by Sylvia Browne

Michel de Nostredame, aka Nostradamus, was born in St. Remy de Provence, France, in 1503. More than five hundred years later his prophecies are still being exhaustively studied, debated, praised, and decried, and the man himself is the subject of both great admiration as a prophet and equally great disdain as a fraud.

I will never claim to be an expert on the subject of Nostradamus, but I do know that in his early years he was a brilliant physician and alchemist. He worked tirelessly to heal countless victims of a plagues that swept through France not long after he received his degree in medicine from the University of Montpellier, and the herbal medications he created were so effective in curing the incurable that he was accused of being a heretic – a deadly charge at the time. No less than the Pope himself declared that the charges unfounded after hearing of Nostradamus’s undeniable success against the plague. Nostradamus was known for his lifelong generosity toward the poor.

Nostradamus spent four years writing his first book of prophecies, called the Centuries, but was reluctant to publish it for fear of the cruel religious persecution prevalent against "seers and soothsayers" of that era. Finally, though, he felt too strongly that his book might be of use to society to keep it hidden, and he published it in 1555 at his own very real peril. Last but not least, Nostradamus took no personal credit for his prophecies but instead acknowledged God as their author and as the One from whom he received his gift. As he wrote in the preface of his first book of prophecies, which he dedicated to his son:

Thy late arrival, my son, has made me bestow much time, through nightly vigils, to leave you in writing a memorial to refer to...that might serve for the common profit of mankind, out of what the Divine Being has permitted me to learn from the revolution of the stars.

So whether or not his prophecies were or are considered accurate, it’s hard to imagine that a man of his kindness, faith, humility, and selfishness would deliberately perpetuate a fraud.

Tragically, the same plague Nostradamus fought against so successfully killed his wife and two children, and he spent the next several years as a traveling physician. It was during these long, lonely  years that he began actively studying and experimenting with the occult, for which he held a lifelong fascination. It was also on one of his routine journeys between France and Italy that he had what is considered to be his first prophetic experience.

He was on a narrow footpath in Italy when he came upon a small group of Franciscan monks. Nostradamus was of Jewish lineage, but his family had converted to Christianity, and he was raised in the Catholic faith. So, like any respectful Catholic, he began stepping aside to let monks pass. But suddenly he focused on one of them and, overcome with awe, he fell to his knees and genuflected at the feet of Father Felice Peretti, a swineherd before he entered the monetary.

When the astonished monk asked what on earth Nostradamus was doing, he replied, "I must yield myself and bow before his Holiness."

Nineteen years after the death of Nostradamus, that monk, Father Peretti, became Pope Sixtus V.

When Nostradamus’s travels ended, he remarried, this time to a wealthy widow with whom he had six children. They settled in Salon, France, and it was there that he began his prophetic writings.

His works had a very distinctive structure. He wrote in four-line verses, or quatrains. Then he organized the quatrains into what he called Centuries – one hundred quatrains per Century, although since he wrote a total of 942 quatrains in his lifetime, there was one Century that contained only forty-two quatrains.

As for his style, it can only be described as obscure. It was full of Greek and Latin and anagrams and odd, complicated plays on words. One school of thought is that his writings were deliberately vague so that they would be too hard to interpret for anyone to claim he was inaccurate. The truth is actually a distant relative of that theory: Nostradamus knew that he faced possible persecution, including torture or death, if he clearly revealed himself as a prophet. But if his works were obscure and confusing enough, no one could make an ironclad case against him for being a heretic seer in league with the devil. So the fact that debates continue to this day about the "real" interpretation of the Nostradamus quatrains is a testament to his ability to protect himself and the integrity of his prophecies.

It was one of Nostradamus’s less obscure quatrains that put him in great favor with the French royal family and elevated his status during his lifetime. The quatrain read:

The young lion will overcome the older one
On the field of combat in single battle.
He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage
Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.

A few short years after Nostradamus wrote those words, France’s King Henry II was killed during a jousting tournament when his opponent’s lance slipped through the "golden" face mask of the king’s helmet, piercing his eye. King Henry’s wife, Catherine d’Medici, knew of Nostradamus’s prophecy about her husband and after his death she regularly used Nostradamus as her personal consultant.

Nostradamus calculated that human history began in 3203 BC. Add seven thousand years to that date and you will arrive at the conclusion that Nostradamus predicted this planet will come to an end in the year AD 3797.

The last prophecy of Nostradamus is found in the following quatrain:

On returning from an embassy, the King's gift safely stored
No more will I labour for I will have gone to God
By my close relatives, friends and blood brothers,
I shall be found dead, near my bed and the bench.

On the night before his death, Nostradamus, who'd just returned from a trip to an embassy, called for a priest to give him last rites. The priest commented that Nostradamus seemed perfectly healthy to him. But Nostradamus assured him, “You will not see me alive at sunrise.”

The next morning, on July 2, 1566, Nostradamus's family found him dead, lying between the bed and his bedside bench.


Sylvia Browne is without question, "America's #1 Psychic," an internationally known psychic and medium.