Nostradamus [antikvár]

PREFACE The prophecies of Nostradamus are as indestructible as the Revelation of St John, and equally obscure. Nowhere is man's fascination with the irrational as evident as in the matter of prophecy; and no prophet since biblical times has enjoyed as long a Ufe in the popular imagination as Michel de Nostredame, the sixteenth-century Provençal physician turned seer. Since the Centuries of Nostradamus were first published at Lyon in 1555 they have not been out of print, nor has there been any dearth of interpretations in the intervening four centuries. It would seem that decoding the bizarre outpourings of prophets is as irresistible as decoding the unfathomable language of dreams. The quality of interpretations of the Centuries has varied, and Nostradamus has been described as everything from a Rosicrucian initiate intimate with the secrets of God to a drunkard whose badly rhymed quatrains are a dubious alternative to the proverbial pink elephant. Yet however accurate and astute some of these interpretative efforts have undoubtedly been, there is something stubbornly elusive about Nostradamus' verses which, once again, suggests a similarity to the elusive dream-language that so fascinated Freud and Jung. Jean de Fontbrune is alone among interpreters of Nostradamus in being wise enough to concede that he does not know it all, even though he has every right to be boastful because of the enormous labour involved in his impeccable historical research. It is possibly because of his humility that his work is unusually sane - too sane, perhaps, for the reader who expects wild, esoteric revelations. M. de Fontbrune is wise, too, in his use of documented history to validate the meanings he attaches to Nostradamus' verses. It is easy to forget that Nostradamus was very much a man of his time, and used the peculiar images and associations of Renaissance symbolism to describe events and persons within his own national and spiritual sphere. He is speaking not in the language of the twentieth century, but in that of the sixteenth, and M. de Fontbrune is the only interpreter I have read who seems to remember this.