Tim Maas Retired Quality Assurance Specialist with the U.S. Army

Nostradamus was a French physician who lived from 1503 to 1566. Although trained as a conventional physician, he gradually moved toward the occult through such practices as horoscopes, necromancy (communication with the dead), and the use of divination and charms.

Beginning in 1550, he published almanacs containing reputed prophecies of future events. (One source indicates that there were at least 6,338 such predictions.)

His best-known work is The Prophecies, which contains hundreds of four-line verses. To avoid persecution on religious grounds, he devised a method of obscuring his meaning through syntax, word games, and using multiple languages. (According to my understanding, he would not have been charged with heresy, since neither prophecy nor astrology were considered heretical. He would only have been persecuted if he had used magic in conjunction with his writings.) (However, he was jailed briefly in 1561 for having failed to obtain the prior permission of a bishop for the publication of his 1562 almanac.)

He was eventually named as a counselor and physician to King Charles IX of France.

In light of the fact that Nostradamus (although a nominal Catholic) used clearly unscriptural practices in the derivation of his prophecies; because his prophecies were worded so as to be open to a number of possible interpretations; and because he made many prophecies that did not (and by now cannot) occur, it seems to me safe to say that he was not in any way inspired by or speaking for God, even if some of his prophecies can appear (with the benefit of hindsight) to have been accurate.

May 02 2017 • 0 responses • Vote Up • Share • Report