It really does not matter. I always felt Romney would be one of the last two candidates standing. But events are ever the judge of predictions. Yesterday, Governor Perry heeded Gingrich’s call to rally conservative votes against Romney by leaving the race. He endorsed the former Speaker of the House. Back in June, I predicted Perry would still be in the race with Romney and would win the nomination on a conservative surge. That was wrong.

Well, as Governor Perry famously would say, “oops!”

I have much better luck picking winners of presidential campaigns by popular vote, such as Nixon over Humphrey in 1968 by a half million votes, Nixon over McGovern in 1972, Carter over Ford (1976), Reagan over Mondale (twice, 1980 and 1984). Nevill Drury, you still owe me a spaghetti dinner in Sydney Australia, next time I am there. That was the bet. I picked H.W. Bush over Dukakis in 1988 and you believed it was impossible.

I did write in 1983 for the Rajneesh Times a forecast foreseeing Reagan as a two-term president. H.W. Bush would follow as a one-term president. After him would come a two-term democrat president in 1992. That turned out to be Bill Clinton, who went on to win a second term.

The Bush-Gore contest in 2000 generated my oracle’s most cryptic message that many of you heard on Coast to Coast AM and the Jeff Rense programs before the election. The message was, Al Gore would win over George W. Bush by 500,000 votes but I was going to be “equally right” and “equally wrong” about Gore. Well, as it turned out Gore did win by a half-million popular votes but was denied the presidency by five votes out of four in the US Supreme Court over the ballot counting dispute in Florida.

Hogueprophecy was born around that time and since then I have documented the presidential victories of G.W. Bush over John Kerry in 2004 and Barack Obama over John McCain by around 8 percent of the popular vote in 2008.

Now, when you look at this record of accomplishment of 11 and 0, there is enough to make both Democrats and Republicans angry at my predictions picking candidates they do not want in the White House. So, when I say once again what I have been forecasting since January 2009 that Barack Obama will win a second term, do not think I am saying that with prophetic bias. If the prediction upsets you, look at your own expectations and biases when judging the guy who accurately forecast Republican victories in seven out of eleven presidential contests.

Anyway, I like to take risks and I often play the “Pick the Loser” prophetic game even though I do it with mixed results. Despite Gingrich’s surge in South Carolina, other primaries are coming with more national impact. Moderate Republicans are still alive and well in the GOP. After the Super Tuesday primaries, Romney will seize the lead and never look back. Romney will be running against Obama for 2012. You can read why the stars and the economy favor Obama for re-election as well as many more details about the 2012 Presidential Election by reading Predictions for 2012.

Now to Iran…

As promised, I want to share a fascinating prophecy from the 16th-century seer, Michel Nostradamus that predicts a showdown in “Carmania” the 16th-century name for the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz. This is the narrow passage where a third of all global oil exports pass. This is the waterway the Iranian Navy threatens to block if economic sanctions being considered by Washington DC cripples Iran’s only significant export resource. The US Navy has also warned that any attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz would cross a red alarm line and there would be military action in reaction.

So, with that said, I wish to quote a passage I wrote in early 2007 for my e-Book, Nostradamus: The War with Iran.

***

The End of the Islamist Dream?

10 Q31
The holy empire will come into Germany,
The Ishmaelites will find open places:
Asses will also want Carmania,
The supporters all covered by earth.

Carmania is a Persian territory on the northern shore of the Strait of Hormuz. Since Nostradamus wrote this, nothing historically significant has taken place there until recent times. We have to keep our eyes open for the French word sainct (“holy,” or “sacred”). Nostradamus hides his blasphemies from the Church inquisitors by playing off a Gothic “s” or “ƒ” for either “s” or “f.” Just like you can turn “friend” into “fiend” Nostradamus takes swipes at the Catholic Church by hiding fainct (false) behind ƒainct (sacred). This time around the false religion is that brand of Islam worshipped by terrorists. The “false” holy or fundamentalist fanatics, like al-Qaeda’s leader, Usama bin Laden, dream of establish- ing an intolerant Caliphate across the Islamic world. It was the al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, that financed and planned the September 11 attacks on America in 2001.

The Ishmaelites (read: the Arabs of al-Qaeda) find “open” spaces in Germany to base a war of terror on Europe and the US.

Line three shifts attention to Iran, to Carmania, the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz where so much of the world’s oil exports pass and can be so easily cut off. The asses is Nostradamus’ general condemnation of the Islamic fundamentalists of Iran, near past and future. Their brand of fearful, grim, Saturnian Islamist ideology will land its adherents inside white shrouds of Islamic burial. It predicts also the final burial of Usama bin Laden, or Ahmadinejad, or Ayatollah Khamenei’s or any other Jihadists’ mad hateful dream of a totalitarian theocratic world Caliphate. The war with Iran will initiate the beginning of “their” ideology’s end in naval suicide attacks across the waters of the Strait of Hormuz.

***

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John Hogue
(20 January 2012)

Nostradamus variously identifies these powerhouse countries as the two great Kingdoms of the North, or the Great Brothers of the North [or Aquilon, after Aquila, the Eagle Constellation in northern skies. Then in a classic Nostradamian double entendre the prophet describes these brothers will become friends at a time when one of them he calls the new land of Americh is at the height of its power. The prophecy is in a quatrain indexed as Century (volume) 2, Quatrain 89 in his magnum opus Les Propheties.

The numbers are a date: 2 [February] [19]89, the month Soviet forces pulled out of Afghanistan in defeat.

In December 1989, President H.W. Bush and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev declared the Cold War officially over. America the victor became the sole world superpower. At that time the two great leaders will become friends promised Nostradamus but with a twist. The Latin/French blended word he used for friend — demis — can also mean halved or split. America and Russia are otherwise known in the prophecy as the brothers who are not yet brothers.

A leader and/or a people he calls barbare threatens their fragile attempt at friendship. The many allusions to them in the prophecies hint powerfully to two possible translations. They are the Barbary Corsairs: a contemporary version of Islamic terrorism raiding the Mediterranean shores of Nostradamus’ France in the 16th century. These Islamic pirates-cum-terrorists of his day hijacked and sunk ships. The modern Islamic terrorist-pirate hijacks and crashes planes. Nostradamus’ Judeo-Christian bias might also hint barbare means Islamic barbarian, the kind of ruthless, bloodthirsty autocrats one sees in modern times, such as the father of Bashir al-Assad (Hafez al-Assad) of Syria, Saddam Hussein of Iraq and today’s Muhammar Gaddafi of Libya. They are Arab dictators, terrorists like al-Qaeda, Usama bin Laden who like Saddam Hussein is a candidate for Nostradamus’ third and final antichrist who set in motion the threat of Armageddon.

Thirdly, barbare could be an anagram for Arab.

Reduce the redundant letters r and b to one letter each and you get the French spelling for Arab: arabe out of barbare.

Barbare stands literally for Barbary, as in the Barbary Coast pirates, against which the young United States of America fought in its first war as a nation in 1805. The capital of the Barbary Coast is Tripoli, the stronghold of Muhammar Gaddafi and the pro-Gaddafi tribes of Libya who contest control of the oil rich North African nation with mostly Eastern Libyan tribes in the current Libyan Civil war of 2011.

America once again is at war with Libya in a coalition of NATO nations, sanctioned by the Arab League, joined by the air forces of the UAE and Qatar of the Gulf States to establish a no-fly zone against Gaddafi’s armed forces.

This coalition exists because members of the UN Security council voted for its prosecution to protect civilians from Gaddafi’s threat of a mass massacre of Eastern Libyans by his army. The vote for this Resolution #1973 went through without a veto. It is important to note that Russia abstained while American voted in favor of the No Fly Zone. What followed where momentous air attacks wiping out Gaddafi’s air defenses, command and control centers, military air fields and later the obliteration of his armored thrust to the suburbs of the rebel stronghold of Benghazi.

Russia in the first hours of military strikes clearly stated its regrets at military action moving forward with such violence against what had once been an old ally in the Soviet, Cold War era. Gaddafi, being one of the longest lasting tyrants in power of modern times came to power at the peak of the Cold War tensions overthrowing King Idris of Libya in a military coup in 1969, forty-two years ago.

Now, with all this background in mind, the next prophecy of Nostradamus, Century 5 Quatrain 78, is perhaps a chilling vision of the near future:

The two [America and Russia] will not remain allied for long: within 13 years they will give in to Barbare power ["Barbary" Corsair: read Islamic barbarian pirates = Arab dictators, terrorists, or a Third World war arising unexpectedly from tensions over a conflict against those of the modern Barbary Coast, of Tripoli, of Western Libya, etc.]. There will be such a loss on both sides, that one [perhaps America in this case] will bless the bark of Peter and the cape of the pope.

Let us follow the prophecies further:

The two-headed eagle of the Russia Federation.

Kingdoms given to men incapable of prudence. [Is he implying US President Obama, Russian Prime Minister and future President Vladimir Putin in Russia, over a conflict started by the irrational Libyan Colonel Gaddafi?] Then for the great brothers [US & Russia] death and dissention. (2 Q95)

There will be let loose living fire and hidden death. Horror inside dreadful globes. By night the city will be reduced to dust by the fleet. The city on fire, helpful to the enemy… (5 Q8)

At sunrise one will see a great fire. Noise and light extending towards the North [Aquilon in French -- the realms of America and Russia, signified here by their eagle emblems]. Within the earth, death and cries are heard. Death awaiting them through weapons, fire and famine. (2 Q91)

The rule left to two [Russian and America in 1989]. They will hold it for a very short time. Three years and seven months having passed, they will go to war. Their two vassals rebel against them. The victor is born on Americh [American] soil. (4 Q95)

To recap this trend of a dire and unexpected thermonuclear conflict between America and Russia over Libya, it begins with America becoming the sole superpower. The two enemies of the Cold War begin a path towards friendship in 1989 as dated by Nostradamus. They both become “eagle kings” in the early 1990s when Russia drops the hammer and sickle red banner for the Czarist white, blue and red tricolor emblem of the double-headed eagle.

The friendship is fragile, halved and prone to imprudent leadership, undermined either by an Arab (Arabe=barbare) leader, and regional Arab revolution, or a barbare (Barbary Coast, read Libyan) source. Then, either quickly after that, in 3 years and seven months, or in a longer breakdown of US-Russian friendship 13 years later, the US and Russia fight a nuclear war perhaps set in motion by unanticipated consequences arising out of the present conflict in Libya.

The idea may sound ludicrous. Nevertheless, if you have been following my books over the last 25 years, especially those books looking at collectively shared prophecies, such as The Millennium Book of Prophecy and 1000 for 2000 Startling Predictions for the New Millennium, many of history’s greatest seers with unquestioned impressive accuracy believe there are three world wars set to threaten our destiny. The 17th-century German prophet Stormberger framed this collective theme of a final, unexpected world war, saying humanity walks with open eyes into the third world war’s apocalyptic end of civilization. With eyes wide shut to the dangers, they did not see it coming. Can you see Stormberger is on to something?

For decades now a majority of us believe the nuclear danger of the Cold War years are behind us. We live under the illusion that thousands of nuclear weapons still sitting around in their silos or stored away will not in a short time be rolled out, switched on and aimed at us once again.

In Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies, written in the mid-1990s and published in 1997, I often came back to the Libyan scenario that an incident would set in motion a Third World War after the Cold War was over. I wrote extensively about a number of prophecies describing a future act of terrorism, coming forth from “an iron fish” leaving a weapon at the mouth of the Tiber, the watery river road reaching Rome and the Vatican. I explained a potential scenario implied by a number of Nostradamus’ prophecies about the governments of North African nations like Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt succumbing to a fever of radical Islamic passions. Each of these nations have a small flotilla of diesel powered Soviet era attack submarines, any one of which could be used by the man who would make war (perhaps the Third Antichrist Nostradamus warned famously about in other visions) described in the following prophecy from Century 2 Quatrain 5:

Qu’en dans poisson, fer & lettre enfermée,
Hors sortira qui puis fera la guerre:
Aura par mer sa classe bien ramée,
Apparoissant pres de Latine terre.

When weapons and plans are enclosed in a fish,
Out will come a man who will then make war:
His fleet will have traveled far across the sea,
To seem to appear [surface] at the Italian shore.

I published the following passage about this quatrain in 1997:

“In several places Nostradamus makes it clear that there’s a Libyan (Barbary) connection to a future (terrorist) invasion of Southern Europe. Muammar Qaddafi, an admitted protector and supporter of Abu Nidal and other terrorist organizations, also possesses five Soviet-made Foxtrot Class diesel-powered attack submarines in his fleet. Whoever the man is with plans and special weapons to make war, his underwater journey to destiny may be dated in the hidden double meaning of the first line: When Mars and Mercury are in conjunction with Pisces.”

Nostradamus hid dates in sentences, such as in line one. Fish (submarine) also stands for the astrological sign of Pisces. Weapons stand also for Mars (the planet Mars, God of War). Letters, papers, (plans) stand as symbols of the ruler of intellect, Mercury. Enclosed is a code for in conjunction. Thus the line, When weapons and plans are enclosed in a fish, can become the astrological code for the date of the prophecy: When Mars and Mercury are in conjunction with Pisces.

Exact conjunctions of Mercury and Mars in Pisces are rare even thought both separately and frequently pass into Pisces every few years. Conjunctions bracket 2012. The first recently at the end of February 2011. Another will come February 2013.

February 2011 marked the spread of the Arab Revolution out of Tunisia to Yemen, Algeria, and Jordan and most significantly into Egypt and Libya. The next conjunction is two Februaries away in 2013. Perhaps Gaddafi could resist that long in the bloody civil war turned into a stalemate by NATO jets and missiles leveling the battleground, rendering both sides into armed rabbles. Just today (30 March 2011), Gaddafi’s forces have once again routed the undisciplined and outnumbered rebels before Sirte, pushing them back beyond the strategically important oil refinery town of al-Brega. Gaddafi’s professional and mercenary soldiers have hid their surviving armor and hit the coastal road to Benghazi Mad-Max, post-apocalyptic style driving in similarly beat up looking, sand blasted civilian vehicles one saw their jittery amateur, R-R-RPG (rompa-room-rocket-propelled-grenade) launcher shouldering adversaries drive. NATO planes cannot distinguish between gangs in vans and trucks that are friendly or fiendly. I anticipate the Gaddafi RV caravans next will decorate their vehicles with the rebel tricolor flags beginning their next offensive into Eastern Libya as a guerilla infiltration.

The strains of the Libyan conflict begin to work to negative effect on American-Russian relations. Former Cold War vassals of the two contest the region, the Arab nations (many of which, like Libya, Algeria Egypt and Syria are former allies of the Soviet Union) radicalized by revolutions versus the US ally Israel, the Saudi Arabian monarchy and the Gulf emirs.

The next most likely time window for world conflict comes when Neptune’s transit of Aries begins (2025-2038). During that period there will be a conjunction of Mercury and Mars in Pisces in March 2026.

That is EXACTLY 13 years beyond the next conjunction in 2013!

Perhaps events in 2013 will cause us to begin the countdown to a third world war one year after all the hoopla about ages changing and rebooting in 2012.

Events of the last 16 years seemed to steer away from my interpretations from 1995 — that is until now. American and European air power bombs Gaddafi the Barbare Corsair in Tripoli, with Russia abstaining and complaining.

We see the Arab world rocked by revolutions and in the initial phases there is much hope for a democratic outcome, yet equally possible like other revolutions of the past, the more organized and ruthless parties emerging could later turn these mostly secular revolutions of moderate Arabs into something extremist and totalitarian — far worse than the dictatorships they overthrow. Thus Tunisia, Algeria, Libya and Egypt become Islamist states.

This is what Nostradamus warned in his prophecies: a march westward of radical Islam out of modern Persia (see Iran predictions) into the Arab world. Egypt was specifically mentioned.

I am not saying this has to happen but I am wondering for the first time in 16 years if events are taking us back to the timeline I considered in detail when composing my interpretation of Nostradamus’ complete prophecies in the mid-1990s.

In the next blog we will look at the future of the Arab Revolution as viewed by the ever-pessimistic prophet Nostradamus.

I will return to a detailed account set forth by him in an Epistle to his king, Henri II of France, penned in 1558. We will refresh this prophetic narrative, moving my mid-1990s interpretation forward to events of our time and see how they might now better frame a clearer picture of a future danger to the world that war in Libya has put back on track for the train wreck of our destiny. By encountering this nightmare in its early stages we might anticipate the reasons why great brothers, great friends of the North — Russia and America — could do the unimaginable: be dragged down into a conflict that would unhinge the world in a nuclear war no one believed possible.

I do this not to terrorize you, reader, but to galvanize your power in the present day to make this future warning of Nostradamus a figment of his or for that matter my imagination, not a reality of your near future 3 years and 7 months or after events in 2013 begin a 13-year countdown to apocalypse.

John Hogue

(30 March 2011)

Libya is just one firestorm in history. Do not get caught in the media’s one-dimensional news cycle. Read Predictions for 2011 and Nostradamus and the Antichrist.

Stay extra vigilant on this day, 11/11/09 and all the rest of the days of November. Jihad organizations like to play with dates including elevens and nines. This is the 11th month of the 9th year of this decade (11/9 = 9/11 reversed). It was on this Armistice and Veteran’s Day holiday eight years ago that Usama bin Laden filmed his infamous video tape of a dinner party in Afghanistan praising the “martyrs” who attacked America on 9/11, implicating his involvement.

Now to happier matters. Monday marked the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall falling (9 November 1989). It marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War and Soviet Union. Nostradamus may have foreseen the demise of both dying with a whimper when he wrote the following prophecy 434 years before it happened, indexing the prophecy as a date. Century 2 of Quatrain 89 says:

Vn iour seront demis les deux grands maistres,
Leur grand pouuoir se verra augmenté:
La terre neufue sera en ses hauts estres,
Au sanguinaire le nombre racompté

One day the two great leaders will become friends,
Their great power will be seen to increase:
The new land [America] will be at the height of its power,
To the bloody one, the number is reported.

The great leaders mentioned in line one are US president H.W. Bush and Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev. The Soviet Empire had exhausted itself in arms races and struggles for political and economy hegemony with America. “We will take your enemy away from you, ” Gorbachev had said to Bush, and he began a snowballing reform campaign of Perestroika (openness) that lead to an avalanche of change knocking down the Berlin wall in 1989 and knocking over the communist Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

In line two, Nostradamus waxes dyslexic giving us the sequence backwards. Their great power is not that of the two leaders but the power mentioned in line three: the new land of America, which indeed became after 1989 the preeminent and sole superpower in the world at the height of its economic and military strength for the following decade.

Many possible interpretations might unveil the mystery of who the bloody one might be. In the context of the Cold War’s end, Premier Gorbachev displayed a prominent blood splattered-looking birthmark on his balding forehead. The number reported are the missiles selected for dismantling as part of START, the US-Soviet Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

In my first book (15 books ago) on Nostradamus, written in 1986, I took the hint of the indexing of this quatrain to predict that the Cold War would end by the end of the decade. On further examination of events since then, the indexing numbers 2 (February) (19)89, may stand for the month Soviet forces left Afghanistan. 1989 was the year Gorbachev met G.W. Bush in an impromptu summit meeting at Malta declaring the Cold War was over

Afghanistan has been the death of Empires. Will America’s empire be next? We await a decision by President Obama, the “black king” of Nostradamus’ prophecies on this day of remembrance of war dead. He will soon send many more to their funerary watch in cemeteries on future Veteran’s Day celebrations, as he does not yet learn Afghanistan’s harsh historic lessons. He will send soldiers to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan and not al-Qaeda. History wonders if he will to track down America’s real enemy, the one who dared speak of his martyrs, eight years ago on America’s hallowed Veteran’s Day.

John Hogue

(Armistice Day: 11 November 2009)

Many of you have asked me what I think about Rathford’s book and the theory that Nostradamus had some all-encompassing key to unlock his cryptic prophecies faster than impish actress Audrey (Amelie) Tautou can say, “Da Vinci Code.”

Some answers gain more authority with time. My answer to Rathford and all those before and after him who attempt to find a code has not changed since I wrote the following opening extracts in the mid-1990s for my complete translation of Nostradamus’ prophecies, published in 1997, in a book entitled “Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies.”

The first passage gives some background. The second directly takes on the theory and the theorists who believe in Nostradamus Codes.

***

PASSAGE ONE:

GUIDELINES FOR READING NOSTRADAMUS

I was willing to hold my peace by reason of the injury, not only of the present, but future time as well, and refrain from writing because if the present kingdoms, sects and religions were to see the future kingdoms, sects and religions to come, and see how diametrically opposed they are to their pet fantasies, they would condemn that which future centuries will know to be true… Later… [I] decided to relinquish withholding my tongue and pen from paper by declaring in dark and cryptic sentences the causes of the future changes of mankind…by clouding them in obscure but, above all, prophetic language.

Michel Nostradamus 1555

I made up my mind, but I made it up both ways.

Casey Stengle
Manager of the New York Yankees (circa 1955)

If Nostradamus was ever reincarnated as a baseball manager, the thought-and tongue-twisting Casey Stengle of the New York Yankees and New York Mets would be my first choice. Like Stengle, Nostradamus turns his native tongue into his own language, fashioning and discarding syntax and grammar rules one sentence at a time. Stengle’s retrograde thinking and dyslexic words of wisdom revolutionized baseball. Nostradamus’ peculiar pen has made him the unsurpassed king of prophets. In the dross of absurdities and calculated insanities Nostradamus hides the gold nuggets of authentic and unrivaled prophetic inspiration. Stengle’s fractured figures of speech were innocent utterances, whereas the seer of Salon, Provence, shaped his ambiguous messages with great care and forethought.

And Nostradamus’ obscurity conjures many results. For one thing, his writing is muddled enough to be taken any way one wishes. It befuddled the Church Inquisitors to the extent that Nostradamus accomplished something rare for authentic seers of his day — he avoided torture and execution as a magician and died peacefully in his bed. His ambiguities have kept the controversy of his prophecies alive, and even enhanced his stature as a seer in the centuries following his death (just as he predicted).

What Casey Stengle once said about managing a baseball team can be applied to Nostradamus’ success as an obscurer: “The secret of managing is to keep the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.”

Nostradamus’ cryptic chronicle of the future has succeeded in distancing his attackers from the majority of his undecided readers. Defining his nebulous narrative is not unlike lying on your back in the grass and gazing at the shapes of puffy clouds. You see a giraffe. Your friend sees an elephant. You can argue with him. Your success at convincing the other depends on your eloquence, not on the reality of the cloud. People keep playing the same game with the misty mentality of Nostradamus. He understood that people love to project their prejudices onto the canvas of the obscure and that this passion in human nature for giving shape to ambiguities will always survive a skeptic’s attack. Nostradamus ensures his cloudy credibility by injecting moments of brilliant clarity that occasionally burn an opening in the general overcast of his narrative. We suddenly see names, dates, and intimate details of events as they happened — or will happen.

Nostradamus’ 36,200 weird words of prophecy are the molecules that compose the dark surface of his magic looking glass. On rare occasions we can peer into its surface and see the seeds of humanity harvested in tomorrow’s field of dreams. But the magic doesn’t end there. Nostradamus’ “glass” reflects both ways. His strange language, symbols, barbarisms, and insights can also be used as a projector of the hidden secrets of his interpreters, be they the commentators or the readers of his oracular opus. A study of Nostradamus is more than just another examination of fulfilled and yet-to-be-fulfilled prophecies; it can be an exploration into how we project our thoughts, feelings, hopes and fears on the future.

Before beginning a journey through time and our projections, it would be advisable to study some of Nostradamus’ grammar rules (or lack thereof), decoding techniques, and interpretive pitfalls uncovered during four hundred years of scholarship. In this way we can rub some of the fog off his looking glass to better see who or what is gazing back at us.

PASSAGE TWO:

Code-breaking Nostradamus

Contrary to the claims of many imaginative dilettantes and a few sincere theorists, no one has yet found the key to any single all-encompassing code that unlocks his secrets. After 22 years of study [make that 33 years, now] I conclude that a magician of Nostradamus’ intelligence would not be so stupid as to forge a weak link in the chain of his future legacy. At best there may be random devices and codes, but as we will see, even unlocking a random code conjures up more questions and mysteries than answers. It seems to be Nostradamus’ rule to keep’em guessing.

Some of the most entertaining books on Nostradamus’ boast about discovering some secret code. For instance, in 1991 authors Peter Lorie and V. J. Hewitt boldly claimed that they had made a complete scientific decodification of the prophet, from his chapeau of anagrams down to his syllable toes. With such a marketing hook I wondered why the promised “detailed” and scientific instructions were tucked away in the back of the book. The instructions brazenly asked the reader to comprehend Hewitt and Lorie’s “scientific” theories by taking a leap of faith beyond objectivity. The back cover boldly declares that Hewitt herself was foreseen by the prophet as the one who would unlock his secrets. So far this book is only remarkable in its remarkably detailed failures, such as Prince Charles’ failing to become king of England in 1993, George [H.W.] Bush failing to win a second term as president of the Untied States, and California not sinking into the Pacific Ocean at exactly 7 pm on 8 May, 1993.

Since that time Hewitt has struck out on her own and her declarations are far more cautious and open to interpretation. One no longer sees the dates for “decoded” prophecies listed on the cover of her books. There is much more use of “could” than “will” in her declarations these days.

I would cordially suggest to Hewitt, Lorie, or any future code-busters that they submit their claims to an impartial test. Anyone who believes he or she has decoded Nostradamus’ quatrains should send their selection of decoded quatrains, with down-to-the-day-and-minute declarations for the coming year, to a reputable metaphysical organization such as the American Society for Psychical Research. After one year those interpretations can be unsealed before an audience of debunkers, journalists, and true believers to test their veracity. After predictions are verified, then, and only then, should that author publish his or her book claiming to decode Nostradamus.

Rather than play hide-and-seek for some code to dispel all mystery, future translators might consider that Nostradamus may have intended that we apply the perspectives of our own era to his prophecies.

His own astrological makeup indicates that Nostradamus was not an ego wishing to be found out. But he was an alchemist of controversies. His obscurity has worked to keep alive for centuries what may be a practical joke or a true prophetic gift, or some combination of the two. Debunkers and blind believers alike ought to be aware that attempting to make the prophet fit their own preconceived ideas and prejudices and calling it his “real” intention, are futile.

Excerpts from
Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies,
pp. 11 – 12, 18 – 19.

John Hogue
(08 September 2007)