I was afraid someone was going to bring that one up, so I guess we should squelch it right now. The simplest answer is this. No, Nostri never made such a prediction. See this site for the full facts. http://www.snopes.com/rumors/predict.htm
Right after September 11, 2001, somebody (perhaps somebody who wanted to boost their sales of books about Nostradamus?) started to circulate a bogus prediction on the web that claimed he had written two quatrains about the sky burning in a new city, about two “brothers” torn apart by chaos in the “city of york”. Sounds real spooky until you realize that the eight lines in question are made up of several invented lines that Nostradamus never wrote including the part about two brothers in the city of York, plus a bunch of other lines that he did write but that have been pulled from other quatrains and modified to make them fit better.
Furthermore, Nostradamus never wrote that the sky would burn at 40 degrees (which is roughly the latitude of New York). What he wrote was:
Cinq et quarante degrez ciel bruslera
Feu approcher de la grand cité neuve
Instant grand flamme esparse sautera
Quand on voudra des Normans faire preuue.
Which could maybe be translated as:
Five and forty steps or maybe degrees
the sky will burn
Fire approaching the large new city
Instantly a great thin flame will leap
When someone will want to test the Normans.
New York City is about 39 degrees 55 minutes North Latitude. If the sky burned at 45 degrees, it would be burning at the Canada-US border 300 miles north of NYC.
However, Kanicbird, the part I find distressing is when you say, “The New City could very easily fit the WTC, basically cities onto themselves, with their own zip code, and certainly a city within a building was certainly new to Nostrodamus.”
What you seem to be implying is that we should assume that some magical supernatural force who knew that September 11 would occur over 400 years later was feeding Nostradamus this information and that the reason his description of the WTC is not more accurate is just that Nostradamus did not have the right language to explain huge office complexes.
Whoooooaaaaaah there fella! I know exercise is good for you, but you could seriously sprain yourself jumping to that many conclusions!
Using the principle of Occam’s Razor (google it if you don’t know about it) we go for the simplest explanation.
First, although Nostradamus lived from 1503 to 1566, (Columbus reached the New World in 1492) he never once mentioned America or the New World. This is not really surprising. William Skakespeare, who lived from 1564 to 1616, during which time the English were establishing colonies in America, never once mentions the New World except for one or two vague references to the “Indies” which could mean the west or east Indies.
But one city that Nostradamus certainly knew about was Venice, which is about 45 degrees north latitude and which was an enormously powerful commercial and military hub of Europe and the Old World in the 1500s.
In fact, when you read his predictions, you note an enormous number of lines that seem to suggest great naval battles in the Adriatic, the arm of sea that leads to Venice.
You see, this man who obviously just used guesswork and normal human knowledge to pretend he had amazing powers of prophecy so he could sell his books (say isn’t that what people are doing with his stuff on the internet right now?), really saw things with the very limited vision of a man of his time. He thought he was safe in predicting lots of major fights ad events in the Adriatic because Venice was so important. What he could not know is that Venice would soon begin a decline that would continue until the whole city surrendered to Napoleon without a fight a couple of centuries later. In other words, nothing much happened in the Adriatic.
So this is my final, honest-and-cross-my-heart posting about that old fraud. But let me leave you with a few points to ponder.
Most people in the world do not speak or read French, especially not French from the 1500s, and cannot check this guy out for themselves and make an objective, personal decision on the validity of his so-called predictions.
Nostradamus is not nearly as popular in French-speaking countries, where more people can check out the original, as in the rest of the world, where people are told what Nostradamus supposedly said. Hmmmmmm! Wonder why?
Most people “learn” about Nostradamus from books, articles and TV shows written principally in English and other languages, by people who have a vested interest in selling nice, spooky stories about the “amazing predictions” of Nostradamus to make a nice piece of change.
Many of the people who write about the “amazing” Nostradamus do no speak or read French. They are just basing themselves on other people’s translations in books about how “amazing” he was.
People WANT to believe in spooky, amazing prophecies. It is fun. Guys like me who write the plain truth are about as interesting as watching paint dry, and I know it.
Like Forest Gump used to say: “And that’s all I have to say about that!”
New subject anyone?
to us… He must have ** predicted ** what would become of his work…