Les Propheties (the Nostradamus Quatrains)

Nostradamus published the first instalment of Les Propheties in Lyon in 1555 through the printer Mace Bonhomme: three complete Centuries and part of a fourth, 353 quatrains in all. A revised edition followed the same year, and a third, adding three further Centuries, in 1557. The full ten Centuries, roughly 942 quatrains, appeared only in 1568, two years after his death, in an edition carrying a dedicatory letter to King Henry II.

He explained his method in a preface addressed to his son Cesar, printed with the 1555 edition: the verses were deliberately obscured, he wrote, both to guard against a charge of sorcery in an age that burned people for less, and because plain language would let the unworthy grasp what he believed should be reserved for the discerning. The result mixes Provencal and Italian words into the French, borrows syntax from Latin, and leans on anagram and paraphrase rather than direct statement; a quatrain will name "Hister" rather than a country, or describe a figure by trade and bearing rather than by name.

That obscurity is structural, not incidental. Almost no quatrain fixes a year, and few name a place unambiguously, which is the feature that has let each generation of readers supply its own referent. Napoleon-era commentators read the Hister verses as Napoleon; twentieth century readers read the same lines as Adolf Hitler. Peter Lemesurier's study of the manuscript tradition traces how successive interpreters have treated the verses as addressed to their own moment, a pattern the text's built-in vagueness makes easy to repeat and hard to test.

Because the quatrains supply no date, no reliable place name and only oblique description, applying them to a real event is almost always retrospective: a reader with the outcome already in hand searches for a verse that can be bent to fit it, and quietly sets aside the many that cannot. The clearest demonstration of how easily this generates convincing-looking hits is not a genuine quatrain at all. In 1997 a Brock University student named Neil Marshall wrote a deliberately vague four-line passage for a class essay, meant to illustrate exactly this mechanism, and did not attribute it to Nostradamus. After the September 11 attacks in 2001 the passage began circulating online as a genuine, centuries-old prediction, with further lines added by later, anonymous hands, one of which names a date decades after Nostradamus's death. Fact-checking organisations traced the text back to Marshall's essay within weeks, and no version of it appears in any sixteenth century printing of Les Propheties.

The episode does not by itself settle whether any authentic quatrain has ever been fulfilled; readers who consider that question open point to matches, such as the Hister verses, that use genuine sixteenth century text. What the 9/11 case shows is how the mechanism works once a match is wanted: obscurity supplies the raw material, hindsight supplies the fit, and at least once, an invented text supplied the rest.

Sources Did Nostradamus Predict the 9/11 Attacks?Snopes.com editorial staff with The Unknown NostradamusPeter Lemesurier