In retrospect, it all seems bleakly inevitable: that enigmatologists would move on from the lardy Bacon-stuffed margins of Shakespeariana to find new hunting grounds. Personally, I thought Nostradamus scrabbled pretty hard to find rhymes for his verses, but a new book claims these were all just a cover story, and that it was no more than an enciphered journal.
“Rise to Consciousness” (2008) by Michal Deschausses claims to decipher the truth hidden in Nostradamus’ work, allegedly revealing a story about “one strong woman” in the far future who seems to resemble… Michal Deschausses?
I-1
Some publishers will assist with offering the knowledge in this Century. In pure reason they will rush her through it. The bout the year of her death secures vast knowledge through the age and the verses will release facts which people will hardly believe.
Could it really be that Nostradamus’ quatrains (strictly speaking, “vers commun”) enciphered a “multi-lingual” secret message? Or is it simply the case that you can, just as Leo Levitov famously did for the Voynich Manuscript, “decipher” just about any given text-like thing into an entirely parallel “polyglot oral tongue”, a stream of Romance language fragments from which you can read basically any message you like?
For reference, Nostradamus’ Century 1 Quatrain 1 is probably an “evocation of the Delphic Oracle, after Iamblichus’s De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum“: and goes like this:-
Estant assis de nuict secret estude,
Seul reposé sus la selle d’aerain:
Flambe exigue sortant de solitude,
Faict prosperer qui n’est à croire vain.
The two are connected, errrm, how? Anyhoo, because Michal Deschausses has been good enough to include her deciphering methodology as an appendix, I’ll probably end up buying a copy and having a look. But having seen Levitov’s book, I won’t be holding my breath.
Now… we’ve had hundreds of years of people claiming that Nostradamus’ verses predict every d&mn thing in the news, from the end of the world, to war(s) in Iraq, and even (most recently) to Barack Obama and his running mate:-
Born of obscure and dark family,
Of white and black of the two intermixed.
The dark one biding his time,
Before the Empire changes.
But… hold on a minute: “Born of obscure and dark family” is a line from Century V Quatrain 84, “Of white and black of the two intermixed” is a line from Century VI Quatrain 10, “The dark one biding his time” appears just to have been made up, while “Before the Empire changes” is a line from Century I Quatrain 43.
So, Nostradamus bloggers have supposedly got themselves excited about three lines moved waaaaay out of context with a filler line added in to form a supposed verse about Obama. Oh, really?
OK… let me try for myself, restricting the search to a high-speed sleective scan through Century I:-
Lost, found, hidden for so long an age,
In the future by headless idiots
That which shall live without having any sense
submerged, killed, dead through brainless idiocy
Profoundly predictive, don’t you think? 😮