NostraDumAss?
Thursday, July 6, 2006 at 11:30PM 
Is it a blessing to be paranoid? Usually I expect paranoid people to be pushy, biased and generally weird. Hero's are cool, composed and practical. But could a paranoid man save the world? Or could a hero miss saving the world coz he wasn’t paranoid enough? Will come back to this digression in a minute.
Nostradamus, the man who saw tomorrow! Nostradamus was born in 1503 in France, and lived till 1566. Many people believe that Nostradamus could predict the future. I don’t know if this is true but he definitely managed to make himself part of the future. Stories have been told of his great powers, one being, during a visit to Italy, Nostradamus passed a group of Franciscan monks, and suddenly exclaimed and threw himself down on the ground, bowing and clutching the garment of one of the monks, Felice Peretti, a former swine herder. When questioned about his act he replied "I must yield myself and bow before his Holiness!" 19 years after Nostradumas' death, Felice Peretti became Pope Sixtus V. After facing several ups and downs in life, Nostradamus settled down, writing down his predictions in 10 books named the Centuries, each containing 100 predictions written in 4 line verses called quatrains. Historians have dedicated their lives to making sense of his predictions, and their greatest shortcoming lie in the fact that almost no one has been able to flag a prediction before the occurrence of the event. More than half his predictions are believed by some to have been true in 20/20 hindsight. This is attributed to the cryptic nature of his quatrains, maybe to evade persecution in his time.
Now, if you believed that I had the power to fortel future events, and I was a quack, I could sit down and write cryptic prose about a terrorist bombing (coz I know someday terrorists are gonna get their way), about a famous assassination, (coz some prominent figure will be assassinated someday in the future), about a devastating hurricane, a flood maybe just to cover global warming. After I am dead and gone, if any of these events come true and if enough people believe in my shit, they'll correlate it to whatever events match, wherever they match. If you wanna believe, you will believe. If I predicted events in 3000A.D and the world ended in 2500AD would that matter? No! When the world is ending, no one would be chanting "Oh Amrit fucked up!" hahahahaha. They'd be scrambling to save their behinds!
But, why would an extremely intelligent man, who knew he had the power to save people from the deadly plague, spend his time predicting events way into the future, knowing that correct predictions would benefit him in no way! Either he was crazy and warped, or he actually wanted to warn people of the visions he believed to be true.
Back to the points I want to focus on. Most of what I learnt came from an article I found online. It spoke of how Nostradamus predicted 3 powerful and tyrannical leaders or antichrists. The first is now believed to be Napoleon of whom Nostradamus is reputed to have written:
An Emperor shall be born near Italy.
Who shall cost the Empire dear,
They shall say, with what people he keeps company
He shall be found less a Prince than a butcher.
From a simple soldier he will rise to the empire,
From the short robe he will attain the long.
Great swarms of bees shall arise.
There are more passages that are believed to be about Napoleon and his conquests.
The second antichrist Nostradamus spoke of was argued to be Adolf Hitler from the passages:
He shall come to tyrannize the land.
He shall raise up a hatred that had long been dormant.
The child of Germany observes no law.
Cries, and tears, fire, blood, and battle.
A captain of Germany shall come to yield himself by false hope,
So that his revolt shall cause great bloodshed.
Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers
The greater part of the battlefield will be against Hister.
The article points out that experts believe that Nostradamus almost spelt out the name "Hitler" but missed it by an alphabet, others, further explain the difference in the alphabet with calligraphic explanations. The word Hister before the advent of Hitler however was believed to refer to the Danube (Ister).
And here comes the interesting part on the third antichrist in the article.
Out of the country of Greater Arabia
Shall be born a strong master of Mohammed...
He will enter Europe wearing a blue turban.
He will be the terror of mankind.
Never more horror.
In the year 1999 and seven months
From the sky will come the great King of Terror.
He will bring back to life the King of the Mongols;
Before and after war reigns.
The article then explains that Nostradamus predicted some long lasting war, and says that he predicted the first target:
The sky will burn at forty-five degrees.
Fire approaches the great new city
The piece then goes on to explain that Nostradamus used the words, New World, for America, and experts believe that the “new city” could be New York, especially since New York lies near 45 degrees latitude. It also says that this “strong master of mohammed” could be Saddam Hussain, but many believe he is yet to come.
At this point in the article I was very confused! How come there was nothing about the events of September 11th? And how come Bin Laden had not been tied to the third antichrist. I scrolled to the bottom searching for his name, and then scrolled to the very top to start the search again, and came across what did send a chill down my spine. The article was written in 1993!
After the events of 9/11, there were several sites/emails, that distorted the last two lines about the 45 degrees to make people believe that Nostradamus had predicted the attacks. They were all well-refuted and rightfully so.
However, nothing changes the fact that there is an article in 1993, that says that Nostradamus predicts that: The third antichrist is yet to come, will be a strong master of Mohammed, out of the country of Greater Arabia, and his first target will be New York which will have flames in the sky!
These are the last words in the article:
“Was Nostradamus a fraud or a prophet? There are some who say that the seeming accuracy of his quatrains are a result of their facile interpretations (Guentte). Still, more than four hundred books and essays about his prophecies have been published since his death in 1566, along with a great number of articles and other commentaries, in numerous languages (Randi 5). Even skeptics pay careful attention to Nostradamus' predictions of the three anti-Christs. If Nostradamus truly predicted Napoleon and Hitler we should take heed of his words about the future. Perhaps we can prevent the dismal fate Nostradamus has predicted (Guentte)”
Maybe if our author was more paranoid, someone who decoded one of Nostradamus’ predictions 8 years before the event, could have saved the day!
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