Graphic showing seven billion people on Earth, half of which crowd urban areas.

Friends,
Some demographer wag has estimated that when the kiddies are in costume looking for tricks or candy treats this coming Monday on Halloween Night there will be born a future little “Halloweener” somewhere on this planet that will break the population sound barrier, as it were. He or she will push the pedal to the metal or our apocalyptically quickening times to a speed of “Mac 7” – as in Seven billion people sucking out the dwindling resources of this ecologically overwhelmed planet. The “trick” will be, how we can “treat a sustainable future for that child where his or her belly will be nourished with food and his or her body will receive fresh water and adequate clothing. Will his or her mind be educated properly or dulled by disease and famine? Will his or her hopelessness be the seed of anger and desperation as they enter their teens and twenties. Will their anger be harnessed by a hundred Hitler’s in a near future world that descends into fascism to stem the emergency of breakdowns in global food, water and hope for the swelling multitudes of Earth?

The prophetic collective message from Nostradamus to the biblical seers, from native visions to Vedic, Islamic and Buddhist visions of the future bodes ominous. In effect, they all mostly support Nostradamus’ famous warning in Century 1 Quatrain 67 of his 1550s magnum-prognosticating opus, Les Propheties:

La grand famine que ie sens approcher,
Souuent tourner, puis estre vniuerselle:
Si grande & longue qu’un viendra arracher,
Du bois racine, & l’enfant de mammelle.

The great famine which I sense approaching,
Will often turn (up in various places) then become universal:
It will be so vast and long lasting,
That (people) grab roots from the trees and children from the breast.

This is a “real” Halloween horror story an awakening of human intelligence can forestall.

Today I am posting my 16 March 2011 interview for Raw Epicurean.net. It was written days after the great Japanese quake and tsunami shattered, then flooded out of existence, thousands of acres of Japanese farmlands along with claiming nearly 30,000 victims. The Fukushima nuclear reactor crisis further tainted surviving agricultural lands and put into doubt the fishing grounds off the northeast coast of the main (Honshu) Island in the Japanese archipelago.

Much of the farmlands of Queensland Australia had already been flooded by cyclones of record-breaking size and ferocity in January 2011. Central China’s winter grain crop had also failed due to bad weather.

Soon after Japan lost much of its agricultural crops near Sendai to the tsunami, the supercharged, globally warming spring rains and deadly tornado season flooded the Mississippi and Missouri river systems in the American bread basket states that are pivotal for feeding the planet. Hundreds of thousands of acres of corn and wheat fields were drowned along with many other foodstuffs.

Summer came, burned, and desiccated the peanut, corn and wheat crops of Texas to the tune of a five billion dollar loss. Then came the typhoons in Asia inundating the rice fields from Southeast China to the Philippines and Vietnam. Then came a monsoon torrent that by itself, and without cyclonic storms, drowned the crops of eastern India and nearly all of Thailand in the worst monsoon floods of a half-century. As I write this, the deluge has run down the rivers into Thailand’s capital. Bangkok streets are underwater.

The impact on rising food prices and threats of famine for 2012 is a major theme in my upcoming e-book Predictions for 2012. These fundamental problems arising from food either being drowned or destroyed by a more violent climate or food surviving the onslaught becoming too expensive for the vast majority of its seven billion people has pretty much fallen off the radar of ratings and interest of the mainstream corporate news. Certainly, other stories concern us now: the loss of American leadership and credibility in finding economic solutions to its debt problems. After Greece a deepening EU banking crisis concerning Italy and Spain all point to a slide back into double-digit recession by the end of this year or early in 2012. The year 2011 keeps pace as the year of 12 disasters with yet another deadly major quake, magnitude 7.2, this time in Van, Turkey.

Yet, worldwide food prices continue to rise, because of historic flooding and droughts in the precious cornucopia of wheat and cornfields in Australia, Southeast Asia, South Asia and North America. The impact of all this strikes like a hammer on the alarm bell of population passing beyond sustainable levels this Halloween. That night we dress up as ghosts and play act scaring and being scared; yet, Halloween 2011 will mark something really scary. Tens of millions of those in costume playing skeletal ghosts today could become skeletal ghosts of famine by the tens of millions, perhaps billions, in the coming decades.

This milestone of 7 billion consumers was on my mind when back on March 16, I typed my response to Ingrid Weithers-Barati’s questions for our Raw Epicurean interview. It contains my oracle’s original take on the threat and solutions. I think it is best timed to share these passages with you again, on the eve of Halloween’s seven billionth child.

***

INGRID (Weithers-Barati): I read your January 31st post “Revolution in Egypt: From Food to Global Fuel Crisis”. You mentioned David Brinkley and his thought on future food crisis. Great article.

HOGUE
Thank you.

INGRID: Picking up where we left off just over a year ago, and all that has happened since then with big agribusiness via senate passing bills, pesticides, and genetically engineered “food”, it seems our current food system is leading us down a dangerous path toward an emergency with food sustainability and security. I wonder are we already there?

HOGUE
We are already there; however, not primarily for the reasons you cited above. These are peripheral to the fundamental problem: we cannot sustain our current growing food demand on a dwindling and rapidly degrading agricultural supply.

The FAO estimates the world will need to produce 70 percent more food by 2050. The miraculous expansion of our crop yields in the last 50 years came from technological advances in what has been hailed as a Green Revolution in food production.

This near-miraculous advance in harvest volume could match our multiplying billions up to our entry into the 21st century. It could absorb our hunger demand at least to sustain a population of 5 billion in the late 1980s jumping to 6 billion in 1999, jumping again in the current year of 2011 to 7 billion.

If you would permit me to take a simile about food sustainability down an unorthodox path, the Green Revolution’s advances could absorb our hunger like the Ganges River in India famously absorbs human and industrial pollution. It has been scientifically proven that the Ganges with its loamy mud bottom is particularly unique in its ability to bear, filter out and purify itself of the burden of human and industrial waste. This fact may be one of the objective reasons why many tens of millions who live upon its crowded banks believe the water of the Ganges is “holy.”

With the turn of the century, something changed. The holy Ganges’ “hole” in which people dumped their filth and forgot it, ignoring the consequences of what happens downstream, has reached a critical mass of mess. Now large sections of the river are dead, other sections dry out for part of the year from over water use.

Food is like a river pouring out of the cornucopia made from our technological advances in agriculture. Around the same time the Ganges started going fowl, the river of food sustenance could no longer absorb our growing dump-and-forget of our hunger demands upon it. Our cornucopia cannot increase the flow. Our current understanding of how to increase crop yields can no longer satiate our growing number of hungry mouths to feed. People expect technology to refresh the Cornucopia, make it larger. Each person looking primarily to his or her own immediate sustenance only. They throw hunger into the river, letting the threat of an oncoming global famine “flow”, as it were, down a river of denial.

I understand that describing human hunger as a form of pollution is unusual, but new ages require new definitions from which new solutions can be created. The unconsciousness of our voracious appetite is a kind of pollution that is inhuman. It is fine for an animal not burdened with sentience to mechanically, instinctively eat and breed to abandon because natural forces beyond its mindless control will cull and decimate the species through the destruction of the range it creates, automatically restoring balance.

The bark beetle mindlessly destroys its forest resource. Lightning strikes, and the forest with the host of beetles is burnt down. The beetle population is decimated and new forest growth begins unhindered.

Instinct, then, is just a cog in Mother Nature’s unconscious balancing mechanism. Yet, this lingering habit of instinct, which is perfectly natural for an unconscious animal, carried over to human beings is perverse, because humans are gifted with a sentience that could understand what animals cannot. They can perceive the need to manage their population so that it grows in balance with the resources available.

A human behaving like a bark beetle, mindlessly populating and devouring its range to the point of crisis, thus setting itself for natural decimation cannot call him or herself, fully human. On the one hand we take too much of its water and on the other our genetic tampering could make the river of our food flow sterile by disrupting the fertility of seeds in unknown ways. We are spoilers of that river; carelessly dumping our hunger demand into the river of food production is like an inhuman act of pollution, like a beetle destroying the forest. The beetle cannot help itself. The human potentially can. That is why I am calling this human abuse today something more than exhausting or mutating a resource river of sustenance. It is pollutingly ugly, because it is animal-like, un-thought out, unintelligent.

Act like a bark beetle or a rat and you will die like bark beetles and rats, humanity.

Use that big brain, and you will not die like rats. You will live like human beings, aware of yourselves and your place as guardians and sustainers of balance in Mother Nature’s world.

Voracious appetite is animal.

Harmony is a human trait.

***

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For those, right now, who wish to move beyond being scared of the future, I invite you to read my take on Osho’s Noah’s Ark of Consciousness Prophecy. Only by encountering and understanding our fears can a seed of harmony, a human trait, give birth to a fearless future.

John Hogue
(26 October 2011)

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Usama bin Laden.

Usama bin Laden (above), Saddam Hussein. Which one is Nostradamus' Arab Prince of Evil?

Friends,
The future and the events they anticipate are having a convergence. The prophecies of Nostradamus about his Third and Final Antichrist, code named Mabus now pit the two front-runners, the late Saddam Hussein and the recently killed Usama (Osama) bin Laden, in an ever-closer race to be number one candidate for Antichrist. Usama is catching up with Saddam.

Here, for your review are the two core quatrain prophecies about Mabus, the Third Antichrist, indexed 2 Q62 and 8 Q77 in Nostradamus’ prophetic masterpiece Les Propheties, initially published in serialized form between the years 1555 and 1560:

2 Q62
Mabus puis tost alors mourra, viendra,
De gens & bestes vne horrible defaite:
Puis tout à coup la vengeance on verra,
Cent, main, soif, faim, quand courra la comete.

Mabus will soon die, then will come,
A horrible unraveling of people and animals,
At once one will see vengeance,
One hundred powers, thirst, famine, when the comet will pass.

8 Q77
L’antechrist trois bien tost annichiliez,
Vingt & sept ans sang durera sa guerre:
Les heretiques morts, captifs, exilez,
Sang corps humain eau rogie gresler terre.

The Third Antichrist very soon annihilated,
Twenty-seven years his bloody war will last.
The heretics [are] dead, captives exiled,
Blood-soaked human bodies, and a reddened, icy hail covering the earth.

Let us go through the milestones that Saddam and Usama tally up to be candidate number one. (A full examination of all the Nostradamus Antichrist prophecies and potential past and future candidates can be had by reading my e-book. Click on Antichrist.

Being a dead candidate is the first and dubious milestone both share. Both violently annihilated: Saddam was hanged at the 30 December 2006, Usama shot by US Navy seals on May Day 2011.

(Score Saddam 1, Usama 1)

Both men’s names can be found in the code name Mabus. Saddam backwards spells maddas=mabbas=mabas. Replace one redundant a and you get Mabus. Usama mixed around get us maaus. Take the b from bin Laden. Replace the redundant a and you get Mabus.

(Score Saddam 2, Usama 2)

The horrible undoing of people and animals has not been made clear. It could imply the times in which they died, when the earth is seeing the balance of nature (animals) unraveling in devastating climate change caused by human abuse of the planet and overpopulation (people). There are many prophecies in Nostradamus about natural disasters, superstorms of terrible winds, global warming, vast inner-continental droughts at latitude 48 degrees across the world, all leading to a global famine and a third world war that may see two-thirds of the human race consumed.

It is not made clear in the prophecies if the Antichrist and the war arising from his annihilation triggers this unraveling of civilization and mass animal extinctions from a global catastrophe he caused. Indeed, the fact that Nostradamus does not directly tie the Third Antichrist to nearly 100 prophecies on this theme except for the nebulous connection made in 2 Q62 indicates to me that the unraveling of people and animals describes the times in which the Antichrist’s added catastrophe of a post mortem war takes place.

This however does not ignore the potential of either some terrible terrorist reprisal (in the case of Usama) or an unraveling of the Arab world because of a future breakup of Saddam’s Iraq as causes for the unraveling of the world. Saddam had famously predicted before being hanged that without his strong hand and dictatorship, Kurd, Shia and Sunni Iraqi’s would not be able to govern themselves and that sooner or later, Iraq would unravel. If the Middle East unravels, so does the oil industry that fuels human civilization. So, for now, I referee that the score is still tied. I conclude that 2 Q62, line 2 is dating the times in which the Antichrist dies, when humans and animals are enduring an unraveling of natural balances of the planet.

(Score: Saddam 3, Usama 3)

At once there is vengeance?

Saddam’s death did not see “immediately after” an unraveling of people and animals. We wait to see if this will happen in the next few months or years after the death of Usama. Score remains the same:

(Score: Saddam 3, Usama 3)

The line saying at once there will be vengeance is openly vague to embrace a future act of vengeance in retaliation to the killing of the Antichrist. One cannot say vengeance actually came from supporters of dead Saddam, although the worst years of the Iraqi sectarian civil war were ahead with the highest death tolls on Iraqis and US-coalition forces in the crossfire. Today saw the first reprisal bombings for Usama’s killing by Pakistani Taliban elements allied to al-Qaeda. Two suicide bombers killed scores of Pakistani Special Forces trainees as they gathered outside their boot camp facility in Western Pakistan to climb onto buses and minivans for a holiday. The death of 80 and the wounding of 100 of these does not fit the horrific reprisal implied that could ally 100 nations into an international counterattack. So, we are still waiting for something bigger to take place, perhaps in America — perhaps on or around the 10th anniversary of 9/11, or in al-Qaeda’s other favorite month to strike, the 11th month of each year.

No score change.

(Score: Saddam 3, Usama 3)

Now, if line 3 of 2 Q62 and part of line 4 are implying an alliance of 100 nations taking vengeance on a history changing terrorist act, then I have to give Usama a point. After al-Qaeda’s hijacked jet takedown of the World Trade Center Towers and drilling of the Pentagon on 11 September 2011 — a terrifying crime dated and foreseen by Nostradamus, see Osama — President G. W. Bush collected 100 nations into his alliance to seek out and destroy Usama’s terrorist network. Shortly after, in a few months’ time, US forces and the Afghan Northern Alliance routed al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban regime that harbored them in Afghanistan. Usama and his surviving core of al-Qaeda were surrounded in caves on Mt Tora Bora. The survivors, including a wounded Usama, only just managed to sneak over into Pakistan where he spent nearly a decade in hiding, overseeing a greatly reduced and crippled al-Qaeda.

(Score: Saddam 3, Usama 4)

The last line of 2 Q62 returns to the theme of describing the times of the death of the Antichrist: a time of great climate disruption (thirst=drought), the crisis of potable water and famine looming for the an overpopulated world that will endure the birth of the 7th billionth thirsty and hungry child sometime around July of 2011. One might argue that this population milestone tilts the milestone in favor of Usama, however the climate has been unraveling since global temperatures spiked and kept spiking from 1998 onwards, including the year Saddam was hanged in 2006. So, no score change.

(Score: Saddam 3, Usama 4)

I will save the comet milestone at the end of 2 Q62 for last. Let us jump to the next quatrain.

We see in line one of 8 Q77, how it links the annihilation of Mabus to the annihilation of the “Third Antichrist”. They are one.

The chemical weapons plume over Halabja, Iraq.

Let us jump ahead to the verse’s final line. The blood-soaked human bodies and the reddened icy or white spotted rain on the hemorrhaging bodies is a phenomenon seen on those killed by biological or chemical agents. Although a reprisal for Usama’s death may use these agents, clearly, Saddam scores one here because he notoriously used such weapons against the Kurds in 1988 in Halabja, killing thousands of civilians and on Iranian soldiers during the Iran-Iraq war perhaps killing and crippling 100,000 of them with mustard gas.

(Score: Saddam 4, Usama 4)

Now to 8 Q77′s line 3. This one leans in favor of Usama. He and his al-Qaeda jihadists are each considered by a vast majority of Muslims around the world as Al-muhartik (heretic). Since 9/11 to the present, most of the leading al-Qaeda planners, the cream of his suicide operatives who committed the act and thousands of AQ foot soldiers have been eliminated (dead), exiled from their countries of origin and made captives wasting away in a network of prisons far from home such as the US concentration camp at Guantanamo, Cuba.

Of course, one could argue that Saddam’s Baathist party henchmen are secular Islamic heretics also either eliminated, exiled from Iraq or crowded Abu Ghraib and other prisons. Nevertheless, Baathist dead and imprisoned have not made the historic impact of al-Qaeda dead and captives in a way that might have caught Nostradamus’ eye, so I give this one to Usama

(Score: Saddam 4, Usama 5)

Now to the most interesting new revelation in Nostradamus that only could be recognized after the death of Usama. Line 2 of 8 Q77 says about the Third Antichrist, “27 years his bloody war will last.”

Iranian human wave attacks during the Iran-Iraq War.

Saddam fulfills this. The time he was made dictator, to the time he was hanged was 27 years of constant warfare for Iraq. Saddam waged a civil war with the Kurds living inside its borders as well as crushing a second Shia uprising in 1991, killing hundreds of thousands. Saddam initiated the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1989) killing a million people. He invaded Kuwait in 1990. He was thrown out of Kuwait with the loss of 150,000 soldiers killed and hundreds of thousands captured in the Persian Gulf War that followed in 1991. A low-grade war smoldered from 1991 to 2003 with US-Coalition patrolling a “No Fly Zone” over Iraqi airspace with occasional volleys of cruise missiles crashing into Baghdad in the mid and late 1990s. Then the US invaded Iraq in 2003 deposing Saddam’s regime. The Baathists fought a guerilla war with US occupiers then as Sunnis they grappled with the Shia in a bloody sectarian civil war at the time Saddam was hanged in late December 2006. A period of wars and civil wars that spanned exactly 27 years!

Score one for Saddam?

Not so fast!

New revelations have reached me today, which I have verified. Usama, back in 1984, established MAK (Maktab al-Khidamat) with Abdullah Azzam, an organization to raise funds and recruit a foreign legion of Arab mujahedeen fighters, mostly Saudi Arabs, to aid the Afghani mujahedeen’s guerilla war against Soviet occupiers of Afghanistan. Although Usama had been funding and fighting alongside Afghans since he completed college in 1979, MAK put Usama on history’s time map as a leader in a war — just the kind of prominence that a prophet from the 16th century would have recognized.

In 1984, Usama’s bloody war began, first with the Soviets, and then four years later, MAK became the foundation for creating and fundraising and recruiting al-Qaeda. Usama’s war shifted from Soviets and became a guerilla-terrorist war against Arab dictators, the Saudi King beholden to Western “Crusader” powers with a string terror bombings in the Middle East during the 1990s, as well as the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Then came dramatic, large-scale swipes at US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 killing hundreds and wounding thousands. Then the USS Cole bombing at port in Yemen in 2000 killing and wounding dozens of US Navy personnel.

One of the 3,000 victims of Usama bin Laden on 9/11.

Then came his bloody war’s greatest terror act, the 9/11 toppling of the World Trade Center twin towers and setting alight the US Pentagon with hijacked civilian airliners killing 3,000. This lead to US occupation of Afghanistan in a war spanning nearly a decade, killing over 50,000 civilians and combatants from all sides. The drone wars over Western Pakistan commenced, killing hundreds more. The war in Afghanistan spilled over into a conflict between Taliban Pakistani guerillas with the Pakistani Army adding thousands to the butcher bomber’s bill.

Then Usama’s blood war ended with his death by US Navy Seal bullets just a dozen days ago.

Usama’s bloody war lasted from 1984 to 2011.

That is also 27 years!

Both Saddam and Usama win a point from me

(Score: Saddam 5, Usama 6)

Now to the last milestone. It is placed at the end of 2 Q62. Mabus is soon annihilated and all these events transpire “when the comet will pass.”

If we factor in how Nostradamus uses comets as portents, the most obvious allusion is not some comet we see in a telescope. It must be a great comet, one that is seen clearly with the naked human eye, like the one, for example, he successfully foresaw describing events in the future French Wars of Religion that could only happen under the unearthly glow of the great comet of 1577.

The early morning hours, just before the hanging of Saddam saw for the first time to the naked eye what would become the brightest comet in 60 years, Comet McNaught. There is no similar comet of singular brilliance seen by the naked eye at the death of Usama.

I know, I know. The emails will come flooding in about Comet Elenin, but it is not visible to the naked eye and will only become a visible smudge with a tale in late summer. No big light show like McKnaught is expected.

Yes, as it approaches the Sun it has been part of some pretty significant, and perhaps more than coinciding, surprises. As I detailed in my last blog, see Nostradamus, every time Elenin lined up with the Sun and Earth, there has been a significant earthquake on that day: the Chilean quake and Pacific Tsunami in February 2010, the Christchurch temblor in New Zealand, September 2010 and the Japanese quake and Pacific Tsunami of March 2011.

There will be two more opportunities for Elenin to trigger quakes of global significance come this September and November. If Elenin achieves a 5 and 0 on significant seismic events and tsunamis before it slips out of the solar system after November, then it could be considered the Mabus Comet and Usama bin Laden would score one on Saddam as Antichrist candidate number one. However, for now, I have to give a point to Saddam, because the comet allusions Nostradamus uses in other visions fits with this as a visible heavenly portent of the death of Mabus.

(Final Score, a tie: Saddam 6, Usama 6)

I have a new blog about prophecy and Meditation planned next. I will return to this “Antichrist, new Nostradamus revelations” theme sometime next week, current events willing. That is why it is good to join my free bulletin list and enjoy what thousands of others on the list receive: first notice of when a new blog is posted. Often these quickening times can upset and delay my planned postings with equally interesting new developments in prophecy’s take on our times. The bulletins will help me help you pick up the threads of this and any other series I mention that may not hit the blog page as originally planned, but later on.

'Adaluncatif' (Gaddafi Luna).

In that final blog on “Antichrist, new Nostradamus revelations”, we will see how the death of Usama bin Laden casts an entirely new light on the fate of Gaddafi. He is to die soon from a “dart” or “missile” not long after the death of bin Laden, it would seem, if one were to take a refreshed post-Usama-mortem review of the famous anagram prophecy Adaluncatif. See how it translates into Gaddafi Luna (Luna stands for crescent [of Islam]). Read also how Nostradamus’ Gaddafi riddles about the sea have been fulfilled by Usama bin Laden tying their fate in death together.

John Hogue

(Friday the 13, 2011)

PS–We are in the fifth month of 2011. Read how startlingly accurate Predictions for 2011 have been so far.

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.

A New Line Cinema movie still of Arwen, played by Liv Tyler, from the adaptation of the J.R.R. Tolkien epic, Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring. (For those of you who speak Sindarin: "Gerich veleth nîn, Undómiel." Concerning our future, dear readers, I would add: "A si i-Dhúath ú-orthor, Edain nîn. Ú or le a ú or nin. Telin le thaed. Lasto beth nîn, tolo dan nan galad.")

I am reminded of Arwen Undómiel, atop her horse, draped in radiant blue and silver riding robes, lost in bittersweet recollection. She moves in a train of other Elves of Rivendell on horseback or on foot, quietly passing down a wooded path on their way to the Gray Havens. She and her regal entourage will catch a ride on the last magical boats setting sail into the West, for the Elvish earthly paradise of Valinor.

A child runs by. Crossing their path. No other Elf notices him but Arwen. Her eyes follow the child’s passage through the forest and into the pale light illuminating white stone walls of an arched balcony of Minas Tirith. The child runs with arms outstretched into a future waiting 30 years hence. There is the mortal man, Aragorn, her beloved. He has become Elessar, King of Gondor. His hair turned silver in the first colors of his approaching mortality, yet his face as recognizable in recent memory as if it were youth’s yesterday.

Aragorn happily sweeps the child up into his arms. The father whispers unheard tenderness to the child, who looks across time back upon Arwen. He is wearing her necklace given to Aragon as gift and testimony of her glad decision to renounce Elvish immortality for a mortal life full of love albeit lived short. The child lowers his chin and his grey eyes penetrate into Arwen’s soul. Her inner voice whispers his name, “Eldarion…” In the child’s gaze of intense and urgent sheen is an unspoken message, “Make this future happen.”

Those of you who saw this scene of a future’s potential in the movie adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, might recall Arwen turning her horse around, galloping back into bare branches winter-wreathing Elvish grounds and archways of the chateau of Rivendell. She would have a deep throated and breathy showdown with her auguring father, Elrond, about potential futures kept secret.

“I have looked into your future and I only see death!” dismisses Elrond.

“But there is also life,” replies Arwen. “You saw there was a child. You saw my son.”

Elrond sits down heavily. With downcast eye, he admits, “That future is almost gone.”

Long fingers tenderly clasp his chin and turn a face saddened by the ages close to hers. She gazes a bright and urging look, whispering, “But not lost…”

I will not spoil the story’s outcome for a handful of people left on the planet who may not have seen the three-part adaptations of Peter Jackson’s production of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

The myth of Arwen’s Vision has a Norn’s rope-thread of truth to it. There is not one future, preordained. Prophets gifted with foresight who are not in some way bound by social conditioning to promote a future preordained that is religio-politically correct down to the last event written in on unchangeable stone, will bear witness to an undiscovered proto-reality. They see a state of future remain stone-like constant only as long as people giving birth to it in the eternity of the present remain as stupid and unmoved to change as stones.

The future has in stock many tomorrows. One sees this in evidence in Nostradamus’ writings. He delivered two tomorrows for the King of France, Henry II, in the first volume of his magnum opus Les Propheties. One of them was so controversial that Henry II summoned Nostradamus to court near Paris to explain himself. Actually, it was Queen Catherine de’ Medici who nagged him to send for that Nostradamus fellow. She made acquaintances with magicians and prophets to see towards what destiny her athletic, handsome (but a bit intellectually slow) husband inclined.

We know nothing of what Nostradamus said in the private meeting in the summer of 1555; however, he left an honored man. It is therefore safe to say that he drew the King and Queen Catherine de’ Medici’s attention not only to the notorious death-by-jousting prophecy of Century 1 Quatrain 35, but also might have drawn the king’s attention to two quatrains (2 Q79 and 4 Q34) visualizing an alternative future hidden under a rather obvious anagram Chyren Selin.

Chyren is “Henryc” (Henry). Selin is (Selene–Moon). Henry II used the letter “H” with the horizontal bar displaying the crescent moon on his royal livery. You can read the Chyren Selin prophecies in chapter seven (under the sub-section entitled, Before the Court and Public Opinion) in the following book: click on Nostradamus biography.

Henry II of France.

In brief, Nostradamus in his Chyren Selin quatrains had the king try on a future where he did not die in a jousting tournament but became the second Charlemagne of France, because he lived on and forestalled religious civil wars between Catholic and Protestant French subjects. Henry at the head of a unified and powerfully renewed French realm would then go to war with the Habsburgs, conquer the northern half of Italy, incorporating the heart of the Renaissance world into France.

The alternative to death by jousting obviously appealed to the king’s vanity, yet he was a true jock at heart and later famously admitted that to die from the hand of a fellow noble in a ritual combat accident was not a bad way to depart this mortal coil. He chose that future, albeit unconsciously perhaps.

The vision of a second Charlemagne was not completely lost until Henry II died from mortal wounds received in a tournament at the end of June 1559. His untimely death to the Charlemagne time line set forward a whole number of futures Nostradamus wished to prevent. These included the religious civil wars of France that one by one brought tragedy and often violent ends to the life of Henry’s heirs and many of the French realm’s leading princes as pre-chronicled by Nostradamus to his everlasting legacy as one of history’s greatest prophets.

Today (5 July 2010), Uranus, the ruler of the potential futures of change or chaos in astrological auguring starts creeping backwards in the sky. Uranus backtracks on a 0 degree path in the sign of Aries (a future of either new creative enterprises, beginnings, or new headstrong upheavals).

Starting 7 July (the day of this blog’s posting) and intensifying by 21 July, Uranus retreats to its place in a very powerful grand T square with Pluto in Capricorn opposing Saturn in Libra (status quo and reality checks). Pluto in Capricorn defines a generational age, an era of systemic crisis leading either to global civil disorder and fascism or democracy’s renewal between now and the first month of 2024.

We will be feeling the influence of this powerful T square throughout the summer in extreme heat waves, floods, violent weather, hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons. I would be pleasantly surprised if the world does not endure a major seismic disaster or two between now and Halloween — metaphorical “earthquakes” that are political, economic and literally seismic.

A thread of destiny pulls backwards out of the T Square in the guise of Uranus in retrograde, starting mid August, retreating into the spacey sign of Pisces. Expect to see civilization’s rug pulled underfoot starting in mid-August, shaking things up when hidden enemies to change — our collective conditioned reflexes against it — pop out from the undercurrent of mass unconscious from August through to the Christmas Holiday Season. Then Uranus goes direct course on 6 December 2010.

Uranus riding backwards in the sky has given me a Liv Tyler moment that could make Viggo Mortensen’s hair go Aragorn-gray, not in 30 years but in a day. It is an alternative future to the one proposed in Predictions for 2010. I withheld speaking of it until it bore signs of possibly Ar-wending its way into the present by 2 November, the day of the US mid-term elections.

Here in part is the future with the most momentum for fulfillment logged in Predictions for 2010:

“When making my occult enquiries to the oracle I received this message. The road to a second term [for President Obama] is successfully ventured despite what the contentious Democrat legislators and president promise but do not deliver. It has far more to do with the Republican Party losing further seats to Democrats in 2010 because the GOP (the Grand Old Party) devolves farther to the right. The GOP wants to go rogue elephant led by its most ideologically dogmatic core followers…”

Personally, I think the oracle is going way out on a limb; however, it has often crawled out there on a thin branch of reason and plucked the apple of tomorrow’s events without breaking the branch and falling. There may be a game of musical chairs afoot with pitchfork primaries flinging out the old lobbyist-haymakers for new blood.

And therein lies my crystal ball rubbing into clarity an alternative future.

I have seen this future but felt not to discuss it because it was, as Elrond might say, “almost gone.” But this time around Arwen is running up the stairs, throwing off her riding cloak to reveal an all too mortal form of a middle age woman with honey roll buns covered by a red, white and blue spandex jump suit with an overly large “Rand Paul for Senate” button. I down cast my eyes to avoid seeing her once beautiful tresses cut short and curled by the local Hair Masters — the bleached blond Afro stuffed in a straw hat dangling tea bags.

I feel like Republican Party turncoat Senator Arlen Specter at a town meeting of catharting constituents.

“You have the gift of foresight,” shrieks Arwen. “Tell me what you have seen!”

“Ok, ok! Can I have the microphone back, lady? I’ll tell you all…”

The currents of destiny begin to change. I feel now compelled to set before the public this rather nasty alternative future.

This potential future is no Eldarion darling for Demopublicans right or left leaning on every prophetic word for the advancement of their ideologies. This future will bring chaos to left-right-and-center, unless a better Pluto-in-Capricorn collective understanding can be had about what unexpected and unwanted consequences can happen if mass popular forces, unconsciously guided, make mob psychology rule the votes cast in the mid-term elections.

Uranus in Pisces is change going backwards into illusion at a time when Saturn continues to progress forward through the sign of Libra the Balancer where it is harmoniously exalted. In other words, Saturn is there to illuminate what is unreal and dysfunctional in our political and economic systems so that we can repair them. For instance, the Obama “change we can believe in” movement under Saturn’s reality check must go back to the blackboard this summer and chalk up another formula for change presented to the American people in early autumn campaigns. One that Americans cannot only believe in but support with political will and momentum.

Barack Obama, if you go forward without seeing how backward your ideas of change are rapidly becoming to what really needs changing in America then your slogan, “Change we can believe in,” will soon become, “Chaos we can disbelieve in.”

Uranus rules chaos and disorder as well as change and revolution. Uranus in retrograde while Saturn is exalted in Libra (read: balanced and more conservative reality checks) means ill-conceived, advancing Fool over-the-brink liberal progress, leads to political chaos for those in power in Washington.

Or worse…

The American people will feel leaderless and unheard by those left or right leaning ideologues living inside the Washington, lobbyist-rich-elitist-loving, political bubble. A future that was almost lost is coming closer. It gathers in the momentum of national frustration and rising anger of the American people against their president, state governors and federal legislators. If the disconnection deepens it may lead to anger as a national referendum of disdain against the governing system.

In this alternative future, the Americans will shout something loud and destructive on 2 November with ballots flying. They may not intend it, but a vote to throw most incumbents out — the good, the bad and the ugly with the baby and the bathwater — could happen.

The angry American voter under incautious Uranus-in-retrograde chaos may fill the gubernatorial seats of state capitals and halls of Congress with a mob of demagogues pronouncing change as a force of political hysteria without leadership, focus or coherency. The new legislators will, to paraphrase Elrond, govern the country for the next two years in a Congress that is “scatterbrained, divided, leaderless.”

Americans might send the politically infantile and extremely eccentric to flush out the old wood. Yes, it would be a change. Chaos is change.

Americans could see an even more dysfunctional government as a result for the next 2 years — one that represents the state of the voting public: pissed off, grasping for straw votes, reaching out to swipe somebody without coherency or plan. Not conservatism or liberalism but a nasty Uranus-in-Piscean-retrograde surprise: tear-it-all-down-ism.

***

Fulfilled Predictions for 2010

We passed the half-year point on 1 July. The following passages were signed off seven months earlier on 1 November 2009. The sacking of General McChrystal for his public disparaging of the Obama administration’s handling of the war in Afghanistan led to every president’s military miracle worker, General Petraeus, advancing from state-side digs in Florida as chief of CENTCOM to formally take command in Kabul on the 4th of July. Petraeus made it clear that a time of serious kick-butting al-Qaeda and the Taliban was coming. It might be a good time to review what the oracle foresaw about Afghanistan in 2010.

The Afghanistan troop call up foreseen before it was even conceived:

“I also discern with oracular help that you [Obama] have bargained with the Pentagon to affect a compromise strategy. The generals prevailed upon you to receive their 40,000-troop increase, but you will counter putting the surge on a short time leash of 18 months.”

Assessment

I originally mentioned this prophecy on Coast-to-Coast AM on 2 September 2009, publishing it 1 November 2009. The compromise to the surge did take place. Obama did announce at the end of 2009 a surge of 31,000 US troops to Afghanistan. NATO then pledged an additional 7-to-8,000 new troops to bring the surge up to 40,000. Obama added the 18-month deadline to assess and start pulling troops out, to exert deadline pressure on the Pentagon to make things happen.

Escalation in Afghanistan foreseen:

“Afghanistan under Obama is little different in popular opinion than Afghanistan under eight years of Bush indecision. The country wants the troops home, however Obama seems poised to listen to the brass and bemedaled Pentagon CEOs of the military industrial complex who want to keep the war business there going on. He’s sending a lot more troops soon, unless I’ve happily misread my oracle.” (Documented on October 26, 2009)

Assessment

My oracle was not wrong. A Bush-style troop surge was proposed signed and sealed by Obama against the popular desires of the American people. Moreover, it ran contrary to his campaign pledge to get out of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems Obama “has” caved to the military industrial complex’s desire to keep the war business going.

US casualties in Afghanistan for 2010 will run up the same numbers as Iraq in its darkest years of 2007

“If Obama isn’t careful, all of his good will, political capital and dreams of changing America will be squandered in an obsession of deeper involvement in Afghanistan. Obama’s change revolution undermined just like Johnson’s Great Society [was by Vietnam].

“Beware of it in 2010 Mr. Obama because I know you will raise US troop involvement in Afghanistan to its highest level. You will endure tolls of American dead and wounded per month as high as the Iraq Occupation at its peak.”

Assessment

There are around 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan. The highest deployment yet. British forces reached the milestone of 300 dead in June. The web site icasualties reports June as the deadliest month in the Afghan war for US combat deaths, at 60. Total killed-in-action for US-NATO forces in June was 102.

General Petraeus is in the driver’s seat now, and he made it clear that inhibiting rules of engagement will be lifted. July was only five days old when already 13 US-NATO troops have fallen. Prepare for a bloody fight to a reckoning on Obama’s Afghanistan strategy. Read more about what will happen. Go to Chapter 10 — Vietnamistan — in Predictions for 2010.

John Hogue

(Posted: 07 July 2010)

Two days after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on America… the US president, indelicately defined his war against Islamist terrorism as “a great crusade.”

Over four-and-a-half centuries ago, Nostradamus said the following in Century 3, Quatrain 61 of his prescient masterpiece Les Propheties:

La grande bande & secte crucigere,
Se dressera en Mesopotamie:
Du proche fleuue compagnie legere,
Que telle loy tiendra pour ennemie.

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

Line 1 and 2′s phrase “great host and sect of the crusaders will be massed in Mesopotamia” is more applicable to the US forces occupying the region today [rather than the previous and temporary invasion of parts of Iraq during the offensive to liberate Kuwait in 1991 during Operation Desert Storm]. I believe President Bush’s use of the word “crusade” is a classic catch phrase Nostradamus wouldn’t have overlooked. Moreover, it is an objective fact mostly overlooked by the American media that a major invasion of Christian missionaries and aid organizations is at this moment taking place in Iraq.

… Thus, it seems we “have” a new crusade in Mesopotamia, as Nostradamus defined it in Century 3, Quatrain 61.

Lines 1 through 3 point to the Gulf War of 1991 repeating itself in early 2003:

The great host and sect of the crusaders,
Will be massed in Mesopotamia:
Of the nearby river the fast company…

Fast armored armadas of the Mesopotamian encirclement of Republican Guard divisions in 1991 become leaner and meaner armored brigades of the U.S. blitzkrieg of 2003. They plunge across the Mesopotamian delta heading north, northwest for Baghdad alongside the western bank of the Euphrates (“nearby river”).

At the date of this writing a “great host” is indeed “amassed in Mesopotamia.” At the end of the war there were close to 200,000 soldiers, the vast majority being of the Christian faith (“crusaders”) on the ground in Mesopotamia. Since 1 May, the Bush administration scaled down the number of troops to 145,000. An escalation of guerilla warfare sets the stage for history to repeat itself. Another US president from Texas is issuing secret orders for a buildup of more troops for what could be America’s second Vietnam quagmire.

Perhaps the repetition of history is closer than I’ve stated it. When US troops crossed the Euphrates River on their final push for Baghdad, they passed into the fertile and marshy planes of the Tigris and Euphrates watershed.

“Gosh!” remarked one reporter on camera from CNN riding on top of an armored personnel carrier through yellowish green rice fields and palm groves, “It looks just like we’re driving right back into Vietnam!”

Is he right?

Let us review the prophecy again:

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.

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 catalyst. 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.

NEW CRUSADES AND QUAGMIRES
(11 July 2003)

ASSESSMENT (March 2007):
This all might sound familiar, even a common place litany of developments and troubles for the US occupation, only I set this down over three years and eight months ago. There was then no Iraqi government in place but what I would ostensibly call a US Viceroy, Paul Brenner, whom the president called his special envoy and chief US administrator of Iraq. Brenner would appoint an Interim Iraqi Governing Council after the invasion. They in turn under US official observation dissolved on 1 June 2004 before picking Allad Alawi as the prime minister of an interim government preparing the way for the first national elections in 2005. America’s Iraqi Prime Minister ended his term on April 7, 2005, after a national election reshuffled the interim national assembly with a face less friendly to Americans. The leader of the Islamic Dawa Party, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, an Ayatollah no less, who chose to wear a western suit rather than the black robe and turban. Bush’s new “reason” for occupying Iraq was on the march and a democratic majority was thronging south, ever closer to Iran and its ruling council of radical Ayatollahs of the Shia sect of Islam. The second national election brought Nouri al-Maliki and a coalition of Shia, and Shia-theocratic factions together to rule Iraq, to the horror and general boycott of Sunnis and the concern of more tolerant yet cautious Kurds who would deal with a Shia government if they supported Kurdish ambitions for autonomy within their lands in Northern Iraq.

Back when I wrote “New Crusades and Quagmires” there was no appearance yet of powerful Shia Ayatollahs, such as al-Hakim, or Shia cleric  Muqtada al-Sadr holding political sway over the government. There were no black-cloaked militias of al-Hakim’s Badr Brigades or al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army tyrannizing the streets, forcing women to cover up. There was no shadow of theocracy or the enforcement of a radical fundamentalist interpretation of the Sharia law in the provinces they ruled by majority, taking what was the most secular of Arab countries back into a medieval dogma. I presented the scenario above when there was no sign for years to come of President Bush’s escalation, his “surge.” Saddam Hussein was still at large for another five months. He would not be hung for another three years.

I implied for the first time on 11 July 2003 that the Sharia law, would hold and they would win the war–not the crusaders who gave them the freedom to rule. Right now the Sharia is holding.

When I wrote the quoted passage above, the mainstream press, US president and vice president viewed the guerilla insurrection as a small affair of malcontented Baathists and dead enders from Saddam Hussein’s shattered dictatorship. They became for the first time the dismissive object of Dick Cheney’s serene and confident, basso-profundo pontifications: they were a pitiful little band of rebels belonging to an insurrection in its “death throes.”

No Dick! The insurrection has grown since July 2003, long after Saddam’s capture in December 2003. It has radicalized Iraq.

2003–2004:
The Arab Prince and the Black One who will make him repen

On 01 August 2003, about three weeks after posting prophecies about Mesopotamia and Crusaders in “New Crusades and Quagmires”, it seemed time for my oracle to train its inner eye on unraveling the mystery behind Nostradamus’ cryptic prophecy about an Arab prince who could become Nostradamus’ Third Antichrist. A dark younger rival aided by a thing called “bloody Alus” will undo him. When I wrote the following, Saddam was a deposed dictator, a hunted man in a US occupied Iraq and his possible successors, his sons Uday and Qusay, had both been killed in a firefight with US soldiers. The brackets are mine from March 2007:

Saddam Hussein’s rapid fall might indicate he is out of the running [for Nostradamus' Mabus-Third Antichrist prophecy]. However, at the date of this writing, he is still alive, and now overseeing a part, if not the leader of, a gathering guerrilla insurrection in Iraq. Death in the near future may yet see him fulfill the criterion for Mabus in Century 2, Quatrain 62: he soon dies at the onset of the war and his death is a catalyst for the great destruction of people and animals around the world in a 27-year war of international terrorism.

I wish to quote my 1997 interpretation of Century 6 Quatrain 33 for today’s theme about the aftermath of the Saddam regime.

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 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.

END OF EXCERPT

I would add that the Ayatollah I spoke of six years earlier might turn out to be the Iranian Ayatollah Khamenei or the leader of Iraqi Shiite Ayatollahs fomenting a fundamentalist Islamic state in Post-Saddam Iraq.

WHO IS NOSTRADAMUS’ THIRD ANTICHRIST?
(01 August 2003)

ASSESSMENT (March 2007):
It is nearly ten years after 1997 and three years and seven months on from posting my assessment in August 2003 about a rising tide of Shia radicalism overtaking Iraq. Ayatollah Khamenei, the true leader behind the Iranian presidential puppet, Ahmadinejad, pulls the purse strings and his al-Kuds revolutionary guards train and arm the Iraqi Shia militias. At this moment Muqtada al-Sadr tarries in Iran seeking protection from the US troop surge until it spends itself and he can return to lead his militias in Baghdad and Najaf. (Update: 5 April 2007: rumor has it he has already returned to Najaf this week.)

The next passage written in August 2003 reads like a history of what has happened up to the present, even though at the time it was only a prediction:

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.

WHO IS NOSTRADAMUS’ THIRD ANTICHRIST?
(01 August 2003)

ASSESSMENT (March 2007)
The rise of the Shia did follow. The statements I had made in August 2003 begged for an accounting six months later. Muqtada al-Sadr had become a chief potentate for the Shia rebellion. His imposing figure, black beard, turban and black penetrating eyes perhaps makes him one who would be Nostradamus’ young black man of evil intent (3 Q 60) or the “black one” in the “Bloody Alus” prophecy (6 Q33) who would make Saddam repent:

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.

BLACK SHADOW OVER IRAQ
(22 April 2004)

The fight in April 2004, one of the bloodiest months for US troops in Iraq so far, may be only a taste of what could come later in 2007 or in 2008, if war should expand its taloned reach by air to the nuclear installations of Iran and the ballistic and chemical gassing of Israeli streets. If America should stir the sleeping black beast of Shia anger it will cascade like a tidal wave through the streets of Shia Iraq in support of their Persian brethren in Iran with a loss of life not yet imagined by US occupying forces.

Next will try solving the riddle of the bloody Alus prophecy that may have made Saddam Hussein repent.

John Hogue
(09 April 2007)

If you have been following my prophetic detective work since the early 1990s you will have seen me peg the deposed Iraqi dictator,

Saddam Hussein, as my first and foremost candidate for Nostradamus’ enigmatic leader called “Mabus” foreseen in Century 2 Quatrain 62 of his prophecies.

Others have stepped ahead into the cue, after 9-11, such as, the founding guru of Al-Qaeda, Usama bin Laden, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority, Abu Mazen (aka Mahmoud Abbas), and the late head of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Even George W. Bush is ahead of Saddam on the list these days.

Saddam Hussein has been overshadowed but never completely eclipsed as a candidate for the following prophecy:

Mabus will soon die, then will come,
A horrible undoing (destruction) of people and animals,
At once one will see vengeance,
One-hundred powers, thirst, famine, when the comet will pass.

Nostradamus (1555)
“Les Propheties,” 2 Q62

In brief review of my interpretation, the death of the enigmatic “Mabus” marks the beginning of a world war using weapons of mass destruction killing animal and man either sometime after a great comet transits the sky, such as Hale-Bopp did in 1997. The “comet” can also be Nostradamus’ poetic description of the first of many ballistic missiles launched after the death of Mabus.

The most popular decoding of Mabus uses the anagram law of reverse mirroring to capture the name: Saddam. For those uninitiated in the technique, you spell Mabus in lower case:

m-a-b-u-s.

Reverse the spelling:

s-u-b-a-m

Reverse any letters that could make a new letter, such as “b” to “d”:

s-u-d-a-m

The laws of anagramming allow for one letter replaced, especially if the letters phonetically match the pronunciation of a known name, such as “suh”-dam:

s-a-d-a-m

Redundant letters can be removed or added:

s-a-d-d-a-m

Saddam Hussein as of 5 November 2006 has been condemned to death by the Iraqi courts under the protection of US security forces at Camp Cropper–the US military base protecting Iraqi courts that cannot guard themselves. Cropper is also the home of a high security cell for an Iraqi dictator and henchmen who in the hands of their own police force, might escape. The trial of Saddam therefore resided behind US barbwire, safely beyond the outskirts of Baghdad and the mean IED-laced streets of Iraqi civil unrest. According to Iraqi law, Saddam’s lawyers can appeal the death penalty verdict to a special tribunal of similarly US protected Iraqi judges. These magistrates have unlimited time to consider the appeal; however, once their decision is made, and if they concur with the judgment of the court, Saddam by law must face execution exactly 30 days later.

Associated Press reported recently what Shia rumor mills at the highest level of the Iraqi government predict the ruling will come soon and Saddam could hang between mid-January to mid-March 2007. It would seem that even the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is confident that pressure will be brought to bear to put Saddam on the fast track for liquidation even sooner.

“The way I understand the law that we passed,” said al-Maliki to the British Broadcasting Corporation in early November 2006, “the execution of the sentence should happen within a month.” He at least expects execution will happen before the “end of this year.”

Saddam Hussein is judged as many things, mostly ugly, yet he is also a survivor. It would not be surprising if political pressures from Sunnis delayed a finding indefinitely. It may be thought more prudent to execute Saddam later, when perchance–”God willing,” as they say in Muslim lands–the deepening religious civil war between Sunnis and Shia blows over, and the execution-cum-martyrdom of Saddam could not be used by Sunni insurgents as a rallying cry for combat against Shias.

Some of you may recall my predictions made shortly after Saddam Hussein’s capture by US forces three years ago in December 2003 wherein I anticipated Saddam Hussein’s last act in life would be to twist his trial into a farce and make himself the personification of a compelling myth as an Arab martyr. I said on Coast to Coast AM and Whitley Strieber’s Dreamland programs that Saddam would try to repeat Adolf Hitler’s successful manipulation of judges and prosecutors by the force of his bullying will. He would belittle and badger them, like Hitler did at his trial for high treason as ringleader of the “Munich Putsch”–a failed coup on 8 November 1923 aiming to seize the Bavarian state government before marching on Berlin.

In Hitler’s case he used the court proceedings to effectively redefined himself in the eyes of the German public not as a terrorist and traitor but as a fire breathing patriot, set to be unjustly martyred with incarceration at Landsburg Prison. So effective was his relentless emasculation of the prosecution that the judges became sympathetic to his cause. They reduced his sentence to five years. As it turned out, the magistrates released Hitler after serving only one year. During that time he lived in relative luxury almost as a pampered guest within Landsburg’s walls. He later observed that the pleasant vacation from revolution allowed him time to collect his thoughts and compose his manifesto, the Nazi bible–”Mein Kampf.” In a few short years after his release, Hitler would become dictator of Germany.

I do not believe Saddam the Sunni mass murderer has any illusions that he will cheat death or rise again after imprisonment to resurrect his dictatorship once the US forces cut and run. US occupiers with their guns and ballot boxes put into power a government and judicial system controlled by Shiite Iraqis, the people he brutalized the most during his nearly a 25-year reign of terror. Hitler did not face capital punishment and many in the German justice system and government were more than sympathetic and primed to embrace his right wing, anti-Semitic views even before he rose to defend himself. To be in a fix similar to Saddam Hussein’s, Hitler would have to stand before judges and jury at the Nuremberg trials after his fall from power, trying to cajole, bully and convince the Nuremberg court that he should not hang for crimes committed against humanity–that indeed his crimes were necessary, patriotic and noble. If Hitler were in Saddam’s perdicament, he would not fight to survive, but fight to propagate a myth of the martyr. Coming generations of radicals would call out his name as a war cry in future Reich revolutions.

As it turned out, Saddam Hussein did try to turn his trial into a farce. He had a lot of help from the Iraqi judicial system. One Shia chief judge after another faced his tongue-lashings and was replaced because they could not shout him down. At one point the trial was adjourned for a month to allow Saddam’s decimated defense council to search for new lawyers to replace those murdered or those wounded fleeing the country. The tribunal officially charged Saddam of crimes against humanity on 18 July 2004. The first crime for consideration was the mass killing of Shia inhabitants of the village of Dujail in 1982. Shia Iraqi’s sympathetic to Iran ambushed his motorcade while he visited the town to make a speech praising those who fought the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988). The three-hour firefight ended with 150 men of Dujail killed or executed. Saddam then signed orders (later used as key evidence in the trial) for his security forces to round up, 1,500 men, women and children for torture and incarceration in desert concentration camps. Then he had the village raised to the ground and laid waste 250,000 acres of adjacent farmland. The land by order remained untilled for a decade.

Saddam’s trial proceedings went forward and actions in the court soon descended into a dark comedy of the absurd with his defense lawyers storming out of proceedings more than once in protest, or at other times, as stated above, the murder of members of his defense council stalled proceedings until they could be replaced. Day after day, came scenes broadcast across Arab and Western television of Saddam and petulant fellow accused lieutenants of his regime in the dock popping up and down from their chairs hurling insults interrupting proceedings or clearing out back to their cells for hunger strikes. It all magnified international concerns that the Iraqi’s were unable to hold a credible trial. Saddam added fatal injury to judicial incivility the day an important witness, a survivor of the atrocities committed at Dujail and the concentration camps stared down Saddam Hussein glowering in his chair while he testified for the prosecution. Saddam bid his time waiting for the light on a camera lens trained his way to turn on and record his live reaction. When the light went on, and the whole Iraqi and Arab world was watching, he made a slow and deliberate slash with his index finger across his throat. Within days, Sunni insurgents murdered that Shiite witness.

Even on the last day of the trial when he heard the verdict, Saddam kept working the myth that a puppet government of an American occupation of an Arab state had tried and condemned the legal leader and father of the Iraqi people. Clutching a big green and gold embossed Koran in one hand, a finger knifing the air with the other, he tried shouting down the verdict of death and was soon after ushered away, spent and shrunken.

Throughout the trial Saddam played on the darker dysfunctional collective conditioning of Arab peoples, so long habituated to follow a reflex admiration for a strongman leader as father figure of the nation. As Dalal el-Bizri, a Lebanese sociologist and political columnist has recently said, “No matter how despotic a leader is, he becomes a symbol of his country, or even synonymous with it.” Despite his cruelty, and bloodthirsty crimes, seeing Saddam a prisoner, caged in the dock, on the defensive, in rancorous debates with prosecution lawyers and judges, is a deeply disturbing sight to many Arabs in and beyond Iraq’s borders. I imagine it would as uncomfortable for those programmed by American conditioning to see their president making a scene while on trial for crimes against the US Constitution. (Perhaps Americans will yet share the disquiet Iraqis endure watching “their” president undergo an impeachment trial. It may be coming sooner than they think. More on that in upcoming bulletins.)

Other “father figures” of Arab nations, with dubious democratic credentials, but stalwart allies of the US no less, such as the Egyptian President Mubarak, have come forth cautioning against hanging Saddam Hussein. Mubarak no doubt felt compelled to say openly what most Arab leaders around the region believe. The Iraqi President’s upcoming execution could push that nationalistic Arab button–the father-figure-symbol as the nation–and galvanize Iraqi Sunnis, at least, into a frenzy of greater violence than that already feeding an Iraqi sectarian civil war. Mubarak need not add what even many Sunni and Shiite victims of Saddam’s crimes feel. They are troubled by the prospect that–love him or fear him–Saddam Hussein was one of their most defiant Arab nationalistic leaders. He stood up to the West and the Americans for decades. A few weeks or months from now he will swing from the gallows like a common thief because Westerners–unbelievers of Allah, Christian crusaders–unilaterally invaded and subjugated an Arab country like neo-Imperialists.

It would have been almost better had the Shia dominated government of al-Maliki acceded to popular demand and built Saddam’s gibbet on the field of Baghdad’s largest sports arena, Shaab Stadium. An audience of tens of thousands of Iraqis could witness his public hanging and satisfy a communal need, as Kirk Semple of the New York Times said, for public closure. However, with each week the civil unrest in the land intensifies, and such a gathering might be too tempting a target for al-Qaeda operatives or other Sunni insurgents to slaughter what could only be a multitude of mostly Shia spectators.

Public safety in the end may work in part to accomplish Saddam’s goal to be remembered as an Arab martyr killed by the hands of Western infidels and their Arab lackeys. Officials in the Iraqi government disclosed that Saddam Hussein would be hung from a gallows built by US soldiers at Camp Cropper. It is a place as far removed from Arab public assembly as possible, near Baghdad International Airport on the outskirts of the fractionalizing capital.

When death comes to him, it will be incumbent upon me and all prophecy watchers to ponder whether Nostradamus “had” always intended Saddam Hussein as Mabus. The fall of his regime through US invasion, and the execution of his person in our near future, could act either as a milestone presaging–or as the flash poin launchin–a collapse of Iraq into full-scale civil war. If Saddam Hussein is the man who would be Mabus, expect after his hanging, as the prophecy says, a “terrible undoing of people and animals.” Expect civil war spreading rapidly across the Islamic Middle East as it metamorphoses into a hecatomb of religious civil war between the Sunnis and Shia. Next after Mabus “soon dies” comes an air strike on Iran by Israel. Then we will know if the hanging of “Mabus-Sudam” may at least coincide or stand in Nostradamus’ mind as a marker for the coming “terrible undoing (read ‘death’) of people and animals” across the region…

John Hogue
(09 December 2006)

The Last Pope: The Decline and Fall of the Church of Rome, is the book in which I detailed the St. Malachy prophecies regarding the succession of the Popes. Below I give a synopsis of that book. My latest addition to this important fault line in the Catholic cosmology is the sequel to the Last Pope:

The Last Pope Revisited. Find it here at Hogueprophecy Store.

Here is a brief synopsis of “The Last Pope”:

In 1139 St. Malachy set out from Ireland on a harrowing pilgrimage to Rome. On sighting the Eternal City he fell to the ground and began murmuring cryptic Latin phrases, each signifying the future destiny of the popes. For four hundred years the manuscript was locked in the labyrinth of the Vatican. On its rediscovery in 1595 it was rejected by the Church authorities as fraudulent but the content of the prophecies remains remarkably and chillingly accurate: to this day 90 percent have come true.

In examining the context of St. Malachy’s life, his pilgrimages and his miracles, “The Last Pope” presents a fascinating account of the fates of the popes and eight hundred years of Catholic prophecy; including those of contemporaries, Hildegard von Bingen, Joachim de Fiore and the 16th-century Catholic seer, Nostradamus, whose vision of the papal succession closely resemble that of St. Malachy.

In this first complete study of St. Malachy’s prophecies in over a hundred years, “The Last Pope” provides new revelations regarding the authenticity of the Latin mottoes. As the Roman Catholic Church continues to witness an eclipse in papal power this work uncovers the truth about St. Malachy’s prophecies and reveals their significance as an account of the papal progression which Vatican policy makers have found too threatening to acknowledge.

St. Malachy prophesied an end to the Roman Catholic Church and predicted the fates of the popes until Judgment Day. Pope John Paul II has died. Only two popes remain on the doomsday list. Are the Catholic prophecies warning humanity of a great chastisement and apocalypse at hand? “The Last Pope” tries to answer these questions from outside of doomsday dogma’s box. The end times may presage something unexpected and wonderful for Catholic and non-Catholics alike.

***

The conclave to elect the next to last pope will begin a week from the writing of this article (18 April). Today, I wish to briefly go over those parallel prophecies about the next pope written by the 16th-century French prophet, Nostradamus. If he is speaking about “Gloria Olivae” (Glory of the Olive)–the Latin motto St. Malachy uses for the next pope–does Nostradamus provide a hint from where in the world the next pope comes?

A new interpretation, if correct, of Century 5 Quatrain 49 of Nostradamus’ prophetic masterpiece “Les Propheties,” would cool the ardor of odds makers who bet that the next pope will be a Latin American. Nostradamus’ inference to Spain includes candidates arising from her former colonial territories, such as Cardinal Carrera of Mexico, Cardinal Maradiaga of Honduras or Cardinal Hoyos of Columbia. Hence, the new pope will not hail “from [the empire of] Spain [as Nostradamus knew it] but from ancient France.”

Nul de l’Espaigne mais de l’antique France,
Ne sera esleu pour le tremblant nacelle,
A l’ennemy sera faicte fiance,
Qui dans son regne sera peste cruelle.

Not from Spain but from ancient France,
Will be elected for the trembling ship [the bark of Peter],
He will make a promise to the enemy,
Who will cause great plague during his reign.

Back in 1986, I surmised that a candidate hailing from within the borders of “ancient France” could include southwestern Poland, the birthplace of John Paul II. It lies within the outer frontiers of Charlemagne’s early medieval empire.

What if this prophecy instead pinpoints his successor? And rather than the broadest extent of France’s oldest Empire, the poetry meant us to look for the successor in the “oldest” and earliest holding of France?

The most ancient plot of French territory would be the holdings of the Merovingian Dynasty of the 5th and 6th century. Paris along with Reims was their chief city. The current Archbishop of Paris is Cardinal Lustiger, one of the late John Paul II’s closest theological disciples. The late pontiff made Lustiger Archbishop of Orleans in 1979. Orleans is another region of “ancient France.” John Paul II made him Archbishop of Paris in 1981.

Lustiger can be applied to my earlier interpretation of this prophecy as well. Like John Paul II, he comes from the frontiers of Charlemagne’s ancient 8th-century Carolingian empire. Lustiger was born to Jewish parents in southwestern Poland. He survived the Holocaust, became a French citizen and converted to Catholicism. Today he remains a dark “Jewish” horse candidate for the next pope. His Jewish origin, however, and his age (79 years old) makes him a long shot. The Vatican avoids responding to what it calls polemicists (like myself) who might infer that their choice of a Jewish born pope fulfills some end-time prediction for the papal succession. If the first pope (the Apostle Peter) and the last pope should be both Jews, it closes destiny’s circle, ending the papal succession.

Let us look again at the last three lines of the prophecy:

…[he] will be elected for the trembling ship [the bark of Peter],
He will make a promise to the enemy,
Who will cause great plague during his reign.

John Paul II trembled with Parkinson’s disease and died as a result of complications from that illness. In my earlier interpretations, I noted that a great plague did appear during his pontificacy–AIDS. But if this prophecy is about the trembling John Paul’s successor, then perhaps we face at last the long overdue visitation of a global pandemic during the new pope’s reign.

Signs are already there that hemorrhagic fever plagues are on the rise in Africa. Doctors at the CDC (Center for Disease and Control) openly admit that the Bird Flu from South East Asia and China could mutate at any time from a bird-to-human to a human-to-human contagion. A form that can spread the deadly infection rapidly around world killing tens of millions.

What if the plague is manmade?

Another post John Paul II interpretation would imply that the future pope who St. Malachy calls “Glory of the Olive” makes a promise to enemies in a future war. This motto invokes the symbol of a dove of peace with olive branch in beak. The next pope could be a great peace maker. Taking Nostradamus’ final line in mind, the next pope, in the name of peace reaches out to radical Islam. Unfortunately, the enemy turns on him, and the great plague foreseen comes out of biological or chemical weapons of mass destruction used by terrorists. A number of Nostradamus’ prophecies infer such attacks on Rome will take place, forcing the evacuation of a future pontiff.

Gloria Olivae begins his reign as a pope bearing the “olive” branch of peace, but later he becomes the pontiff enduring Christ’s apocalyptic prophecies from the Sermon on the Mount of “Olives.” In other words, his reign marks the beginning of apocalyptic wars and rumors of apocalyptic wars spreading out from the Holy Land across the whole world.

Century 5 Quatrain 92 gives us another clue to the next pope. My interpretation made back in 1997 for Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies remains unchanged:

Apres le siege tenu dixsept ans,
Cinq changeront en tel reuolu terme:
Puis sera l’vn esleu de mesme temps,
Qui des Romains ne sera trop conforme.

After the [Holy] See kept for seventeen years,
Five completed terms will exchange within [the Vatican]:
Then one will be elected at the same time,
Who will not be too conforming to the Romans.

This is what  said then:

“This could be about modern popes. Pius XI (1922-1939) ruled the Vatican for 17 years. The five successors would be Pius XII (1939-58), John XXIII (1958-63), Paul VI (1963-78), John Paul I (1978), and the current pope, John Paul II. When he dies a new pope will be elected that will not please the Vatican status quo. Perhaps he will be as revolutionary as Pope John Paul I.”

OTHER PAPAL POSSIBILITIES
For St. Malachy’s motto for the next pope:

GLORIA OLIVAE
(Glory of the Olive)

If the College of Cardinals convening on 18 April takes the short-lived caretaker route in their balloting then Cardinal Ratzinger has the best chance. My sense is the reign of this 77-year-old will be short. Maybe just four years. He will exhaust himself–as would any other elderly candidate in their late seventies–trying to keep up the pace that John Paul II set in his globe trotting ways.

St. Malachy’s prophecies often describe the details of a pope’s family arms or Papal heraldry. If the coat of arms of a candidate for Gloria Olivae should bear olives and olive branches, then expect it to be the current Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Tettamanzi (his name means “bull’s tits”). Then again we may toast the new pope with a Martini–a Cardinal Martini, that is. He is the previous Archbishop of Milan and noted Biblical scholar who now lives in Jerusalem for half of each year. Both the current and former archbishops of Milan are in play because the seal for the Archbishop of Milan bears olive branches.

I think the chances for a Latin American are quite high, but I believe European cardinals in the Conclave will see to it a European, if not an Italian, will be the next pope.

The top conservative Italian candidates include Biffi, Tettamanzi and Sodano. Tettamanzi’s association with Opus Dei is key to an Italian conservative takeover. Then again, Tettamanzi has been best at hedging his spritual-political bets by also warming up to more liberal Catholic organizations. He at least has put on a good show as a moderate.

Of course we cannot rule out the importance of the Israeli connection with prophetic symbols of the olive and olive branch. Martini spends half of each year in Jerusalem and his potential candidacy enjoys that ever popular word play in prophecy: the double entendre. Read the “olive” branch of Israel along side the “olive” branch in the coat of arms as the previous Archbishop of Milan and it could equal “Gloria Olivae.”

Martini is progressive so he is much more of a long shot. Tettamanzi is perhaps the late John Paul’s choice for successor. It is traditional for a pope in his final years of life to appoint his successor as Archbishop of Milan, the largest Catholic Archdiocese in Italy. For example, John XXIII appointed his successor, Cardinal Montini (Paul VI) to that post.

The inclination to a conservative or progressive future pope depends on whether the College of Cardinals meeting in the conclave seek to sustain John Paul II’s conservative agenda. If they do then do not expect John Paul III will heed to pressures from the laity and regional bishops to soften dictatorial control from Rome in their local affairs. Those who read the history of papal succession in my book, “The Last Pope,” cannot fail to notice how often a conservative or liberal pope tries to stack the college with his own theologically sympathetic cardinals. Then, after his death, they choose a successor from the opposite pole. As the old Vatican saying goes: “A fat pope is followed by a thin pope, is followed by a fat pope, etc…”

I guess that makes the corpulent Tettamanzi the man of the white smoking stove piped hour because John Paul II was thinner than Tettamanzi. The latter is a native of the Milan region. That brings greater emphasis to his olive branched coat of arms as the Archbishop. He is 71. His mother is still alive and well and in her early 90s. The long living gene pool of the Bull Tits clan could confer on Tettamanzi more than a short rule of a caretaker pope. He might rival John Paul II in longevity sitting upon St. Peter’s throne longer than a quarter century.

There is perhaps a deeper message hidden underneath the layers of peace making and a tie with Israel hinted in the cryptic motto “Glory of the Olive.”

Christ’s sermon on the Mount of Olives.

The next man in St. Peter’s chair, and the second-to-last pope on St. Malachy’s list before Judgment Day endures an apocalyptic pontificacy. This would be especially true if he does turn out to be one of the younger candidates from Latin America, such as   Honduran (Maradiaga), the Mexican (Carrera), or the European Schonborn the Austrian and Daneels the Belgian Cardinal. (UPDATE 4/14/05: For the record, I had a powerful vision dream on the morning of the 14th that the next pope would be Schonborn . We will see if that plays out.) There is also Hummes of Brazil, but Nostradamus made it clear that the next pope would not come from the Spanish Empire of his day. Brazil belonged to Portugal. In any case, the youngest is 60 (Schonborn), the eldest is 71 (Daneels). Like Tettamanzi, there are enough relatively youthful heir apparents in the short list for becoming the next pope who may not be so short lived. He can linger long enough to see his pontificacy enter the 2020s–the same decade of catastrophe that so many prophets date as the beginning of humanity’s true tribulation. Thus, the rule of St. Malachy’s last pope, Petrus Romanus (Peter of Rome) may be a long time off in the future. There is still time to make St. Malachy’s dire coda for the last pope a future avoided:

During the last persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there shall sit Peter of Rome, who shall feed the sheep amidst many great tribulations, and when these have passed, the City of the Seven Hills [Rome], shall be utterly destroyed, and the awful Judge will judge the people.

A detailed, line by line, interpretation of the dire days of the final Pope Peter of Rome can be read in pages 349-367 of THE LAST POPE.

John Hogue
(12 April 2006)