The statue of St. Peter the first, and perhaps the last, pope named Peter before the end of days. A popular Protestant conspiracy from the 17th century and later conjured up again in the 19th by the Seventh Day Adventists presumed the Papal Tiara had a Latin inscription taken from the Donation of Constantine. Add the numerical equivalent of Latin letters and reach a sum of 666. Other conspiracy theories have 666 emblazoned on papal miters or tiaras as an abbreviation of Julius Caesar's Latin inscription Vini (Veni), Vidi, Vinci – "I came, I saw, I conquered" -- in the Roman numerals VI VI VI (666). Thus, the Beast of Revelation is a future pope, some believe. This conspiracy theory was soundly debunked in the 20th century. I will write about it in detail in the future. For today's blog, I mention it only because Nostradamus seems to apply hints to the "pope-as-antichrist" in these prophecies using another lead.

Friends,
Quatrain 66 of Century 6 has Catholic prophet Nostradamus using the number of the Beast in Revelation to tie the discovery of a great Roman’s tomb with either an earthquake as a metaphor for religious upheaval or literally he implies a tomb uncovered around the time of a natural disaster and/or quake. In both possible interpretations, the Church is undergoing an apostasy: the opening stage of undermined faith in laity and leadership alike expected in the Catholic version of the Apocalypse. I disseminated in great detail the thrust of collected visions of the Apostasy, Roman Catholic Apocalypse and visions of a subsequent Age of the Holy Spirit beyond the need of churches here: see Apostasy. The latter prophecies either speak of a completely new world religion or a new renaissance of what it is to be universal happens after the Catholic Apocalypse — what the Greek word Katholicós means. Nostradamus’ prophecies imply that the embrace of a larger universal understanding of God and existence transpires sometime after the bones of the great Roman, which is either St. Peter or St. Paul, are found.

Quatrain 66 of Century 6 reads:

Au fondement de la nouuelle secte,
Seront les oz du grand Romain trouués,
Sepulchre en marbre apparoistra couuerte,
Terre trembler en Auril, mal enfouez.

At the founding of a new sect,
The bones of the great Roman will be found,
The sepulcher covered by marble will appear,
The earth trembles in April, badly buried.

In part two of the series (see 666) we followed an interesting lead suggested by “CJ” that the Aquila quake in Italy of April 2009 happened close enough to the discovery of bones purported to be relics of St. Paul to make him that great Roman, not St. Peter. Just a few months later scientific carbon dating proved that the bones hail from the times of St. Paul. The tomb under the altar of the Church of St. Paul just outside the Vatican walls is made of white marble. Pope Benedict XVI announced the discovery of the tomb on 12/6/06 (Twelve is 6 X 6) of the 6th day (666) in 2006 (or, 2 X 6 = 12). The quatrain is 66 of Century 6 (666).

Now, before we get too Aposta-sassy about this surprising number of sleuth-sayer hits, let us see how Nostradamus in another quatrain may give us similar clues that actually match the moldy bones of another “great Roman” besides the Apostle Paul. Century 9 Quatrain 84 reads:

Roy exposé parfaira L’hecatombe,
Apres auoir trouué son origine:
Torrent ouurir de marbre & plomb la tombe
D’vn grand Romain d’enseigne Medusine.

The King exposed will complete the slaughter,
After having found his origin:
A torrent to open the tomb of marble and lead
Of the great Roman with the Medusine device.

The great Nostradamus scholar Edgar Leoni gives us the Latin Medusaeus, for Medusa whose serpent-topped head turned all onlookers to stone. Lee McCann believes it is an anagram Deus in Me the motto of Saint Peter. I would add that the name Peter, or pierre in French, means “stone.” The Medusa that can turn people into stone may be Nostradamus nasty description of the final Pope of the foretold Apocalypse who he infers elsewhere in is prophecies will be named Peter.

The Medieval Irish prophet, St. Malachy, purportedly came to the same conclusion several hundred years before Nostradamus in his famous papal prophecies. In 1138, Malachy purportedly predicted the last pope of the Vatican during the apocalypse would be named Peter. Over the centuries, many believed the average life expectancy of pontiffs, placed the succession of the final pope on his list around, or shortly after, the dawning of the new millennium.

These prophecies were rediscovered around 1595. They hint of 111 successors to St. Peter’s throne from the times of St. Malachy to the end times, each pontiff cryptically described by two-to-three word Latin mottoes. A paragraph plays coda describing the 112th and final pope of Judgment Day.

These fascinating prophecies may have been written a half-a-century “after” Nostradamus’ quatrains by a man hiding his true identity under the nom-de-plume of the famous St. Malachy. Thirty-six popes were foretold in the list unto the Catholic apocalypse beyond 1595. The usual forgery should have fallen flat once hindsight was no longer aiding its phony prophet. Instead, the remaining mottoes’ accuracy beyond the potential forger’s publication is remarkably high. Read more of the complete details here: Last Pope.

There is a reoccurring theme in Catholic eschatology. Nostradamus and other seers predict vast natural disasters and/or wars destined to unearth the tomb of Saint Peter in the ruins of the Vatican after a great flood and fire. Nostradamus in the following quatrain is less vague than 6 Q66 about which great Roman he is intending the apocalypse to uncover. Living closer to the end time might have sharpened his insight.

Nostradamus wrote verse 6 Q66 in 1556. Verse 84 of Century 9 was set down one to two years later. Maybe his second glimpse of the future was clearer than the first. He might have seen the uncovering of St. Paul’s tomb and mistook that sepulcher for the first pope who will be named like the last, Peter. Clearly, the unearthing in the second prophecy alludes to a natural or man-made catastrophe. The quake is not in Aquila in 2009 but toppling the Vatican itself in the near future.

The current Pope Benedict is the second-to-last pope in St. Malachy’s list. He is in his eighties; so a few years hence will come his successor, the Last Pope. There is an unwritten rule. No pope can use the name of the first Pope. Could Nostradamus have confused his “great Romans”? Could the last pope then be named “Paul” — Pope Paul VII?

Time and events will soon answer that question, perhaps before 2015. I have often sensed over the decades that Nostradamus great Roman and Malachy’s Peter the Roman would rule during what I call the Roaring 2020s. This is the decade when unsustainable economic, social and ecological habits of humanity meet a catastrophic reckoning if destiny’s inclination does not change.

John Hogue

(16 May 2010)

Oldest known picture of St. Paul.

The Catholic Church scandal of pedophile priests widens in April. Yet, another Bishop of the Church, this time the shepherd overseeing the Catholic flock in Norway, is exposed as an abuser of little boys this week in what has become the worst crisis of faith in Pope Benedict XVI. Although the vast majority of the Catholic world community of over 1 billion people remain steadfast against it, calls to end mandatory celibacy for priests have not been this loud since the sexual revolution put Pope Paul VI in a canonical corner after he declared in the encyclical Humanae vitae (1968) that all artificial contraception a sin.

Upheavals of all kinds — natural, religious, political — fill this first full week of April. Two major quakes in less than three days, one 7.2 magnitude temblor in Baja California, the other of 7.8 magnitude off the Indian Ocean shores of Sumatra. A political quake rumbles in Afghanistan. President going a bit kooky in Kabul, wearing the black Taliban turban of the enemy in public speeches, peevishly and openly musing aloud that he might join the Taliban as he grows ever more irascible under US pressure to purge his government of rampant opium dealing and corruption. In Harmid Karzai, I reiterated my prediction made in early 2009 on Coast to Coast AM that America will rapidly leave Afghanistan entirely in a few short years. Perhaps Karzai’s threats this week are showing US soldiers the way out of Vietnamistan? I strongly sense that US forces by 2012 will have mostly abandoned Iraq and Afghanistan.

Finally, the week is punctuated by a political quake, or better, a breakthrough: the restart of START (The Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) signed by Presidents Medvedev of Russia and Obama of America. I will come back to this theme in future blogs because full ratification of the treaty to reduce US and Russian nuclear warheads by one third must be ratified by the Russian Duma and US Senate towards the end of the year. I predict the treaty will be ratified and when that happens I will be able to deliver some good prophetic news for a change. For decades I’ve been writing that the most dangerous potential future before us is a breakdown of attempted friendship between Russia and America foreseen by Nostradamus and other seers. In their collective vision, the third and final war to end all civilization in a thermonuclear exchange came as an unanticipated danger — Armageddon’s visit a complete surprise. Therefore, any action that bolsters friendship and reduces the nuclear armaments of the two greatest nuclear powers diminishes that future. You can read Nostradamus’ full prophecies about this threat in the Epilogue of the following eBook: see Mabus Nostradamus.

Now to Part 2 of our series on Nostradamus’ 666 Prophecy.

Back in July 2009, “CJ” shared an intriguing take on Nostradamus’ 666 prophecy:

CJ
I would like to suggest that the Century 6 Quatrain 66 has been fulfilled this week. The earthquake that occurred in Italy in April is talked about in the first few lines and the rest about the bones of the great Roman being found (St Paul) was just announced. Very clear references I think you will agree.

HOGUE
Let’s first review Century 6 Quatrain 66 written back in 1556:

Au fondement de la nouuelle secte,
Seront les oz du grand Romain trouués,
Sepulchre en marbre apparoistra couuerte,
Terre trembler en Auril, mal enfouez.

At the founding of a new sect,
The bones of the great Roman will be found,
The sepulcher covered by marble will appear,
The earth trembles in April, badly buried.

There have been a number of purported discoveries of the final resting place of the first “Pope” or Bishop of Rome, St. Peter, who is presumed by most Nostradamus scholars to be his cryptic grand Romain, though St. Paul, who was also martyred in Rome, can’t be ruled out.

CJ thinks the temblor that devastated Aquila, in the Apennines; just less than 150 miles northeast of Rome in early April 2009 is mentioned by Nostradamus in line four. Around that time, Vatican Archaeologists lowered instruments on a string into the purported sepulcher in the earthen bowels of Rome’s Church of St. Paul, just beyond the walls of the Vatican, to collect bones for carbon dating.

A few months later, in June 2009, Pope Benedict XVI announced to the world that objective evidence beyond faith, evidence of scientists, narrowed the time window for the bones walking and perhaps preaching the good news of Jesus Christ around the first or second century C.E. when St. Paul would have lived.

At that time the Daily Mail UK reported: “The Vatican archaeologists have also found a very old fresco — dated to three centuries after Paul’s death — on the walls of the catacombs, which appears to be a faithful likeness of Paul. The old icon-painters and makers of frescoes and mosaics did not paint from whim. They saw their task as the keeping alive of a tradition, and accounts of Paul’s appearance would have been passed down from generation to generation.”

It’s perhaps more than an interesting coincidence. An earthquake pummels Aquila in April 2009. A few short months later, the scientific conclusion about the bones comes out in late June. Nostradamus described the tomb as made of white marble. Excavation of the tomb began three and a half years earlier. On 6 December 2006, the Catholic News Agency announced that Vatican archaeologists confirmed the presence of the white marble sarcophagus beneath the Church of St. Paul’s altar possibly holding the decapitated skeletal remains of St Paul.

The date is interesting. The sixth day of the twelfth month in “06″. Twelve is made of two sixes, therefore, we have the sixth day of two-sixes (666) on the sixth year of the new millennium: 2006 = 2 X 6, which is 12 (6-6 in the year 6).

Nostradamus’ quatrain indexing is 6 Q66 = 666.

The presager from Provence being a dyslexic mad poet with a method might want us to read his verses backwards with line four becoming line one: “The earth trembles in April, badly buried. The sepulcher covered by marble will appear. The bones of the great Roman will be found at the founding of a new sect.”

Read backwards in sequence, the message sounds more like an earthquake has hit the Vatican and the nearby Church of St. Paul and THAT uncovers the tomb for examination.

In part three we’ll see that line of soothsaying supported by other prophecies of Nostradamus.

As for the “new sect” could it be a new world religion in its infancy at that time. A more traditional interpretation would have it mark the death and resurrection of what it means to be “Catholic”: Universal truth seen underpinning all and everything, or a triumphalist Vatican dogma proclaiming universally a narrow view of what is universal?

John Hogue

(09 April 2010)

PS–Read The Last Pope Revisited for a detailed answer.

Pope Benedict XVI.

Friends,
First, as promised, here is a quick list of natural and seismic disasters that support my oracle’s prophetic contentions written in detail in Predictions for 2010 that Mother Nature has declared war on bad human habits this year. Since 15 March when I last reported (see, Natural disasters), Chile experienced a new major temblor in its northern provinces not related to the massive 8.8 quake in early March. Further quakes have hit the Caribbean including a large moderate temblor in Eastern Cuba and aftershock in Haiti claiming more lives there from collapsing buildings. The Icelandic volcano I spoke of in mid-March has erupted spectacularly. Huge sandstorms in China coming out of the deforested interior gave Beijing its worst air pollution alerts on record. The closely positioned twin monster cyclones Tomas and Ului did their damage in the South Pacific and Coral Sea regions. Tomas as a Category 4 Cyclone barreled into Fiji delivering one of the Island nation’s worst disasters. (I will write more about it in a series about the passing of Adi Da, whose Ashram was hard it.) Ului pelted the Solomons then spun in to Northeastern Australia causing widespread crop damage. Historic rainfall and flooding in the North Atlantic states continues, including 500-year floods putting much of Rhode Island underwater, requiring the federal government declare the entire New England state a disaster area. Connecticut and New Jersey’s governors also seek federal disaster relief for their entire and saturated states.

Just how many visitations of 500-year dust storms, floods and droughts does humanity need to get it that Mother Nature is on the warpath? Check in at the end or the beginning of every month this year for a blog-to-prophecy natural disaster report called Natural Disasters Quickening.

Now to today’s new blog series, which I will weave between installments of the series The Media Mask of Nostradamus, see Nostradamus.

***

I’m at last catching up on some of your questions that I promised would become blogs. I was writing blogs at a breakneck pace in the final days of March to multiply my stock because today — April Fool’s Day — I will begin work on a new eBook setting the prophetic record straight on what is and is not significant about the Mayan Calendar Long Count coming to an end in 2012. Look out for my eBook on 2012 coming out this summer.

Back on November 14, 2009, “Michael” sent me the following question:

MICHAEL
I became very interested In Nostradamus lately and want to ask if there’s any significance to century 6 quatrain 66, which in the Bible is 666.

HOGUE
This prophecy has intrigued many over the centuries since Nostradamus composed it around 1556 for the second serialized publication of his magnum opus, Les Propheties (The Prophecies). The theme follows down the same line of other Catholic prophets who believe the apocalypse begins first from within the most hallowed center of the Holy Church in Rome. (See Last Pope Prophecy.)

The theme of Apostasy taken up here by Nostradamus seems topical in early April 2010, what with a widening web of scandal entrapping the papacy of Pope Benedict XVI. It turns out that hundreds of pedophiles of the cloth and cross across Europe have molested thousands of children. A few of these pedo-priesto-philes may once have been under the protective wing of Archbishop Ratzinger of Munich in decades past before he was made Pope Benedict in 2005. The Vatican denies Ratzinger protected these fallen priests from justice or knew that they were sent back to their parishes after therapy to “do it” to their child charges one more, many more, and more times.

Cardinal Ratzinger paying inculpable papabile is more inappropriate because he was John Paul II’s Prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith for 24 years before becoming Pope Benedict XVI. The Prefect used to be called “The Grand Inquisitor.” Inquisition — the act of inquiring into a matter; an investigation — is EXACTLY about delving into the crimes of the Church’s child-fornicating straying flock of priests from 1981 through 2005. He knew what was going on, in complete detail. He knows what’s going on between priests and their victims right now. To say he’s not responsible as the pope’s cop for 24 years, then God’s Vicar of Christ on earth since 2005 reeks of sham. His currently dismissive and derogatory official responses to these questions of his oversight in the matter of priests and their child victims as idle gossip mongering reflect meanness and a lack of compassion.

Catholic seers in the past thousand years have foreseen an apostasy for the Church in our times: a falling away from faith, not only for lay believers but also a degeneration and straying from the teachings of Jesus by priesthood and pope in Rome. A state of apostasy is phase one of the Catholic version of the Christian apocalypse. I describe this variant apocalypse in detail here: see Apostasy.

Nostradamus is one of those Catholic seers. He takes up the Apostasy theme in Century 6 Quatrain 66:

Au fondement de la nouuelle secte,
Seront les oz du grand Romain trouués,
Sepulchre en marbre apparoistra couuerte,
Terre trembler en Auril, mal enfouez.

At the founding of a new sect,
The bones of the great Roman will be found,
The sepulcher covered by marble will appear,
The earth trembles in April, badly buried.

I wrote the following interpretation published in 1997 in Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies:

***

Nostradamus dates the appearance of a new sect to correspond with the discovery of St. Peter’s authentic tomb.

The Roman is Saint Peter, whose bones, Nostradamus tells us, will be found beneath the Vatican at the time of a cataclysm. We cannot rule out the interpretation of another future trend expressed in other quatrains: that the tomb was to be found in 1978, the year a dramatic influx of interest in the teachings of Osho, Hubbard, Moon, and Adi Da Samraj. It can be assumed, therefore, that a new religious sect has already appeared.

The indexing of 6 Q66 could, on closer inspection, hide the biblically symbolic number, 666, which represents man and the Antichrist. If this is a correct interpretation Nostradamus does not make it clear whether the number stands for the new sect or is intended as a jibe at the Roman Catholic Church as un-Christ-tian. Certainly all the candidates explored are, to varying degrees, considered threats to the orthodox Christian view of the universe.

***

I would like to add a correction. It wasn’t in 1978 but in 1968 that Pope Paul VI declared the bones of St. Peter had been found. However, Pope Paul made the announcement in the latter half of the 20th century, close enough to the new millennium to make this prophecy contemporary for our times.

Easter is just around the corner. So too is the five-year anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s death (2 April) and Cardinal Ratzinger’s succession as Pope Benedict XVI (19 April). Earthquakes in Nostradamus’s cryptic lexicon aren’t always what they linguistically seem. The shake up of the Vatican in a future April, perhaps this coming April, could imply a deepening, Church-quaking pedophile scandal undermining the credibility of this pope.

In Part Two, we’ll look at other suggested discoveries of St. Peter and the other Great Roman, St. Paul, as possibly indicating events foreseen in this prophecy far closer to us in time than 1968.

John Hogue

(01 April 2009)

The painting exemplifies the spooky stereotypical portrayals of Nostradamus by all forms of sensational media posing as journalism. If Nostradamus where the African American, President Obama, this portrayal would be like a cartoon of Sambo. Even the crystal ball is profiling the prophet as some dime store mannequin soothsayer. Plunk your coin in the slot and get your fortune told by the wind-up dummy.

As promised to Sarah and the rest of my blog community, here is the beginning of my point-by-point response to her cathartic letter about frightening prophecies milked by the media, and presumably, me, without detailing what one must do to prevent this future from happening.

SARAH,
John, I’m a 27-year-old. Graphic design student and new mom. I also live in the Pacific Northwest. I attend Portland State University. In all of my classes we discuss being “green”. There are lots of organizations and groups dedicated to being sustainable. I was required to take a class “environmental sustainability” last term. I learned many very scary facts about population control, and water quality. I felt very fearful of this planets demise.

HOGUE
The world of humanity has stepped into the uncharted territory of a new era, the global stage of human evolution. Now for the first time everything we do affects everyone else on the planet. We have entered this unique and challenging stage in our growth essentially following the habits of hunter-gatherers and early cultivators of prehistoric times. Like them, we regard this world of nature as an enemy to be tamed and conquered. In short, we have not evolved for hundreds of thousands of years. Yes, we change our technologies, our goddesses and gods, our religions and moral stances. They are masks of civilization affixed each century to the original face of the same old savage who once had to find a way to outbreed the other animals and outwit them, tame them, conquer them.

Well, we have won that battle. The war of survival of the fittest pitting humanity against the natural world is over. Yet we still go on breeding to abandon, usurping, raping, conquering Nature as if we were still that fragile band of a few thousand cave men and women in little tribes scattered across the wild natural world of immense and limitless resources.

It is not that world anymore.

We must snap out of this long sleepwalk of Neolithic dreamtime and become the Earth’s gardeners and guardians. We are the only animals evolving a potential of sentience to bring balance and harmony into our lives. All other animals can only breed and consume to their unconscious heart’s delight and let nature take its course. She will seek to restore the natural balance, cull the overpopulating critters and if need be bring upon them an extinction if they cannot adapt to her balancing act.

Human beings have this unique potential not shared by all other planetary animals to become their own guardians of nature. They have this god-goddess spark. They need only snap out of their habitual Paleolithic sleepwalks through history.

We enter a new millennium where this sleeper must awaken. We talking animals must become human, crystallize and awaken that potential of consciousness and love and bring ourselves into harmony. Otherwise, nature will — must — cull and eradicate us, as her mechanism so efficiently will do to other miscreant species.

I have collected thousands of predictions from all periods of prophetic forecasting and you would be amazed how they share the same collective warning about our times and how our disruption of the earth and its climate must end. Our abuse of this beautiful earth is the catalyst to our potentially doom-laden apocalyptic destiny. Yet, the challenge before us of global death can catalyze a human spark in all people. Cognizance on a global scale of the emergency can be enough to transcend insentient animal instincts and bring back to us, a golden future. That future has also been set before us by seers of all times and persuasions. You can see hundreds of positive prophecies about tomorrow in books under the following themes. See new age religion, Millennium prophecies, and Aquarian Age.

SARAH
Not until I had my daughter did I begin to feel almost terrified for what may happen in her life.

HOGUE
See this terror in a different light than what the mind is habitually programmed to frame in its acquired darkness. You did not have this mind before you were born, right? Not possible. You had to learn how to read and write English and take on labels like “American” etc. This all came after you were born. Be a witness to this mind that was trained by others to be terrified, or in other words, trained by others to push the “terrified” button when confronted with things you were taught to react for or against.

Take a deep breath, close your eyes. Take a step back into the being that was there before this mind was imprinted upon you. Step out of the darkness of your mind’s terror and see this so-called terror from some distance.

I used to be terrified by the future. Then I became a practitioner of the science of self-observation. Over time I came to understand that what my mind projected upon this energy you are feeling is not “terror” but “urgency.” Terror is negative and disempowering. Urgency is positive. It gives you energy to understand and act.

Society teaches us to be afraid rather than feel urgent. Urgency sees what lies before the human race is not terrifying. It is a challenge to grow and evolve. A mind imposed on us is afraid to grow because perhaps only the soul grows and the soul is not the mind, is it?

How can it be?

Where will this mind and its programmed brain go when we return to the bodiless state? Where was “Sarah” before you were born? Where will this “Sarah” go beyond death’s door? This brain you adopted at birth and had programmed and wired to think and react a certain way as a personality imposed on you by others is called “Sarah.” Imagine how different your soul’s personality mask would have been if you were born in Beijing, Mecca, or Banares instead.

This fear is an imposed interpretation on something else. Feel it instead as urgency to change, free of the mind’s projection to feel terrified. Then, new revelations and a fresh intelligence with which you were born will reawaken. Practicing the science of self-observation will help. I have many techniques I can offer you, if you but only ask for them. There are techniques I have learned that can help you face your fear and transmute it into urgency.

SARAH
In my household we made many changes. We use less water, we try to live sustainably.

HOGUE
This is wonderful and I commend you for it. I too do many things to lower my carbon footprint. Chief among these is helping my readers move from reading me in paper books made by cutting down forests of trees. I try to help them see how they can also lower their carbon footprint by reading my books made of photons and electrons. (See eBooks.)

I feel an urgency to live by my experience. Meditation teaches me that it is within my capacity to celebrate choosing freedom’s unique responsibility to live as I write. I light my own candle in the darkness and care not if a million candles remain dark. It is up to them to see that they too can put the light on. If seeing my candle lit helps that is secondary. What is more important is that my candle be lit and that it stays lit every moment, 24/7, waking or sleeping. It is enough that I be a watchman of my own light, sustaining it one eternal moment to the next.

I follow my own light, not the glowering light of the television’s false pictures. The points I made above are often given to these TV shows on film, yet they rarely reach you in the final cut.

In part three of this series we will talk about a theme most prophecy based TV shows censor out of my appearances: The first step to save the world can be the first step away from the problem’s source.

John Hogue

(27 March 2010)