A ‘Book of Centuries’ consisting of cryptic four-lined rhymed verses is published in France by Michael Nostradamus, a provincial doctor. The book’s 900 ‘Centuries’ contain a series of prophecies about future events. Predictions included a massive fire in London in the year 1666, global war erupting twice in the-then far-distant 20th Century, the coming of an anti-Christ from the deserts of Persia later in the same century and, most absurd of all, a revolution that would overthrow the mighty French monarchy before the 18th Century was over.
Snatches of Hebrew, Latin and Portuguese, and the use of anagrams, made the book very difficult to understand fully – yet impossible to dismiss. The book was first published in 1555 and has rarely been out of print since his death. In the years since the publication of his ‘Les Prophéties’, Nostradamus has attracted many supporters, who, along with much of the popular press, credit him with having accurately predicted many major world events. Most academic sources reject the notion that Nostradamus had any genuine supernatural prophetic abilities and maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus’s quatrains are the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations (sometimes deliberate).
These academics argue that Nostradamus’s predictions are characteristically vague, meaning they could be applied to virtually anything, and are useless for determining whether their author had any real prophetic powers. They also point out that English translations of his quatrains are almost always of extremely poor quality, based on later manuscripts, produced by authors with little knowledge of sixteenth-century French, and often deliberately mistranslated to make the prophecies fit whatever events the translator believed they were supposed to have predicted. On the evening of July 1, 1566, he is alleged to have told his secretary Jean de Chavigny, “You will not find me alive at sunrise.” The next morning he was reportedly found dead, lying on the floor next to his bed.
Most notable historic snippets or facts extracted from the book ‘On This Day’ first published in 1992 by Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, London, as well as additional supplementary information extracted from Wikipedia.
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