Who is Mabus, the Third and Final Antichrist foreseen by Nostradamus?

Friends,
Discovery premiered their Nostradamus Decoded tonight. Fabulous production quality and for the first hour they tried their best to be fair and balanced between skeptical and sympathetic views of Nostradamus until the temptation was too great. They dug up a fellow who was an expert on 16th-century French but had no knowledge whatsoever of mystical or occult knowledge from the same century. They also dug up James Randi to rant his usually unchallenged lapses of research. I tried four times in the last 20 years to corner him in a foursquare debate on television; wherein every statement he made could be challenged. He always escaped.

Don’t get me wrong, I generally liked the show and it was rich in good material from both sides. Bravo Discovery Channel for coming a long way forward from that disaster of a documentary called Nostradamus: A Skeptical Inquiry. Its more deserving descendant, Nostradamus Decoded, went a lot farther to allow skeptics to be challenged. I am grateful for that. However, Discovery Channel still seems to have a front office policy of being pre-wired biased in favor of any skeptical view, and still lets a lot of these lazy and undisciplined skeptics, like Randi, go unchallenged.

Hope in me springs eternal that Discovery will advance the path of science (which means to know) by allowing me in future documentaries they may plan on prophecy to answer every challenge, so that you, the television viewer, can be served best to decide for yourself whether the Randis or the Hogues in this Nostradamus debate have best presented their arguments.

I will give you, my readers, the responses to challenges made on this show as soon as I can in a few weeks. I would like to do it now, however I am very busy in the next few weeks finishing the final edit of Predictions for 2010. Today the rough draft was finished, appropriately on All Soul’s Day because the future of 2010 will shake souls — not only shake them for worse.

What I can present for you tonight is a blog article composed in March that covers my take on one of the main themes of Nostradamus Decoded:

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I have been on the trail of decoding Nostradamus anagram for his Third and Final Antichrist perhaps longer than most Nostradamian scholars. I began in 1982, over a quarter-century ago. I waited this long before releasing my findings about MABUS because I felt the times for the actual emergence of the one Nostradamus calls his last Antichrist where not nigh unto now

The book covers just about every possible angle I have discovered on my own or collected from fellow divination detectives on the case. There are few stones left unturned, yet on rare occasions someone comes up with something interesting like the reader named “Sultan” did the other day. Another reader we’ll cal “J” presents a view often entertained by readers that Mabus isn’t a name, it’s an acronym.

J
I downloaded your book yesterday and didn’t stop reading until I was done. Excellent and informative.

HOGUE
Thank you J, for reading it.

J
I wanted to comment on your opinion on Mabus. I agree and expanding on your theory. [Try this interpretation:] Mabus May Be Us (or) May Be U.S. – both of which would apply.

HOGUE
The only problem with that theory is that it assumes Nostradamus hid English phrases in his prophecies. After over 30 years study of his unique mangling of the French language, I have not seen anything convincing enough to conclude that Nostradamus used codes for English acronyms. Still, enough readers over the years come to me with these creative attempts which makes me think it is time to write a blog article about my views on the matter, so thanks for your inspiration, J.

J
Seeing as how Mabus applies to so many world leaders and figures couldn’t it also say we are in the time of Mabus?

HOGUE
I think Nostradamus is saying that indirectly with his many hints about the time, astrology, common names fitting Mabus. I don’t think he said this directly in a nudge of an English phrase in code, though.

J
Doesn’t the bible state we will see the Anti Christ everywhere around the world?

HOGUE
In a way, my ending to the book tried to answer in the affirmative that question, and offer the readers a fresh look at just what the Antichrist might be, beyond personifications.

But back to your acronym theory. Hundreds of readers have supplied me with plays on MABUS meaning Ma Bush, for the former president’s mother, or adding the missing y say it is an acronym for May B us. Alternatively, May B U-nited S-tates. There are those of you who think it stands for a blending of G.W. Bush and Obama. It is true that a more traditional use of anagram rules from the 16th century will get you Mabus out of G.W. Bush. Just turn the G.W. to lower case g.w. Switch them around: w.g. Turn them upside down to get m.a. Bush, then drop the redundant h, and voilà! Mabus.

You can also get Obama from Mabus. The correct phonetics is oobama or ubama. You mix it to spell Maabu, cut the redundant a with an s replacement — et voilà, nous retroverons Mabus!

Now then, pardon my French, folks, but in no way have I found any acronyms for English phrases in Nostradamus. You have to look for French possibilities, and to a lesser extent phrases or names hidden in ancient French-related languages of Ossitan, Gallot, Provençal, or find an acronym you can hide phonetically in Roman letters for Greek, Hebrew, Arabic or print outright in Latin. Nostradamus blended these languages into his prophecies in Old French.

John Hogue

(01 November 2009)

Friends,
Enter the Serengeti of Synecdoche, to creep with elephant gun half-cocked through the high grass plains of the animal kingdom of Nostradamus’ words. We are doing the Safari Darwin of Debunk. We are up-wind of a pack of lionesses of skepticism watching their instinctive strategy of the hunt. They seek to pounce upon the weakest verses in the vast herd of Nostradamian quatrains: those Wildebeests of portent too slow to run off in sudden bright cognizance, the ones too vague in vision to see the huntresses approach.

These sorry ungulates of augury are ever the prey of debunkers, marking and maneuvering for the kill to cull the enfeebled and most confused in the “heard” of Nostradamus’ over 1,500 verses.

These are the only ones they dare hope to feast upon. You will rarely see a pack of debunkers fall between the horns of a full bull wildebeest prophecy: one with clear intent, gleaming in a black-eyed and sharp auguring vision, snorting and stamping its point hard in the ground, waiting. Daring a fool lion to think these are black haunches to claw and tooth without hazard.

A lioness tried it. Ten times. Back in the 1990s, the reigning “queen” of debunking lionesses, James Randi left his teeth rather than teeth marks in the behind of bull wildebeest quatrains and got gored for his troubles. It happened when I wrote for the sake of the hunted an answer to all of his attempts to eviscerate ten quatrains, famous for leaving behind them very large and lingering sharp horned prophetic accuracy.

Every once and awhile, when current events don’t demand a quick prophetic response, I will return to and refresh this prophetic showdown from the 1990s. We will run again from time to time with these skeptically dangerous quatrains, renewing the battle of beasts-of-prey prophecies and debunking predators.

For today, I’d like to talk about the vulnerable prophecies, the type we examined back in the blog article entitled “Nostradamus Predicts McCain Win? NOT!” — quatrains 78 and 79 of Century 10. These pathetic creatures are fair game for skeptics because they are exactly the right kind to easily chase down. They remain verses so vague and open to interpretation that con-skeptics swipe and claw them to the ground easily, so that you might think the rest of the “heard” quatrains are as easy for lions to clutch by the throat and smother like a scrawny dik-dik.

Beyond it being simply wrong or false, what makes a quatrain appear prophetically weak?

Either it may not give up its secrets until the clues make sense to those in the time it foresees; or, it’s something impossibly nebulous, intended for Nostradamus’ contemporary and long-departed audience. In either case, it is marked by weak credibility for a pounce and a “purr” puss full devouring.

Here’s the two prophecies again in the original Renaissance French followed by my English translation and commentary from 1997. I haven’t looked at these interpretations for 11 years and found it amusing that I waggishly predicted some future debunker would sink its fangs into them:

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10 Q78
Subite ioye en subite tristesse,
Sera ?† Rome aux graces embrassees:
Dueil, cris, pleurs, larm. sang excellent liesse
Contraires bandes surprinses & troussees.

Sudden joy into sudden sadness
Will be at Rome for the graces embraced.
Grief, cries, tears, weeping. Blood, excellent mirth
Contrary groups surprised and trussed up.

A vision of the contradictory images fluttering on modern Italian television? Who knows. This could describe any number of instances of sudden joy and sadness felt by people waiting for news of survivors from some ship or airplane accident.

10 Q79

The old paths will be all improved,
One will travel on them (to a place) similar to Memphis:
The great Mercury of Hercules, fleur-de-lys,
Causing to quake land, sea and country.

As far as I know, the authors of cheap-thrills Nostradamus articles in the tabloids have yet to make hay over line 2 of this quatrain:

FLASH! Nostradamus predicts Elvis slighting!

The new king from Memphis probably isn’t the King of Rock. As flashy as his sequined costumes were, I never saw any with fleur-de-lys designs. But all seriousness aside, a snarling and sexy king of another song and dance is meant here. The great Hercules of the lilies can only be a king of France. The references to home improvements in the first two lines are not intended for the new driveway at Graceland. They are better applied to the public works of Louis XIV during the period of 57 peaceful years when the rocks of the stonemasons rolled to finish the Palace of Versailles. “Thank-yuh-v’ry-much.”

Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies, (1997) p. 809

***

We’ll take on the bull quatrains by the horns as soon as stock market crashes and forecasting the fates Obama cabinet choices give me the time to go hunting.

John Hogue
(07 November 2008)

Friends,
Remember the famous Hillary Clinton political campaign ad broadcast during the Democratic Primaries of purring phones and sleeping little children? Some of it is about to become true complements of Barack Obama’s pursuit of a cabinet consisting of a team of rivals like the one formed by his idol, President Abraham Lincoln. He chose not one but all three Republican’s who ran hard against him to be nominated as their party’s candidate for president in 1860. He rewarded their rivalry with some of the most influential cabinet posts: William H. Seward as Secretary of State, Salmon P. Chase as Secretary of the Treasury and Edward Bates as Attorney General.

We mark today another moment where destiny opens a wide opportunity: when the president elect once again makes good his intention to be the next Lincoln; or, as the Clinton ad now should say:

“It’s 3 a.m. in the morning and your children are safe and asleep. There’s a phone in the White House and it’s ringing. There’s a crisis somewhere in the world…”

Your vote ‘has’ decided who will pick up that call if you voted for President Elect Barack Obama. “

This Friday (14 November 2008) he has offered the job of Secretary of State to someone who, as the ad continues, “Already knows the world’s leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world.”

She won’t lead as President of the United States, because she lost, like Seward. She will not lead as Obama’s Vice Presidential nominee after the job went to now Vice President Elect Joe Biden.

But, if it’s three a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. Who do you want picking up the phone? Obama, that’s clear from a majority of the voting electorate. But the president may be handing the phone over to his first choice for Secretary of State, his chief rival in the primaries, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I’ve always felt a very powerful premonition whenever I’ve seen Hillary Clinton alone with Barack Obama on the stage during the primary debates. Destiny meant to bring these two human beings together in a political dream team.

I have NEVER sensed in my oracular states anything to support the popularized view of talking Media woodenheads on the television that Obama and Clinton could not stand each other or work with each other. The chemistry in their auras said to me just the opposite was true. That’s not to say they won’t debate and question each other in what could be as lively and challenging a collaboration in the future as Seward versus Lincoln in the past. But they will get things done. Great things!

I had misread my prophetic gut feelings during as the primaries ended. I thought this dream team would consist of Clinton as Obama’s running mate. When that didn’t transpire it felt very strange to me, as if events had gone against the grain of a destined, fateful collaboration.

This vision of the teaming up of the two is something I’ve been trying to frame in different forms since early 2007 in my bulletins, as any of you who have read me over the last few years know. First, I thought the team would be Clinton with Obama as Vice President. Then Obama-Clinton. I just couldn’t get the vision of this powerhouse duo to stop haunting the silent unguarded auguries of my oracle, even as the presidential elections approached and all outward signs of that future ever happening seemed dead. The feeling of a missed destiny stayed in a distant corner of silence in my future gazing, humming like a soft overtone, slightly out of key. It couldn’t really go away.

Today’s not so cryptic messages from the Obama headquarters that the job of Secretary of State is Hillary Clinton’s to have or reject, has brought the future of that dream team back to life.

If Clinton takes the job, the person I predicted since 1998 would become America’s first woman president of a Nixonian Democratic administration, might be part of a power team in international affairs and diplomacy not seen since Nixon chose Henry Kissinger to be his Secretary of State. In the end, this step may be her next step to being a president herself, in the future. One would only hope it won’t be tragedy that brings that step too soon in 2012.

I predict that if she accepts Barack Obama offer, we will see breathtaking diplomatic feats of genius not enjoyed since Trilateral Diplomacy, Detente with the Soviet Union, peace agreements with North Vietnam and Nixon’s historic visit to China.

May she be as mindful of her destiny and say, “Yes.”

John Hogue
(14 November 2008)

Friends,
An interpreter of prophecy and a forensic scientist share many things in common. Sometimes they both spend decades tracking down clues derived from sparse evidence to solve a mystery by trial and error. The forensic scientist may eventually solve a crime, while a prophecy interpreter may at last grasp a seer’s intended vision of tomorrow. Today I wish to review for you a prescient forensic search that has spanned the past eighteen years-and-counting. It concerns the right interpretation to a famous prophecy about “Alus sanguinaire” (bloody Alus) and the “black one” in Century (Volume) 6, Quatrain 33 of “Les Propheties” by Michel de Nostradamus. If we can unlock this 16th-century French visionary’s enigmatic clues we just might see what is coming next in America’s occupation of Iraq. Since writing my first book “Nostradamus and the Millennium” in 1986, my intuition has guided me along a prescient theory that a black robed Ayatollah of the Shiite sect of Islam is the catalyst to the violent spread of Islamic extremism across the Middle East. Then as now, I believe Century 6, Quatrain 33 (below) points to Iran and the fundamentalist Islamic revolution of Ayatollah Khomeini as the source:

Sa main derniere par Alus sanguinaire
Ne se pourra par la mer guarentir:
Entre deux fleuues craindre main militaire,
Le noir l’ireux le fera repentir.

His hand [that is, his power] finally through bloody Alus,
He will be unable to protect himself by sea.
Between two rivers he will fear the military hand,
The black one will make the angry one repent of it.

Back in 1986, Iranian armies under Khomeini’s command launched their largest human-wave offensive against entrenched Iraqi troops in the Iran-Iraq Gulf War (1980-1988). This is what I concluded about it then. Please note that I inserted the bracketed comments from today:

“Nostradamus called this contender for the third anti-christ ‘the black and angry one.’ This implication of blackness may relate both to Khomeini’s form of dress and his well-known dark character.

“Further, in the quatrains about ‘the black and angry one’ Nostradamus speaks of the one who is the inspiration for an attack across Iraq all the way to Egypt with a force of one million men, the date being set astrologically for August 1987.* During 1986, Iran boasted close to one million men at the front fighting Iraq.”

["Nostradamus and the Millennium" (1987 edition), p.128].

*[NOTE: the prophecy displayed by the side of the text relating to C6 Q33 is C5 Q25, reads: "The Arab Prince...Inclined towards Persia [Iran], Very nearly one million men will invade Byzantium (Turkey) and Egypt.” The astrological aspect is “Mars, the Sun, Venus (in) Leo.” The next time the sun and these planets were in was August 2000. It will happen again August 2019, and August 2032.]

My 1986 interpretation aside, what actually happened?

Ayatollah Khomeini’s massed infantry offensive on the approaches of Basra and across Faw Peninsula ground down in bloody ruin in the following year. Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship survived. The war ended in 1988, and when Khomeini died shortly after, it appeared that the trail to identifying the “black one” as Khomeini hit reality’s brick wall.

The path to understand this prophecy was waylaid by controversy during the Gulf War of 1991. My publisher at the time (Labyrinth Press) announced their desire to rush a reprint of “Nostradamus and the Millennium.” They went ahead and made an unauthorized cut of my passage about Ayatollah Khomeini. This led to a decade-long quack attack from James Randi accusing me of dropping the segment on Khomeini because I didn’t want to publicize a failure. Recently, the Las Vegas magic act, Pen and Teller, dug up Mr. Randi’s accusation for Showtime Channel’s new skeptical inquiry show, crudely entitled “Bullshit.”

If I may, I would like to set the record straight about the missing Khomeini entry.

I found a new publisher, Element Books, after the legally binding terms of Labyrinth’s contract had ended. Element reinserted my updated Ayatollah Khomeini comments. I might add that these are the same comments I had planned to insert in the 1991 Labyrinth edition. They appear in my authorized second edition of “Nostradamus and the Millennium” under the new title, “Nostradamus: The New Revelations” (Element Books, 1994). You can find my Khomeini commentary on page 184 of that and all future reprints. The most recent, and third, edition came out in 2001 under the new title Nostradamus: The New Millennium. This book updates my interpretations as seen in the new light of events after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on America.

I want to make it clear that an explanation for my mistaken Khomeini interpretation has been published and readily available for over ten years. I can only conclude that professional slight-of-hand-and-intellect artists like James Randi, Pen and Teller base their “scientific” and “skeptical” conclusions on lazy research and idle skimming through one botched 1991 reprint of my first book. That makes the data for their accusation more than 13 years out of date.

Here are pertinent excerpts coming from my explanation, published in 1994. I have inserted statements in brackets from today:

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“In the summer of 1986, I warned incorrectly that Saddam Hussein might face military defeat in the following year [of the Iran-Iraq War]. I suggested this possibility in the light of the dating in Quatrain 25, Century 5 of the final Iranian offensive of almost one million men set to overrun Mesopotamia and defeat the ‘Arab Prince’ (Saddam Hussein) in August of 1987…Looking back at this interpretation, it can be argued in my defense that August of 1987 did prove to be a significant turning-point in the war; it was not, however, in Iran’s favor…American covert military actions between August 1987 through July of the following year had the effect of turning the tide o f the war in favor of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

“Although the Iranians had unleashed their, initially successful, final offensive of nearly a million men in the previous year (February 1986), and had seized the Faw peninsula and fought their way to the approaches to the city of Basra by April 1987, my interpretation that they would overrun the Arab world all the way to the borders of Turkey and Egypt was a classic example of a prophet scholar’s weakness for hyperbolic exaggeration.

“At least for the present time.

“With an increase of arms and intelligence support provided by the United States, Saddam Hussein was able to push the Iranians out of the Faw peninsula the following year…Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1988, to be replaced not by another ‘black and angry’ Shiite mullah, but by the more moderate Rafsanjani who was to steer Iran away form confrontations…Iraq is poised to break up any time around the mid-90s. By that time Iran will have quietly amassed an armed force to match that of Saddam Hussein’s prior to Operation Desert Storm and may yet fill the political void by uniting with Shiite Iraqi Arabs to form a new Pan-Shiite state. Although there are now increased numbers of Ayatollahs supporting more radical Shiite fundamentalism, Rafsanjani’s re-election keeps them somewhat at bay till the mid-90s.

“If the Third Gulf War should take place at that time, Iran’s priests of the Jihad will show the world that they have learned lessons from Saddam Hussein’s blunders: Do not take the border dispute bait before you have achieved the means to arm your regional ballistic missiles, your superguns, and your bombers with nuclear weapons.

“In a third and final Gulf War, waged during a time of dreadful astrological aspects, a ‘black and angry’ Ayatollah could sweep across the Middle East with the sound of jet engines and nuclear-tipped missiles to do battle with Israel and the forces of the West led by the United States. “

["Nostradamus: The New Revelations" (1994), p 184;
Nostradamus: The New Millennium, p. 184.]

***

It would appear my predicted date for the fall of Saddam and breakup of Iraq in the mid-1990s was a bit hasty. Saddam fell in 2003A breakup of Iraq could still happen –my bad dating forecasts aside. It is believed by US intelligence that Iran is moving quickly to create and arm itself with nuclear weapons for a future war. The Iranian government denies this. The apocalyptic spread of militant Islam across the Middle East from Iran to Iraq, then to Egypt and Turkey may be a destiny taking its time. My 1986 interpretation that Ayatollah Khomeini will physically lead a militant Islamic revolution westward across the Middle East from Iran was a dead end, but a revolution lead by the myth of Khomeini is still quite alive. Go to southern Iraq and walk through the Shia towns and cities. You will see Khomeini’s grim face, bracketed by his distinctive black turban and robes, posted everywhere. He remains a patron saint and a rallying symbol for a future militant rebellion of Islam. Is he, or an Ayatollah heir to his revolution invoking his name, the “black one” or Nostradamus’ “bloody Alus”?

I returned to my investigation of Century 6, Quatrain 33 in 1997. It appears in the first complete translation of all of Nostradamus major prophecies since the Leoni edition in 1962. Here is the prophecy again:

His power finally through bloody Alus,
He will be unable to protect himself by sea.
Between two rivers he will fear the military hand,
The black one will make the angry one repent of it.

“The quatrain implies that Saddam Hussein (‘the angry one’) is the man who is ‘unable to protect himself by sea’ (his defenses proved useless against sea-launched cruise missiles both during and after the Gulf War of 1991). Saddam, the Mesopotamian leader ‘between two rivers’ (the Tigris and Euphrates) who fears the ‘military hand’ of the West, may also need to fear the hand or power of bloody ‘Alus,’ the ‘black one,’ who is someone other than Abu Nidal. He could be a future black-robed Ayatollah from Iran.”

Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies p. 459.]

Six years later, my interpretation of 6 Q33 evolved again in the aftermath of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. I wrote the following segment in a HogueProphecy Bulletin for 1 August 2003:

“Saddam’s sons have been killed. He will follow them shortly. What transpires in the months or a year ahead is a new insurrection fomented by a black robed and angry Iraqi Shiite Ayatollah. Whether his anger or US imperialist interests in Iraq are justified only history will tell. Prophecy tells us that a new guerrilla war is coming. It may not be solely a war waged by those between the two rivers of the Tigris and Euphrates in the ‘Sunni’ Muslim ‘Triangle.’ The vast majority of Iraqi’s of the Shiite faith will, for better or worse, choose to establish their own political destiny without edicts from Viceroys of an American occupation. The Shiites may push aside the Americans if they do not step aside.”

[HogueProphecy Bulletin, 1 August 2003:
Who is Nostradamus' Third Antichrist?
A Post-Iraqi Invasion Update .]

Unfortunately, my prediction about a Shiite rebellion against American occupation starting in 2004 was correct. At the end of March, American coalition forces banned a newspaper published by Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of a sect of young and radical Shiites. He launched an uprising in a half dozen cities with up to 10,000 militia from his own al-Mahdi private army, assisted by Sunni guerrillas. So far (22 April) the fighting has killed 102 US troops and over 1,000 Iraqi civilians and fighters in bloody urban street fighting primarily in Fallujah, al-Kut and along streets in the Shia slums around Baghdad. US wounded are in the several hundreds .

[UPDATE 5 May: The US military death toll for April reached 138 dead, 879 wounded, of which 560 were serious wounds.]

The Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini never set foot again in Najaf, the holiest city of the Shiites but a black robed Iranian cleric has lived there for 40 years. A majority of Shias in Iraq, as well as many in Iran and the world over, acknowledge him as their Grand Ayatollah. I speak of Ayatollah Ali Husaini Sistani. So far, he has been a moderate cleric, respected even by the administrator of the US occupation of Iraq, Paul Bremer. Sistani’s leads 15 million Iraqi Shias through the practice of quietism. It would be good for the US viceroy and his soldiers not to believe Sistani’s silence stands for acquiescence to US occupation. The Grand Ayatollah wants Iraq to be a democracy, but he has made it quietly clear that he prefers Iraqis use their self-determination to fashion a democracy that is Islamic in attitude–not Western American. It is also clear from his polite but pointed statements that he expects the US occupiers to leave soon after the 30 June deadline–the date when they promise to hand over sovereignty of Iraq to an Iraqi interim government. Sistani expects national elections will ensue, and the Shia majority will help elect and later dominate a new democratic government by the end of 2004, or by early 2005.

Sistani lives in Najaf, the most sacred city of the Shiite sect of Islam, the site of the martyrdom of their founder, Ali, the grandson of Muhammad. It is their Vatican, and in many ways the Grand Ayatollah, born in Iran, but residing there for over 40 years, is their pope. With Saddam gone, the Shias from outside of Iraq, from Iran and all over the world, expect Najaf will again become their center of religious pilgrimage, learning and theocratic power. Sistani patiently waits while younger, more violent, clerics like al-Sadr use violence to accomplish this dream. They do not have Sistani’s blessing in this.

Is the dark eyed and black bearded rabble-rouser, cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, Nostradamus’ “black one”?

During the Saddam Hussein dictatorship his much revered father, the Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr oversaw the al-Hawza (the main school of Shia instruction) in Najaf. He became so popular that Saddam Hussein had him assassinated in 1999. After the fall of Saddam, al-Sadr the son attempted to take his father’s place leading the al-Hawza in Najaf. He did so with an added malevolence his father may have never condoned. The Aljazeera web site states:

“His followers surrounded the home of Grand Ayat Allah Ali al-Sistani, an Iranian citizen, asking him to leave the country soon after occupation. This followed the murder of the prominent Shia cleric Abd al-Majid al-Khoei who had returned to Iraq with US forces after years in exile returned to Iraq.”

Al-Sadr the son has neither his father’s theological knowledge or authority, though his passionate oratory has inspired the younger and unemployed followers of his father, many of whom joined the younger al-Sadr’s al-Mahdi militia. Al-Sadr’s newspaper, al-Hawza, made it abundantly clear that he rejected the US occupation and their idea of a provisional Iraqi governing council. He did foment passionate yet non-violent resistance to the US occupation until US authorities shut down al-Hawza the end of March 2004, alleging it was inciting violence. Mass demonstrations of al-Sadr’s followers ensued until 5 April 2004–the day he concluded that non-violent protest was useless and urged his followers and militia to “terrorize their enemies.”

There is a clear and present danger this rebellion will spread beyond al-Sadr’s small movement and ignite an insurrection across two thirds of Iraq, among the Iraqi Shias. And yet, it may well turn out that the al-Sadr rebellion in itself will be impotent unless the US forces gathering their tanks around Najaf should use heavy handed tactics to seize al-Sadr hiding inside the holy city of all Shia factions. Even if the US occupiers show restraint in the 11th hour, there may yet be a terrible rebellion brewing, beyond their worst nightmares. It could come from a command or a statement of displeasure from Sistani if he thinks the US forces aren’t pulling out of Iraq fast enough after 30 June.

Even though al-Sadr is not the “Iranian” Ayatollah I foresaw in the verses of Nostradamus it is a well-known fact that Iraqi Shia militias receive arms and financial aid donated by militant Iranian ayatollahs smuggled across Iraq’s 900-mile border with Iran. This April, the former Iranian president, Rafsanjani, went as far as praising al-Sadr’s uprising, calling his al-Mahdi militiamen “enthusiastic, heroic young people.” Ayatollah Sistani who condemned the actions of al-Sadr also publicly condemned the heavy handed US military response for the devastation and suffering it caused innocent citizens of Shia towns and cities across Iraq.

The stage is set for the “black one.” The names of Ayatollahs have changed, but the source of their rebellion still leads to my first choice back in 1986, the founder of a militant Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini. Back in the 1960s, Khomeini lived in the holy city of Najaf as an exile of the Shah of Iran, an American backed dictator. The rise of another American backed dictator in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, in the 1970s forced Khomeini from Najaf into exile in England. There he planned the Iranian revolution that overthrew the Shah and brought his triumphant return to Iran in the late 1970s. Then came the Iran-Iraq War. Saddam’s invasion of Khomeini’s Iran faltered, and US supply of chemicals and expertise for manufacturing weapons of mass destruction and daily intelligence reports from US satellites aided Saddam’s successful defense against Iranian counterattacks. What seemed imminent to me for 1987 was wrong. The Iranian revolution didn’t topple Saddam Hussein, break up Iraq and spread its brand of Islamic radicalism as far west as Egypt as far north as Turkey. And yet, Khomeini’s revolution is still alive and waiting.

It could topple a new government and break up post-Saddam Iraq, and it could happen and very soon.

An Islamic fundamentalist party rules Turkey at this moment. For now they pledge to respect and uphold the secular Turkish constitution. What will happen in Turkey if Iraq falls into chaos, the Iraqi Kurds declare their independence, and the eastern third of Turkey, populated by Kurds fights to secede from Turkey?

What of Egypt? At this moment the ailing president, Mubarak, has long and brutally suppressed a volcano of Islamic militancy in Egypt. What happens if Iraq falls into chaos, and Mubarak should pass away? A Shia rebellion against Western occupation in Iraq might galvanize Egyptians to overthrow the pro-Western government of Mubarak, or his successor, as Century 6 Quatrain 33 may infer.

Let us again see examine the riddles of “bloody Alus” and the “back one” framed in the light of volatile events in early 2004:

His power finally through bloody Alus,
He will be unable to protect himself by sea.
Between two rivers he will fear the military hand,
The black one will make the angry one repent of it.

Line one’s “Alus” anagram is rich with decoded potentials covering both sides of the conflict. The line, “his power finally through bloody Alus,” could point to the power a black robed Ayatollah extremist has rekindled to incite a Shiite rebellion against a draconian occupying force Nostradamus calls “bloody Alus.” A rudimentary use of the laws of anagram easily transforms the riddle “Alus” into “l’usa” (or, “the USA” in English)!

One can also drop the “u” in “Alus” and replace it with an “i” to imply (Ali S)istani. In that case “his power” stands for al-Sadr’s “power” to incite rebellion beyond his own small movement infecting Sistani’s followers “through” a union with the “bloody Ali” Sistani. Taking this farther, perhaps Nostradamus qualifies “Alus” as “bloody” because he saw visions of Shia men in these parades of devotion ritually slicing their foreheads and thus bathing their heads and shoulders in blood; or, he saw them flogging their backs to a “bloody” mess while they celebrated the martydom of their founder, Ali (“Alus”).

Line two in previous interpretations stood for Saddam Hussein’s inability to defend himself from US coalition cruise and jet aircraft attacks from the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea. Given Nostradamus’ predilection to hide multiple meanings in his quatrains, one might also add that the forces of the bloody “l’USA-Alus” occupation will find their supply lines to the Persian Gulf cut in a future rebellion. If all southern Iraq rose in rebellion the US convoys strung along hundreds of miles of lonely roads would be under constant attack from Baghdad all the way to the port of Um Qasir. (“He will not be able to protect himself from the sea.”)

Line three describes the “two rivers” of Iraq–the Tigris and Euphrates. This line first applied itself in earlier interpretations to the “fear” Saddam Hussein felt when pitted against US forces in the Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003. A deeper layer of prescient meaning might denote an Ayatollah leading a future rebellion of Shiites in a far more heavy handed battle to come in the streets of cities across southern Iraq after 30 June.

The “black one” should fear the military hand of the Bush administration. Iraq will suffer a bloodbath–one that line four implies. One that even a “black” robed Ayatollah as moderate as Grand Ayatollah Sistani might unleash if he challenges the “angry one”–a frustrated President Bush–to “repent” his escalating military violence by ordering a general strike and rebellion of 15 million Iraqi Shias.

Nine months ago I wrote the following warning in a bulletin about a prophecy of Nostradamus related to 6 Q33. I concluded that Century 3, Quatrain 61 described a disastrous future Christian Crusade in modern-day Iraq:

The great host and sect of the crusaders,
Will be massed in Mesopotamia [modern day Iraq]:
Of the nearby river the fast company,
That such law will hold for the enemy.

I’ll close the bulletin with what I said in July 2003. It appears more pertinent than ever:

“The final line seen in the light of the 2003 invasion, becomes more ominous for America. Indeed, a clearer picture arises of just what Nostradamus might intend for the ‘law’ that will ‘hold for the enemy.’ Saddam’s dictatorial ‘law’ survived the Gulf War of 1991 only to be replaced by a new tyranny–the ‘Sharia’ law of Shiite fundamentalism.

“The law of the Sharia will hold Iraq because the American president’s preemptive war and occupation is the cataylst. A force-fed Iraqi puppet democracy will radicalize the country. The guerrilla insurrection will grow in strength long after the US captures or kills Saddam. This insurrection may be the match setting the fires of a 27-year war foreseen by Nostradamus in his famous ‘Mabus’ and ‘Third Antichrist’ prophecies [2 Q62 and 8 Q77].”

[HogueProphecy Bulletin, 11 July 2003,
New Crusades and Quagmires]

It would appear that forces are in motion. Without a dramatic and more thought out Iraqi occupation policy enacted soon, Alus–or “L’usa” (the USA)–will face a future quagmire in Iraq after 30 June that is very “bloody.”

John Hogue
(22 April 2004)