The Doomsday Apostrophe

According to a prophecy of Nostradamus, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse will wreak their destruction in July 1999-July 3 or 4, according to some interpretations-and many millennial pessimists believe it.

At least, this is what Nostradamus, the 16th century French astrologer and physician, predicted will happen.  And, strictly speaking, the apocalypse part is only how his followers interpret his best-known prediction: that great king of terror will come from the sky in July 1999.

This was one of a thousand predictions Nostradamus wrote-in rhymed quatrains and grouped in hundreds-in a book called Centuries.  In full, Century X quatrain reads: "In the year nineteen hundred and ninety nine, seven months, from the sky will come a great King of Terror.  He will resurrect the great King of Angolmois.  Before and afterwards Mars reigns happily."

Nostradamus enthusiasts believe that July 4, Independence Day, is the most likely day for the apocalypse because of a reference the seer made to "Al-quilloye," the American eagle.

Whatever the correct interpretation of X.72 is, there are several reasons why we might take the predictions of Nostradamus more seriously than those of other, more modern seers.

First, Nostradamus mat well have foreseen the Great Fire of London, the French and Russian revolutions, Napoleon, Adolf Hitler, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Persian Gulf War-depending on how you decipher his highly ambiguous writings.

Second, the legend of Nostradamus is woven into the fabric of history.  The Maginot line, for instance, was drawn up in the 1920's and 1930's because Nostradamus had predicted that France would be invaded via Switzerland.

And not only do the libraries at the Vatican

Third, with his flowing gray beard, scholar's gown and brooding countenance, Nostradamus looked the part.  Even his name resonates with enigma and gravitas.

Although Michel de Notredame (Nostradamus was his Latinized name) was born in St. Remy de Provence in 1503 and practiced medicine for a while in Paris, Salon-de-Provence is the town with which he is most closely associated.  He lived most of his life in Salon-and died of edema there in 1566.

Although he converted to Catholicism, he was born Jewish and lived his life in fear of the Inquisition.  To avoid prosecution as an occultist or magician, he deliberately made his prophecies difficult to interpret.

He wrote them in a crabbed hybrid of French, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew, as well as using his own neologisms (constructed from ancient Greek and Latin).  He also had a fondness for anagrams, such as Rapis for Paris, which he (sometimes) signaled by writing the word in capital letters.

This all means that people can read into his prophecies whatever they want to, almost.  Faint parallels are deemed precise descriptions, and inconvenient facts are ignored.  When Nostradamus referred to the "Master of Time," for instance, his devotees have taken this to mean Einstein.

The more famous Nostradamus became in his own lifetime, the more the Inquisition grew suspicious of him.  One prediction especially made them think he was in league with the devil.

He said the king of France, Henry II, would die in a Jousting accident-"The young lion shall overcome the old in single combat,

inside a golden cage his eye will be put out in one of the two contests, then he shall die grievously."  Four years later, in 1559, Henry, wearing a suit of golden armor, did indeed die when a jousting lance went through his eye.

As with his writing style, so Nostradamus' method of prediction was far from straightforward.  He combined traditional astrology (using charts and star signs) with the visions he saw when scrying (looking through the flame of a candle into a bowl of water placed on a brass tripod) with a technique called comparative horoscopy (that is, he looked up the position of the planets at the time of great events in the past and then made a prediction that history would repeat itself when similar planetary conjunctions occurred in the future).

So should we feel uneasy Sunday?  Or should we just dismiss Nostradamus as a charlatan whose predictions are fodder for the superstitious, witless and gullible?

In the past, author and academic Peter Lemesurier has shown that Nostradamus never actually predicted the end of the world-not least because his predictions continue up to the year 3797, when he appears to have run out of steam.

To interpret the king of terror quatrain, Lemesurier has gone back to the original text of 1555 and discovered that it actually refers to "roy deffraieur" (an appeaser king).  In subsequent corrupt editions, after the death of Nostradamus, the word acquired an apostrophe to become "roy d'effraieur" (king of terror).

So there you have it.  thanks to a misplaced apostrophe, the world won't end Sunday, after all.

An article by Nigel Farndale, Chicago Sun-Times, July 4, 1999.