Originally posted by Morgasshk:<br /><strong>Here's another interesting one... one of N's last entries...
Century X, Quatrain 72<br />"In the year 1999 and seven months there will come from the skies the Great King of Terror. He will bring back to life the great King of the Mongols. Before and after war reigns happily. "
Translation: One of Nostradamus's last and probably the most sombre, melancholy and most noticable prophecy yet unfilled. He tells of an Asian antichrist, steeped in the traditions of the warrior hordes of the Mongols, visiting death and destruction upon the face of the globe. Most experts belive that this new demon will be an Anti-Christ committed to tearing down the values of Judaeo-Christian society as we know them. If napoleon and Hitler were the other 2 anti-christ figures that Nostradamus makes in some of his prophecies, then this will be the third and final one...</strong><hr></blockquote>
I know about the 3 anti-Christs stuff, but I'm not so sure this quatrain makes a clear reference to them. There's speculation that 1999, from his time, is actually 2001. He also wrote "sept" month in French ... many think it means "7", but it could just as well be Sept-month. "From the sky" matches Tuesday. Bin Laden (or whoever managed to pull this off) could easily be called the "King of Terror" today. Coincidental we call it terrorism? And I am NOT sure, but I believe Mongolia during Ghenghis Khan covered today's Afghanistan (or perhaps the part of the Mid East where whoever's responsible came from). [Any comments, GK? Is that where you were?]
The "war" part in some translations is a reference to the god Mars, which of course is the God of War, but he also has a "higher" spiritual transformation side. As some think, this is NOT an end-of-the-world prediction. So we could be looking at war or another age of enlightenment. Either way, as we all know, this is a turning point. What we do next may determine in which direction.
<br />No comment on the 3rd quatrain Morgasshk offered. I'm not as familiar with it. But thanks for all the work, Morgie. Sorry your PC crashed (I've been there when writing these things, too!)
<br />Nosty in a Different Light<br />But I will share a few things about how one could look at the work of Nostradamus and have it all make sense.
Understanding the Future<br />He purportedly put himself into a trance and "saw" things. You've had deja vu. He could just do it awake and in a major way (like, deja vu on steroids). If we say he actually saw some things to come, many of them he could not possibly understand or interpret or give accurate 16th Century words to.
Safety in Vagueness / No Order<br />This was complicated by the fact that people weren't so wild about his predictions at first (esp. when they came true) and he faced persecution. He wrote vaguely on purpose to protect himself and because he was human and lacked proper words to describe everything he saw. He also mixed up the order of all his quatrains, so they essentially appear randomly, not chronologically, in the Centuries.
Nature of Communication<br />There's also the communication gap between our 2 times ... as Stormerne knows, words and phrases that had common understandable meaning back then do not carry the same meaning today.
TIME & THE FUTURE<br />And, lastly, there is this whole concept of time and predetermination. As Stephen Hawking knows, we have an experience of time but not a firm grasp on what it is or how it works.
My view is what if ... your future (and our collective futures) are NOT written in stone, but rather there are possible futures ... different paths we can take through our choices that lead to different results, like those books that used to make you choose a door and follow a path to a different part of the book. What if it all exists in time at once, not like the linear Space-Time Continuum that makes cool Star Trek episodes. So all possible futures are accessible to "seers" and true psychics (and possibly to any of us, if we develop that part of ourselves) from any point in time.
So perhaps there are the places we are likely to go if we keep doing what we're doing, and there are the places we could go if we made certain choices. The problem with seeing the future is that, while the true psychic really did see SOMEthing, no one knows for sure (even the psychic) if it will be the future that actually unfolds.
So the psychic describes what they see, as unfiltered and un-self-interpreted as possible. If we make certain choices, it "comes true" and we regard the psychic as amazing. If it does not, we regard the psychic as a charleton.
If that is the true nature of time, a true psychic can never be 100% right, but that doesn't mean they lied or are just very bad at it. It depends more on us than them. And though many are liars, that doesn't discount the good ones, much like certain A-holes of your nationality do not represent the rest of you.
Nosty wrote A LOT of stuff and a LONG time ago. Some of the correlations are remarkable ... arguably beyond coincidence. But just because some never happened as predicted, doesn't mean he didn't see that and it also doesn't mean the rest are bullsh..ooters.
Spiff <img src="graemlins/scan.gif" border="0" alt="[Scan]" /> [Edit: add headlines]
[ September 14, 2001: Message edited by: SpacemanSpiff ]</p>