Category Archives: End of the World 2012

Perhaps the most notorious of European soothsayers is the 16th-century French apothecary, Michel de Nostredame, better known by his Latinized name, Nostradamus.

(His surname, like the Paris cathedral, simply means “Our Lady.”  His Jewish grandfather converted to Catholicism on Our Lady’s Day, 1455, and, like many a new-born [and ancient Mesoamericans], adopted the name of his “birthday” as his own.)

His famed Prophecies purportedly predicted pivotal and tragic events in Europe and America such as World War II, Princess Diana’s death, and the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center Towers (nobody claims they predicted any events in Asia or Africa, as far as I know).  Lately they have been applied to 2012.

He composed his prophecies over eleven years for an annual Almanac that he first published in 1550.  (This tradition continues, in such publications as the Old Farmer’s Almanac, whose long-range weather predictions are reputed to be better than the US Weather Service’s.)  He selected about a thousand of these to re-cast as 4-line rhymed poems (called quatrains), and they were published in many editions.   Due to the casual standards of 16th and 17th-century typesetters, no two copies are exactly alike.  Most English translations are based on later, increasingly corrupted, copies of copies.  Very few versions of his prophecies can be trusted.  But the worst of it is, his own obscurantist compositions are impossible to pin down.

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