***

6 Q97
At forty-five degrees latitude, the sky will burn,
Fire approaches the great new city.
Immediately a huge, scattered flame leaps up,
When they want verification from the Normans [the French].

10 Q49
Garden of the world near the new city.
In the path of the hollow mountains:
It will be seized and plunged into a boiling cauldron,
Drinking by force the waters poisoned by sulfur.

The only great new city I could find built anno Domini Nostradamus at or near latitude 45 was new (Your) city. Back in 1983, I believed these quatrains described a nuclear attack, possible committed by terrorists rather than a thermonuclear exchange of US and Soviet missiles. I thought these highest towers of the World Trade Centery might be the same hollow mountains in his vision blown down to sulfur poisoned waters and ashes of a nuclear terrorist blast. A prophet alive in the time when the towers of man loomed no higher than the nearest town cathedral would marvel at the twin mountain-like skyscrapers climbing higher than all surrounding edifices in a vault of 110 acre-sized floors to a mountainous roof top perch at 1,368 feet, in the case of the South Tower. The huge antenna spire rising above the North Tower roof increased its ascent to 1,727 feet.

If this was about an attack on New York, I wrote in 1983, the final line of 6 Q97 made it clear the future countrymen of Nostradamus had seen it coming, tried to warn the US, and, while American contacts sought verification the attack came in, too late to prevent.

When I visited New York in 1994 I had dinner with the late author and parapsychologist Hans Holzer… [The previous year saw Islamic terrorist fail bring down the towers with a truck bomb.]

Holzer asked if he and his friends should leave New York, to which I answered, “No, but stay away from the Battery District [the southernmost tip of Manhattan Island where the World Trade Center looms]. Never go there. Ever. It is doomed.”

This message passed out of my mouth from a mysterious place within in a cool and deeper voice than I usually use. It was a warning as much for my attention as for his. I recall saying to Hans that the next time the terrorists attack the towers would definitely fall.

“When?”

I recall telling him about the King of Terror prophecy, which I believed set the time of attack around July 1999, but it could be a little later — “2001 at the latest,” I added.

There’s no tape of our wine warmed conversation that night so this is the best my memory can recall. It echoes what I wrote the following year (1995) appearing in my examination of all of Nostradamus’ major prophecies in Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies, later published in 1997:

• As suggested in 10 Q72, the terror of the Middle Eastern Antichrist comes from the skies (the heavens). Therefore this could mean that nuclear fires from the skies (from 10 Q72) will descend on the Western democratic powers, as early as July of 1999. (Commenting on 1 Q56, p. 114)

• In these quatrains Nostradamus may be hiding a warning of a future plague of world terrorism — mainly based in North Africa and the Middle East. The worst scenario, a handful of terrorist-sanctioning nations dragging the world into nuclear war as early as 1999…The Antichrist gets his support from Babel, an ancient name for modern Iraq. (2 Q30, pp.178-179)

• Nostradamus’ Third Antichrist has yet to be positively identified…What does come through clearly is the fact that this third and final Antichrist is not a prominent European leader…The man we know as Mabus may be some obscure future terrorist who, if he is not identified and restrained in time, will trigger World War III and the extinction of civilization as we have known it (2 Q62, p. 201).

• New York, the Vatican, or some other city is burned from the sky by the atmospheric explosion of a nuclear missile, or by the detonation of a terrorist atom bomb concealed in a hijacked airliner. In the mid-1990s Algerian terrorists hijacked a jet airliner, and had they not been overwhelmed by security forces while refueling at Marseilles, they would have continued on to Paris and detonated the jet’s 15 tons of air fuel in a huge fireball a few hundred feet over the center of the city. (2 Q81, p.215)

• The sky ignites into flames on the latitude near New York City. (p. 497).

• The next important transit of these planets in a fire sign was Mars in Sagittarius and Saturn in Aries in October 1997. During that year the comet Hale-Bopp will be in our skies. If armed conflict breaks out it will come as a reflection of the darker aspect of Sagittarius. Wars or terrorist raids inspired by, or reacting against, religious bigotry and a fanatic adherence to dogma and fundamentalism, would not be a surprise. (4 Q67, p. 350)

• By 1999, this terrorist from the land of “Baal” might wage war on Israel or its Western allies from the sky, either with a nuclear missile or a jet, which is loaded with plutonium dust, or chemical weapons that are detonated over a city. (10 Q72, p. 798)

• If 1999 passes without an Antichrist [attack], rather than easing our awareness we should sharpen it and use this reprieve from Armageddon to make the right decision today to forestall Armageddon in the 21st century. (Epistle, p. 616)

• Nostradamus foresaw the coming of three tyrants whom he called Antichrist. These men, he warned, could move mankind towards total world destruction sometime shortly after the year 2000. (1 Q60, p. 116)

• Other astrological prophecies point to the early years of the new century as a prime window for a climactic showdown with Islamic terrorists. (2Q2, p. 154)

The two-quatrain prophecy about a new city and hollow mountains illuminates my inner mind’s picture frame. First the lines of 6 Q97:

At forty-five degrees latitude, the sky will burn…

Latitude calculations in Nostradamus’ time were somewhat inaccurate. The only great and new city built after he lived was New York City at a latitude just less than 41 degrees. When the fireball and smoke cleared around the North Tower, the world could see what the instantly obliterated Muhammad Atta piloting hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 at 466 miles per hour had done. There was a gaping hole in the north face of the tower in the jagged, headlong outline of wings and fuselage of a Boeing 757 airliner implanted at a 45-degree angle.

…Fire approaches the great new city…

The afterburners blazed behind two hijacked Boeing 757 and 767 airliners, American Airlines Flight 11 at 466 miles per hour and United Airlines Flight 175 at 545 miles per hour, rapidly approaching New York.

…Immediately a huge, scattered flame leaps up…

The fireballs issuing from both jets hurled into the towers were larger than the town in which Nostradamus lived and wrote this prophecy, Salon-en-Provence.

…When they want verification from the Normans [the French].

Back in 1983, I said this quatrain could only stand for a future nuclear or terrorist attack on New York City if Frenchmen warned Americans it was coming. A number of French newspapers, including Le Figaro, reported that on 10 September, French intelligence officers desperately tried to contact their opposites in the US Pentagon and CIA. French intelligence networks had a spike in email and phone traffic indicating an attack was imminent, either targeting the US Embassy in Paris or a shot at the United States homeland, by operatives of the terrorist organization known as al-Qaeda (Arabic for The Front).

On the following morning, 11 September, Pentagon staffers were trying to verify the claims when a Boeing 767 (American Airlines Flight 77) swooping in at grass-top level at 530 miles per hour drilled the western façade of the Pentagon building penetrating 310 feet through three office rings in eight-tenths of a second.

Now the lines of 10 Q49 pick up the prophecy:

Garden of the world near the new city…

You could decode this to read: Garden State (the motto of New Jersey) of the world (Trade Center) near the new (York) city.

…In the path of the hollow mountains…

They are the two towers. The second jet on its terminal approach of the South Tower flew directly over the underwater tunnel that guides the PATH Subway system to the World Trade Center from New Jersey.

…It will be seized and plunged into a boiling cauldron…

It, is the jet, or by extension, the two towers collapsing into the boiling cauldron of their own lunar-death colored fire and debris clouds to sit as smoldering rubble for months on end inside what architects and builders had coined “the tub” – an eight-story deep rectangular basement built watertight to keep out the Hudson River from flooding the subway systems of New York. The word Nostradamus used, cuue — spelled cuve in modern French — means cauldron or simply tub.

…Drinking by force the waters poisoned by sulfur.

This is where Nostradamus documented one of his alternative future time lines that fortunately did not incline towards the tub breaking and flooding the subway system. If it had, many tens of thousands of New Yorkers might have drowned in the poisoned debris filled floods. Rather than 30,000, the number sacrificed to a candidate who could be Third Antichrist was only a little over 3,000 people.

Excerpted from:
Nostradamus and the Antichrist, Code Named: MABUS

John Hogue

(15 September 2010)

L’an mil neuf cens nonante neuf sept mois, Du ciel viendra vn grand Roy d’effrayeur…

In the year 1999 [reverse of 9.11.1) September month,
From the sky will come a great King of Terror…

Effrayeur is a dreadful word.

In French it means: to frighten, to alarm, to terrify. It lunges from the Latin formido: dread, terror. It is sudden, throat grabbing fright, unexpected and disturbing to the core. It soars on the wings of an airline jet roaring through soft blue autumnal skies over the narrow valley streets and manmade canyons of New York -- an outrage of noise that guides one to look upwards and see its source devoured by the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Violence! Instantly rejected in the vomit of hot acid fuel spittle, fireballs, thunder and the after note of human shock and horror declared in ten thousand expletives of disbelief from those who witnessed it.

Effrayeur is Lord of the Skies the moment perception is raped by accident becoming terrible intent. It comes casting its lengthening swift shadow over towns and valleys of the Garden State, soaring across green waters of the Hudson, accelerating.

The Lord of Terror comes down from the skies, heralded by ovations of disbelief as now millions of New Yorkers and hundreds of millions of people around the world, in tight lipped or gaping horror before television screens, beat bewildered and unbelieving hearts. Terror charges in, turning slowly on the wings of infamy, engines screaming at full thrust to perform a macabre disappearance into the South Tower of the World Trade Center as if solid steel and glass were a vertical surface of water and a 767 Boeing passenger jet was an Olympic diver entering that surface in a perfect dive with nary a splash. In an instant the perversion of physics is erased by fireballs and the disbelieving screams of millions, in public, standing upon balconies and streets around New York, or viewed on televisions in private homes, bars, restaurants, TV shops and offices. In that moment of outrage and alarm, terror, set free of hijacked planes, seized hearts in public and private places across half the planet as all in that moment understood these planes crashing into buildings were no accident but a brazen attack on the United States.

The first leg of following effrayeur-linking words to other quatrains brings us before Nostradamus' most famous dated prophecy:

L'an mil neuf cens nonante neuf sept mois,
Du ciel viendra vn grand Roy d'effrayeur.
Resusciter le grand Roy d'Angolmois.
Auant apres Mars regner par bon heur.

10 Q72
In the year 1999 seven months,
From the sky will come a great King of Terror.
Bringing back the Khan of the Mongols.
Before, after: Mars (i.e. Magus-Mabus) rules happily.

Specific dates are rare in Nostradamus but often accurate. This is the most specific he would ever write for our times. That makes it the most important to understand, to crack its code if there is one. It intends to mark a protean shift in human history proceeding from an act of terror coming from the sky. The King of Terror will bring back Genghis Khan, the King (Khan) of the Mongols. This is a metaphor used to frame something in the time of 1999 or thereabouts to a historical trauma still haunting the memory of 16th-century Europeans. Irresistible Mongol hordes had galloped out of Asia three centuries before Nostradamus wrote this prophecy. No European army of knights or siege walls could check them. The Mongols would have overrun Europe altogether had it not been for the opportune death of Genghis Khan's heir, Ögedei Khan (d.1241), compelling them to turn their bridles eastward towards Mongolia to parlay for a successor. Nostradamus uses a metaphor of "yellow peril" brought back to challenge the West in 1999. What connection this danger has to the King of Terror lies obscure.

Nostradamus ends the prophecy with one last riddle. Mars is symbolic of war thriving happily. The higher aspect of Mars, however, is the Magus – the enlightened master and forger of new consciousness, new enterprises and explorations. Nostradamus may be using this noble title in a negative context, or to obscure allies and perpetrators of the King of Terror.

Let's delve into more classical allusions.

The term Magus was originally applied to high priests of ancient Persia; are we thereby to consider this a classical allusion to the modern Islamic Republic of Iran "ruling happily" through wars of the Third Antichrist? If we are, then the renascent Mongol king is a current Iranian ally, a new "Khan" among totalitarian rulers of the awakening capitalist-communist hybrid superpower, The People's Republic of China.

Then there's the anagram tie-in to the Mabus quatrains. Take the g of Magus, turn it over and you have b for Mabus.

A deeper classical understanding of Baal Hammon-Thurbo Majus connects it to the "King of Terror" descending from the skies. The Carthaginians and Phoenicians worshipped an all-powerful "Baal" or "Lord" God. The extent of Baal worship stretched from North Africa across lands currently called Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Syria and Iraq. Each region gave him a personalized name. What Nostradamus in 2 Q30 called the infernal god of Hannibal, Baal Hammon, was Lord patron deity of Carthage. When angered, Baal – any Baal – would retaliate bringing down storm and thunder as a "Lord of Terror coming from the skies." The conduit of biblical and classical meaning has Baal Hammon, then, under the Romanized name Thurbo Majus, hiding Nostradamus' Mabus as the King of Terror descending from the sky, resurrecting Mongol power in the emergent superpower China, allied to an emergent regional Middle Eastern superpower, Iran – China's primary source of crude oil.

Excerpted from:
Nostradamus and the Antichrist, Code Named: MABUS

***

Part two will examine the prophetic significance of the following quatrains believed to detail the attack on the World Trade Center nine years ago for us, yet for Nostradamus in the 1550s, it is, a future over 440 years ahead:

6 Q97
At forty-five degrees latitude, the sky will burn,
Fire approaches the great new city.
Immediately a huge, scattered flame leaps up,
When they want verification from the Normans [the French].

10 Q49
Garden of the world near the new city.
In the path of the hollow mountains:
It will be seized and plunged into a boiling cauldron,
Drinking by force the waters poisoned by sulfur.

Lone wolf terror attacks will mark the autumn of 2010. Read more about what kind, where and when these attacks could happen in Predictions for 2010.

John Hogue

(11 September 2010)

***

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) was more than a military, political and logistical genius with an estimated I.Q. of 143. When on hiatus from the first turbulent years of the French Revolution, the then newly minted artillery officer relaxed on his native island of Corsica writing a heroic romance novel of surprisingly good quality.

Napoleon’s interest in classical history and the antiquities of Egypt during his military expedition there in 1799 not only brought to European civilization’s attention the Rosetta Stone, which delivered the means to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs, but his team of scientists also uncovered and translated into French an Egyptian papyrus best known and published today as the Egyptian Book of Fate. It is said Napoleon carried and consulted it privately before important campaigns and battles to add a little occult spice to his strategic decisions. It is known that his mistress, then wife, then Empress, Josephine, delved into tarot cards and other divination techniques. It is believed she read the prophecies of Nostradamus; however, there is no indication in the writings of or about Napoleon that he was aware the 16th-century prophet had pinned him as the first of three Antichrists under the code name PAUNAYLORON (a code for Napaulon Roy = Napoleon King. Learn more about it here: Antichrist).

A movie still of Napoleon at Borodino from the Moscfilm production of War and Peace, 1968 -- history's most expensive film ever made. It took six years to make and hired 120,000 extras for the battle sequences. At the present US-dollar value it cost 1 billion bucks to make.

Hubris saddled to an insatiable desire to keep conquering others blinded him to any oracular Egyptian warnings, if they could be had in the Book of Fate, or the warnings of Josephine’s tarot readings, not to plunge deep into Russia in 1812. Napoleon did so and destroyed an army of a half-million men. The following year he rebuilt an army of another half-million (teenagers mostly) and destroyed that in lost campaigns across the German states in 1813. He abdicated his throne as Emperor of the French in 1814 and was exiled to Elba after fighting and losing a campaign against a formidable coalition of Austrian, English, Prussian and Russian armies. He would escape Elba in 1815, return to France, fight and dramatically lose one last battle at Waterloo with the British and Prussians, after which Napoleon Bonaparte, was exiled for good to the South Atlantic island of St. Helena

In the last six years of life left, he had a lot of time to reflect on the past and predict how his actions would cast a giant shadow on the rest of the 19th century. Hidden within his memoirs and apologies to history are a number of accurate forecasts. He said the “19th” would be “a century of revolutions” foreseeing the fall of monarchies. France did mark two monarchies fall to street revolutions in 1830 (Charles X) and 1848 (Louis-Philippe). Revolutions would rage across Europe in 1848-49. There would be Garibaldi’s red-shirted revolution that eventually led to the fall of many principalities and monarchies with the unification of Italy. Greece fought more than one revolution to free themselves of the Turks and with the fall of Bonaparte’s cousin, Emperor Napoleon III, a bloody socialist revolution known as the Paris Commune consumed itself and much of Paris in 1871.

Napoleon Bonaparte on St. Helena predicted the crowded patchwork of little German states would soon resume and achieve their unification. This they did in 1870-71 when the Second Reich was established. (The First Reich being the Holy Roman Empire and the Third Reich being that of Adolf Hitler).

Napoleon foresaw the French people freed of the Bourbon yoke. That happened in 1830 with the fall of Charles X.

Nostradamus’ First Antichrist describes the worldwide spread of the French Revolution with a phrase one might expect from the prophet himself: “from this tripod [its] light will burst upon the world.” It is known that Nostradamus practiced his theurgic-spirit conjuring rites while sitting of a brass tripod like a Delphic oracle.

The Battle of Borodino was the bloodiest single-day clash of arms of the 19th century. It is estimated that in 12 hours of exceedingly violent combat up to 70,000 men were killed or wounded in a three-square mile area (and I may have been foolish enough in a past life to be caught in the cross-fire). Famous last words: "Beau feu!" (Good shot!)

Nostradamus savaged Napoleon in many remarkably accurate prophecies, but overlooked his more positive legacies. In the last prophecy above, Napoleon played his part in self-fulfillment. Though he was a dictator, he had spread the core values of the French Revolution across the continent and though at last defeated, these tenets endured forcing the victorious monarchies to adapt and reform their governments to embrace more human equality and freedom. Even the popes ruling with a Catholic fundamentalist hand tried to rescind Napoleon’s code of laws that prevented discrimination against all minorities, especially the Jews. They succeeded to force Jews back into ghettos only until the unification of Italy, inspired by the French revolution at last erased the Papal States.

Sorry Nostradamus, sometimes it takes an Antichrist to teach a Pope how to be a good Christian.

John Hogue

(07 September 2009)

PS–My next blog will mark the 9th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack by fashioning an essay based on Jihad Messiah, the seventh chapter of Nostradamus and the Antichrist: Code Named: MABUS.

***

When we, and the controversy of Nostradamus, entered a new millennium, many interpreters and dilettantes of Nostradamus mistakenly believed his prophecies foretold the end of the world–a strangely popular but patently unqualified myth, since Nostradamus had dated the end of the world 1,797 years ahead in the year 3797. Nevertheless, a peaceful turning of New Year’s Day 2000 exposed Nostradamus in the minds of many believers and skeptics as a prophetic failure and charlatan. Then on 11 September 2001, the debate about this man and myth came back before global scrutiny. No sooner had the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed into billowing, apocalyptic clouds of debris, than Reuters News Agency broadcast across the planet a prophecy attributed to Nostradamus about “hollow mountains” falling in the “City of York.” The lines of the purported prophecy–much like what we know about the man Nostradamus–were a blend of myth and fact. Fake lines like “the city of York” drew people in, yet these were sewn together with stolen lines of two actual Nostradamus prophecies–the same prophecies that for decades many interpreters, including this author, believed forecast a future nuclear or terrorist attack on New York’s lower Manhattan financial district.

A prophetic hoax about an attack on the “City of York” rode on the back of these real quatrain (four-line) prophecies about what many believe is an attack on New York:

At forty-five degrees latitude, the sky will burn,
Fire approaches the great new city.
Immediately a huge, scattered flame leaps up,
When they want verification from the Normans [the French].

Garden of the world near the new city,
In the path of the hollow mountains:
It will be seized and plunged into a boiling cauldron,
Drinking by force the waters poisoned by sulfur.

(Quatrain 97, Century 6 and Quatrain 49, Century 10, The Prophecies of M. Michel de Nostradamus.)

When you have two prescient-sounding yet general provocations that include images like “fire approaching” a “new city” at “forty-five degrees latitude” in the “path” of “hollow mountains” near a “garden of the word,” the hackles can rise–especially if you apply present-day facts to conveniently join together the dots of a 450-year-old prophetic rant to see what you want to see. Does one brush it all off as a coincidence that the city of “new” York is near latitude 45 degrees, or that the first Boeing 757 hijacked by terrorists cut into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in “a huge, scattered flame” at a 45-degree angle? Is it just the law of chance fooling a prophetically sympathetic mind when the second hijacked airliner passed over New Jersey (also known as the “Garden” state) and swerved at high speed toward the South Tower of the “world” Trade center building exactly over the “Path” subway tunnel before slamming into the second man-made peak of “hollow mountains”? And when Nostradamus describes his vision of “hollow mountains” being “seized and plunged” into a “boiling cauldron,” are we conned yet again by a new generation of sycophants tagging events of their time on to cryptic ravings; or is it more than a coincidence that each tower as it fell looked as if it were seized by the hand of an invisible force and plunged into the boiling cauldron of its own debris cloud? Are the “Normans” some retroactive allusion to the people of Normandy, or is this, as Nostradamian scholars believe, a code name for the French, whose intelligence agents on 10 September were indeed frantically warning their opposites in Washington D.C. that a terrorist attack on America was imminent?

Do we have a 16th-century charlatan catching us in our projections when the multiple meanings of Renaissance French can satisfy what we want to see? The word Nostradamus uses for “cauldron” is cuue (spelled cuve in Modern French). It can mean a number of things beyond “cauldron” such as “tank” or “tub.” Is the skeptic right when he brushes off any application of this word to the fall of the twin towers? Is the skeptic right to suggest waggishly that we might as well say Nostradamus is predicting some future disaster in a jacuzzi; or, is it not a little disturbing to one’s flippant reason to discover that the World Trade Center was built on a huge, rectangular cement box of watertight floor and walls known as “the tub”?

Welcome to the debate.

***

John Hogue

(11 September 2009)