have trusted them completely, and even planned their lives around them.
00:52Adolf Hitler was one.
00:56The words of Nostradamus, although written four centuries earlier, seemed to describe Hitler uncannily.
01:04In the court of Henry II and Catherine de' Medici, Nostradamus was believed.
01:10Were they all deluded?
01:14Or was there some mystic formula which Nostradamus used to foresee events yet to happen?
01:20Early in the 16th century, Nostradamus gained fame as an astrologer after he published prophecies in verse form.
01:37Nostradamus described his method of predicting the future.
01:40Sitting alone at night in secret study, it is placed on the brass tripod.
01:48A slight flame comes out of the emptiness and makes successful that which should not be believed in vain.
01:54A wand in the hand is placed in the middle of the tripod's legs.
02:01With water, he sprinkles the hem of his garment and his foot.
02:06A voice, fear, he trembles in his robes. Divine splendor.
02:12Divine splendor.
02:14The God sits nearby.
02:25Since the beginning of history, advice has been sought from prophets who foretold disasters yet to come.
02:31Mankind's belief in free will and control of our own destiny sits uneasily with a suspicion that catastrophes, natural and man-made, are in some way pre-ordained.
02:48Nostradamus himself believed that his predictions were of fates that could be avoided, destinies that could be changed.
03:08He never doubted that he was genuinely seeing the future.
03:11He chose to write his prophecies in what are known as quatrains, four-lined rhyming verse in the Provençal dialect of southern France, which was his home.
03:26It was the time of the Inquisition, when men and women were burned for lesser heresies than the one he practiced.
03:33So he deliberately disguised and confused the quatrains, using anagrams, Latin and Greek.
03:41Specific dates are rare.
03:44Even so, his verses evoke vivid images of calamities on earth.
03:53At sunrise a great fire will be seen, noise and light extending towards the north.
03:58Within the globe, death and cries are heard.
04:03Death awaiting them through weapons, fire and famine.
04:12The greatest army on the march put to flight will scarcely be pursued further.
04:20When the army reassembled and the legion reduced, they will be driven out of France completely.
04:28Death awaiting them for the first time.
04:29The war was made of France.
04:30The war was made of France.
04:31The war was made of France.
04:33The war was made of France.
04:35The war was made of France.
04:37The war was made of France.
04:38He organized his quatrains in groups of 100, called centuries.
04:42Nearly 1,000 predictions have come down to us.
04:47His fame spread with extraordinary speed after publication of the first volume in 1555.
04:54At the court of Henry II and Catherine de' Medici, they were read avidly.
05:04One was of particular interest because it was thought to predict the manner of the king's
05:09death.
05:10The young lion will overcome the older one in a field of combat in a single fight.
05:16He will pierce his eyes in their golden cage.
05:19Two wounds in one, then he dies a cruel death.
05:26An Italian prophet had already warned Henry II that both the beginning and end of his
05:31reign would be marked by a duel.
05:34The first duel had been fought without injury, and now it was thought that the king's jousting
05:39days were over.
05:41But the occasion of a double royal wedding of his sister and his daughter to foreign nobility
05:48proved too much of a temptation.
05:55He faced his young lion, Count Gabriel de Montgomery.
06:00The young lion will overcome the older one in a field of combat in a single fight.
06:07The king wore a protective visor, according to contemporary accounts, made of gold.
06:17Was this, as Nostradamus called it, a golden cage?
06:21A field of combat in a single fight.
06:22A field of combat in a single fight.
06:28The two horsemen raced towards each other.
06:29Montgomery, too late, tried to withdraw his lance.
06:35The lance splintered, fragments driving up under the protective gold visor.
06:36Montgomery, too late, tried to withdraw his lance.
06:42The lance splintered, fragments driving up under the protective gold visor.
07:08Henry II took ten agonizing days to die from septicemia.
07:13It seemed such a striking confirmation of Nostradamus' prediction that Catherine de
07:17Medici made him Médecins du Roi, a doctor and soothsayer by royal appointment.
07:25For the rest of his life, he was famed throughout Europe.
07:29And after his death in 1566, people began to interpret lines from his quatrains as referring
07:37to their own time.
07:38Erika Cheatham, a scholar of medieval French who has made a special study of Nostradamus,
07:45finds some of these supposed prophecies significant.
07:48One of the things I find most convincing about Nostradamus and personally made me really interested
07:56in following him through was the fact he gave specific dates that occurred after his death.
08:01He writes that in 1666, the city of London should be destroyed by fire.
08:06He gives the date of the death of King Charles I, 1649.
08:12The Parliament put the King of London to death.
08:14Louis Pasteur, the great biologist, he not only gives his name, but in the same verse,
08:19he gives the founding of the Institute, 1895.
08:23London burnt by fire in three times twenty plus six.
08:31The great fire of London happened in 1666.
08:38The French Revolution in 1791.
08:50By night, he will come through the forest, two partners in a roundabout way.
08:56The Queen, the white stone, the monk king dressed in grey at Varennes.
09:05Marie Antoinette, her hair turned white through shock, escaped with Louis XVI secretly through
09:11the town of Varennes.
09:13For not wanting to consent to the divorce, which then will be recognized as unworthy,
09:20the King of the Islands will be forced to flee and one put in his place who has no sign of kingship.
09:29King Edward VII of Britain abdicated because of his love of Mrs. Simpson and spent the rest
09:35of his life in exile.
09:39His brother George, who never expected nor wanted to become king, ruled in his place.
09:48For those who see Nostradamus as having an outstanding prophetic gift, two names are always put forward.
09:57Napoleon.
09:59Hitler.
10:02Both names, if they were truly foreseen by Nostradamus, were disguised or coded.
10:09Napoleon was written as an anagram.
10:12Paul Ney Laurent.
10:15Juggle these around and they become Napoleon Roy, Napoleon the King.
10:23Napoleon, after his defeat at Waterloo, was exiled on the tiny island of Elba.
10:31After his escape and his victorious 100 days, a new empire began to grow for him.
10:37Stained with murder and enormous adulteries, the great enemy of all mankind, he will be worse
10:44than his ancestors, uncles and fathers in steel, fire and water, bloody and inhuman.
10:52Out of nearly 1,000 such quatrains that Nostradamus wrote, how many can be interpreted as having
11:07come true?
11:09Scholars such as Erica Cheatham think the proportion is very high.
11:13In my opinion, I think perhaps 73% is a rough average of what has come true.
11:18But remember, that does cover a span of 400 years.
11:24As Hitler advanced through Europe, his colleague Goebbels was busy orchestrating a propaganda campaign
11:31based on the 400-year-old prophecies.
11:36True or not, they were to have an effect on the strategy of the Second World War.
11:47It was Frau Goebbels, wife of the Nazi propaganda minister, who first alerted Hitler to the
11:52strangely accurate way that Nostradamus seemed to describe events leading to the war in Europe.
12:01Elik Howe, a former British intelligence agent, detailed to assess the influence of Nostradamus
12:07on Hitler explains what happened.
12:11Around the 20th of November, 1940, once Goebbels was actually sleeping at home with his wife.
12:19She was reading a book about ancient prophecies and she was so excited about what she read
12:26about a particular prophecy which had been attributed to Nostradamus
12:32that she woke her husband up and said,
12:34Joseph, Joseph, Joseph, you must listen to this.
12:37There's this prophecy that there'd be a war in Poland in 1939 and it would be the end of the British Empire.
12:45And a couple of days later, Goebbels was instructing his studios at the propaganda ministry
12:54to prepare, without delay, a Nostradamus leaflet for the benefit of the French in order to depress and mislead them.
13:03No fewer than 13 quatrains seem to refer to Hitler, sometimes calling him Hister,
13:11sometimes the great or greatest leader, and describing the swastika as the crooked cross.
13:18Even before hostilities began, military leaders on the French side began to dig the Maginot line
13:25according to instructions apparently given by Nostradamus.
13:29A great trench, earth excavated. The water will be divided into 15 parts.
13:43The Nuremberg rally and the invasion and occupation of France.
13:49When the greatest man carried off the prize of Nuremberg, battle is joined with the French.
13:55He makes preparations. Some will regard him as good, others bad or uncertain.
14:10Italy and the pact with Mussolini.
14:14Not far from Venice, the two greatest ones of Asia and Africa will be said to come from the Rhine and Hitler.
14:24Mussolini's black-clothed fascists have the pact with Hitler.
14:32Liberty will be occupied by a black, proud and villainous man.
14:37By Hitler, the Republic of Venice will be vexed.
14:45Aerial warfare and the battle of Britain.
14:51He will use thunderbolts, so many in such an array.
14:55The machine of flying fire will come.
15:16A skeptic would call these quatrains obscure and irrelevant.
15:20And was Nostradamus genuinely foreseeing a swastika when he wrote the following?
15:28The great pontiff, by the Wallite party, who will subjugate the borders of the Danube.
15:34The cross, pursued by hook or crook.
15:38Captives, gold, jewels, more than 100,000 rubies.
15:45And are even the references by name to Napoleon and Hitler as accurate as they first appear?
15:53Author John Sladeck does not think so.
15:56There are hundreds of Napoleon quatrains in the prophecies.
16:00Mainly because I think the 19th century French scholars kept going over and over in Nostradamus
16:05and digging out anything that could be anything to do with Napoleon.
16:08But the one I noticed particularly is supposed to have an anagram of Napoleon,
16:13which is P-A-U-N-A-Y-L-O-R-O-N.
16:17If anybody can make Napoleon out of this, they're a pretty good mystic themselves.
16:21In fact, it could be an anagram of just about anything.
16:24It could be an anagram of your pal Anon.
16:27There are a number of predictions which refer to something or someone called Hister, H-I-S-T-E-R.
16:36And this is usually taken by the Nostradamus believers as Hitler.
16:42But in fact, it was a reference to the Danube River, which was called the Easter River in Nostradamus' time.
16:51It is said in defense of Nostradamus that he made his prophecies deliberately obscure
16:57in order to escape the charges of heresy and witchcraft.
17:01Moreover, if it is possible to look into the future, everyone in history who has attempted to do so
17:07has said that the picture is uncertain and indistinct,
17:11as if they are permitted only glimpses of what might be.
17:18Ron Wormuth, modern psychic, often consulted by the business community, explains foretelling the future.
17:26And the true psychic part or precognitive part, which is being able to sort of see around the bend in the river,
17:32as Einstein put it, is relatively rare in that sense where it's completely without any sort of an input.
17:39I do believe that we can prevent future events.
17:45I'm not a fatalist.
17:46I happen to believe that we do have free choice.
17:49And I feel that being forewarned is being forearmed,
17:53which means that if a psychic tells you something that's negative, you can change it.
17:59If the Nostradamus' predictions come true in our lifetime, might they help to establish his authenticity?
18:10They speak of actions begun by a man in France leading to a crisis in Persia,
18:15the land now called Iran.
18:17It was indeed in France that the Ayatollah Khomeini lived in exile
18:26before returning to take over from the Shah.
18:29Erica Cheatham finds this completely convincing.
18:32When I wrote it initially, I said that this particular prediction was rubbish.
18:38It's number 70 in century one.
18:41It talks of a man in a turban who shall sit in France plotting the downfall of the emperor of Persia.
18:50Unbelievable.
18:55Another quatrain can be taken to predict that the Prince of England will marry
18:59and that he will be the last prince on the English throne.
19:04Lastly, he seems, according to Erica Cheatham, to speak of the San Andreas Fault.
19:13A great earthquake.
19:15He gives an astrological date, the sun in 20 degrees of Taurus, which means May the 10th.
19:24He does not give the year.
19:29The overthrow of Ayatollah Khomeini.
19:36The last king of England.
19:39The eruption of the San Andreas earthquake on May the 10th.
19:45If all these happened, would it be just coincidence?
19:49One striking aspect of the prophecies of Nostradamus is that where they seem to mean something,
20:00they have often been unfulfilled.
20:02Hitler saw himself as the conqueror of Europe and Russia.
20:07Neither Nostradamus nor any of his astrologers foresaw his downfall.
20:13Napoleon believed he would win at Waterloo, as predicted by Nostradamus.
20:20He lost.
20:22The certain quatrains, which were taken to mean the French Revolution,
20:30and then were taken to mean the Napoleonic Wars, and then were taken to mean the First World War,
20:36and then were taken to mean the Second World War.
20:38So I don't suppose anything that's that vague really is of any value at all as far as predictive power.
20:47So far, a lot of the things he said have come true, or there has been accuracy there,
20:54because I believe he did predict the Second World War.
20:57He's predicted also to do with the massacre of the Jewish race.
21:01He also predicted a great deal to do with Hitler.
21:03He also predicted a lot of our problems we have of Russia.
21:06I mean, different things, and he has been very accurate.
21:09I mean, I think it has to speak for itself.
21:12In the end, perhaps most prophecies mean just what the listener intends them to mean.
21:19Possibly those rare true glimpses of the future that some people seem to have
21:24are half coincidence and half foresight.
21:28Perhaps they owe as much to self-fulfillment as to the supernatural.
21:33We cannot be sure.
21:42Coming up next, In Search Of continues with a look into the future at the end of life as we know it.
21:51Then, 20th Century with Mike Wallace takes a look at people who live on the edge in earthquake zones.
21:57And later tonight, Madam Hall's brothel, Alexander Graham Bell's bullet detector,
22:02and other extraordinary things with stories to tell on History's Lost and Found
22:06at 8 here on the History Channel, where the past comes alive.
22:12See you next time.
22:19Bye.
22:21I'm the CEO of Tenshata, from the storytelling of the새 Tonight Podcast.
22:25I'm the CEO of Tenshata.
22:27I'm the CEO of Tenshata.
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