What happened, Michel? Did you read the tea leaves wrong? The 7th month of 1999 has come to pass, but disaster didn’t happeen! Some will say that you realy ment September. I will remind yoy again Oct. 1.
Zymurgist
Why do people still pay attention to this idiot. He’s never gotten anything right. Hasn’t anyone read his writings?
(Not you, Carl, Nostradomus) 
Peace,
mangeorge
Allegedly, 7month 1999 actually refers to August, so we are not in the clear yet. But all he really says is that the king of terror will come from the sky under the sign of the swastika. Kind of ominous that while the US was bombing the snot out of Kosovo the protesters were holding up the swastika emblazoned NATO-nazi banners. But then his prediction is 3months off.
There is a quote about the sun appearing as double which eveyone though was a hydrogen bomb, but I’m not sure that prediction shared the same deadline of the king of terror. But hey, the indians and packastanis still have time to do something stupid.
Also cassini is going to zip by earth this month carrying enough plutonium to kill every who ever lived about 10,000 times.
If you really want to scoff, check out http://prophetic.simplenet.com/ where each predictions is dissected to such an extent as to map it to several different and unrelated events in recent history.
How exactly can “seventh month” refer to August or September? I glanced through something that gave Aug. 11, 1999 as the day of nuclear annihilation. I remember a show hosted by an embarrassed Orson Wells that said it would happen in October 1999, and would be instigated by a man in a blue turban. Do they even try to base these conjectures on the poems or are they just making them up?
Prior to the Gregorian reform of the calendar, there were a variety of start dates for the new year. In some areas of Europe, the new year started in March, so by that count, September is the 7th month. I can’t remember if Nostradamus was writing (dreaming? doping?) before or after the Gregorian reform.
Also, “September” literally means the 7th month. Under the ancient Roman calendar, the year was divided into 10 months, and several of them, in a burst of Roman originality, were named after the number:
Quintilis - fifth month
Sextilis - sixth month
September - seventh month
October - eight month
November - ninth month
December - tenth month
When Julius Caesar reformed the calendar, around 45 BCE, he added two new months (I believe January and February). And, just because he thought it sounded better, he re-named Quintilis “July.” Later, the Emperor Augustus thought that “August” just rolled off the tongue better than “Sextilis.”
Gregorian calendar was made official via papal bull on Feb 24, 1582
Nostradamus died on July 1, 1566.
…but he should have been able to predict that the seventh month in 1999 would be July, no?
To lazy to check the link, here it is:
I notice the distinct absence of the term “nuclear annihilation.” It kind of sound like it could be about a nuclear explosion, but its vague, and crytpic and other predicictions that came true, did so with the help of a lot of symbolic interpretation.
Also let me point out that Century X-72
is the only passage with a specific date and the other passage, and sybolicly Century VI-97 could refer to world war II where the invasion of Normandy was followed by the incineration of most of germany in 1945.
Or, just like every other psychic prediction, its just so damned cryptic and vauge, that if we try hard enough we can correlate the “prediction” to events after the fact.
“Or, just like every other psychic prediction, its just so damned cryptic and vauge, that if we try hard enough we can correlate the “prediction” to events after the fact.”
—falcon2
Exactly!
Peace,
mangeorge
Greg just asked how one could count September as the seventh month; he didn’t ask why one would.
I take a literal, narrow approach.
I had forgotten that Nostradamus predated the Gregorian calendar. However, the seventh month of 1999 by Julian reckoning would have passed by in March or April, right?
It’s true that September meant “seventh month” before Julius Caesar added January and February, but that system predates Nostradamus by many centuries. Why would he use that one?
I gave two alternative explanations for how September could be the seventh month.
a) if the year starts March 1, as it did in some areas of Europe, then September is the seventh month.
b) if you want to go by the literal meaning of the names, you can call September the seventh month.
As to why Notradamus would chose to use these obscure means to refer to September in his “prediction,” read the sample falcon2 posted - it’s obvious that clarity, precision and transparency were not the lodestars of his style.
I just cruised the “Christmas” thread, and am reminded by John W. Kennedy that for those areas that started the New Year in March, the start date was March 25, not March 1. Even so, if March is partly the first month of the year, September is partly the seventh.
Sorry for the inaccuracy.
Hey, here’s an idea! Maybe Nosty was just making it all up!
If anything like what Nostradamus predicted happens in the next 10 years, believers will come up with some way of rationalizing the seventh month of the nineteen hundredth and ninty-ninth year as fitting the actual date of said disaster.