General FAQ about Nostradamus

The following answers to Frequently Asked Questions are offered by way of an introduction to the celebrated sixteenth-century French seer and his prophecies. They are closely based on original French editions and archives, and are not dedicated to the support of any particular interpretation.

A. Michel de Nostredame (1503-66), later known as Nostradamus, was one of the leading lights of the late French Renaissance. A Jewish-French contemporary of Paracelsus and England's Dr John Dee, he is often supposed to have been (from 1530) at medical college with Rabelais: however, he is known to have been expelled again from the student body at Montpellier for having, as an apothecary, been rude about doctors, so this is at best uncertain. He was certainly much admired by the poet Ronsard. As a physician (qualified or not) he came to specialise in the Plague, on which he was recognised to be one of the foremost experts: in his Traité des fardemens, though, (see below) he frankly admits that none of his cures actually had much effect on the disease - not even the blood-letting that some commentators insist that he never used. He was also famed somewhat as an 'astrologer', even though his competence clearly left much to be desired, but he preferred to call himself an 'astrophile', or 'star-lover'. On his semi-retirement in around 1550 he turned to writing. Apart from a highly popular cookbook (actually, a 'Treatise on Cosmetics and Conserves') and a number of academic works, his main fields were astrology and prophecy. This brought him into great public prominence, and he became particularly influential at the French court. He also invested heavily in local public works - notably the irrigation of the vast Plaine de la Crau just to the west of his adopted home-town of Salon-de-Provence, a scheme whose results (like his house in the town)can still be seen today. Twice married, he had two children by his first wife Henriette d'Encausse (all three died) and six by his second (three sons, of whom the eldest was César [b.1554], and three daughters).

These latter (currently the best-known of his prophecies because they are not tied to particular dates during his lifetime) took the form of

A. In the case of (b) (i) above, the latest evidence suggests that he did so basically by borrowing and re-expressing the ancient, Bible-based, end-time prophecies that were then all the rage (given the general conviction at the time that the End of the World was at hand!), and especially a huge, mainly Latin anthology of them entitled the Mirabilis liber [1522/3], which some ascribe to his own father Jaume. (In other words, Nostradamus was certainly not working in a vacuum, and by re-expressing in French verse the former Latin prophecies - all of them printed in crowded Gothic type full of abstruse scholarly abbreviations - he was, if anything, not ENcoding the prophecies, but UNencoding them!)

Basically, the theme of these even more ancient prophecies was that Europe was (by way of the vengeance of God!) about to be invaded and devastated by huge Muslim armies commanded by the Antichrist in person, before a glorious future King of France (a figure inserted by the 16th-century French editors, and often supposed nowadays by French royalists to be the long-awaited Henri V), commanding even more powerful Christian forces, would push them back again to the Middle East and finally convert them to the True Faith (!!). [Nostradamus seems to have associated this king with the contemporary Henri II, whereas his secretary Chavigny explicitly and repeatedly associated him with his contemporary Henri IV.] Thereafter the Pope would set up his throne in Jerusalem, and all would be set for the rest of the expected end-time events - the grisly invasion of the forces of God and Magog from the north, the re-appearance of Elias and Enoch, the destruction of the Antichrist, the Second Coming of Christ and the Final Judgement. All of these themes therefore variously re-appeared, if in truncated and deliberately obscure form, in Nostradamus's verses and accompanying dedicatory letters to his son César and to King Henri II, as did many of the ideas, details and even actual words from another hugely influential book of the time - Richard Roussat's Livre de l'estat... of 1549/50.

However, these prophecies alone were not enough to cover the planned thousand verses, and so a great deal of further evidence suggests that Nostradamus now amplified them considerably by borrowing analogous events from ancient history, the medieval chronicles and even events from the very recent past - to say nothing of various contemporary books of recorded 'omens' - and projecting them into the future, on the grounds that (as everybody believed at the time) 'history repeats itself'.

But when and where? Nostradamus hints pretty heavily in his covering 'Letter to King Henri II' that his primary method here involved 'comparative horoscopy' - i.e. looking up the horoscopes of major past events and calculating when and on what latitude their major elements would recur. It was constantly a case of 'another Hannibal', 'another Nero', and so on - which explains why figures from classical antiquity continually crop up in his predictions. There is especially frequent evidence of this in 2(a) above.

In 1594 Chavigny, his former secretary, published a book about the seer entitled (in French) The French Janus - and Janus was of course the Roman god who looked both backwards and forwards at once. Chavigny could scarcely have summed it up more clearly - though he does not actually suggest that the title is a description of Nostradamus!

This much was purely mathematical. Nostradamus then claims to have amplified the results by means of traditional astrology. He also allegedly resorted to theurgy (the ritual summoning-up of 'gods') to obtain actual names and other oral information (see verses I.1 and I.2) - though both these claims are open to question.

All of this was of course perfectly allowable under the broad-minded terms of Renaissance science and scholarship. The hoary old tale that he possessed some kind of 'magic mirror' to aid him in this, though, is simply the result of a misreading of his accompanying letter to King Henri II, where he says that his claimed visions came to him comme dans un mirouer ardant ('as in a burning-mirror' - i.e. a simple, concave mirror for concentrating the sun's rays, rather like a modern shaving mirror). This suggests (if true) that he tended to 'see' either all detail and no context, or all context and no detail - and much of it topsy-turvy at that. The verses tend to bear this out. As for the suggestion in the well-known film that his visions were the result of ingesting nutmeg, this (like most of the rest of the film) is the purest speculation - as, alas, is the popular conviction that he indulged in scrying, using a bowl of water.

A. No, but he did leave the 'Centuries' in scrambled order, as well as using deliberately obscure language in them, allegedly in order to protect himself from his more vociferous religious critics. This involved using not only the various linguistic contortions normal in sixteenth-century verse, but also a sprinkling of homonyms (i.e. re-spellings) and a large number of imported Greek and Latin words - to say nothing of Provençal. All this, too, was highly fashionable at the time: Nostradamus merely pushed it to extremes.

A. Yes. Even the long-lost original 1555 edition was rediscovered in 1984, and published in facsimile by Michel Chomarat of Lyon. Many of the world's major libraries hold original copies of early editions of his works (i.e. 1605 and earlier) - including the Archbishop of Canterbury's Lambeth Palace in London and the Vatican in Rome. Details may be found in the Bibliographie Nostradamus and the Nostradamus Encyclopedia (see below). The bulk of his predictions, however, are contained in a vast manuscript by his secretary, which has recently been restored in Paris and researched and reprinted in part by Bernard Chevignard, Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Bourgogne, in his Présages de Nostradamus (Editions du Seuil, 1999), which contains many actual facsimiles.

A. Not very far. Most of them rely on late and very corrupt editions. Their attempted word-for-word translations (not a recommended way of approaching translation at the best of times, and certainly not one espoused by Nostradamus himself in his own translations of classical texts) are often full of elementary schoolboy/schoolgirl howlers, suggesting that their authors were not best qualified to undertake the job in the first place. Their would-be interpretations are generally highly skewed and arbitrary, and characterised by extreme credulity, paranoia and obviously preconceived agendas. Moreover, you wouldn't guess from most of them that Nostradamus was writing poetry, not legal documents!

A. The local Catholic peasantry viewed him with suspicion and (in an age of almost apocalyptic religious warfare) thought he might be some kind of Protestant. The Church was interested, though sometimes a little suspicious. His books - and especially his annual Almanachs - were avidly devoured by the reading public (around 90% of whom could reportedly read at the time). The Court, under Queen Catherine de Médicis, quickly became besotted with him, to the point where foreign ambassadors were reporting home that it had become overcome by a kind of Nostradamania and implying that this precluded all sensible dialogue for the duration.

A. No - though he was once reportedly summoned before the Inquisition of Toulouse to explain a possibly heretical remark that probably had more to do with his wry sense of humour than with his beliefs. In fact he was extremely pious (he seems to have had reformist, Franciscan sympathies, which may have been the reason for his allegedly heretical remark, which seems to have been about a statue of the Virgin Mary!), and his relations with the Church were always good. Despite frequent modern statements and a Britannica article to the contrary, his books were never placed on the Vatican's Index of Forbidden Books, though various of them did regularly appear on the Spanish equivalent.

9. Wasn't he buried upright, with a medallion around his neck predicting when he would be dug up?

A. No. There is no historical evidence for either story. The site of his original burial can, however, be visited by eating at the Restaurant 'La Brocherie', in the Rue D'Hozier at Salon, which still incorporates part of the 13th century Franciscan chapel.

A. Yes and no. They seem to name Franco (IX.16) and apparently Napoleon (VIII.1) and De Gaulle (IX.33). Possibly they name Pasteur -though the reference (I.25) could simply be to an unidentified shepherd or bishop. 'Chyren' (referred to 6 times) almost certainly does not refer, as many French observers would like to believe, to President Jacques ChirAC, and it remains to be seen whether the famous 'Mabus' prediction at II.62 really refers by name to the former US ambassador to Riyadh, Raymond E Mabus or merely to the 16th century painter Jan Gossaert de Mabuse. Many others are certainly 'named', but only as 'another Hercules', 'another Hannibal' etc. (see 3. above). As for dates, a few of these are specified in clear language (X.72's prediction for 1999 is probably the most famous), while a number (especially in the 'Sixains') seem to refer to a special 'liturgical count' (see VI.54) based on the establishment of Christianity as the mandatory Roman religion in November 392 and the consequent imposition of St Ambrose's newly promulgated Canon of the Mass as the core of the Church's liturgy. A somewhat larger number bear astrological signatures that tend to recur on a cyclic basis, and so could help to pinpoint the date of the next fulfilment, or the one after that . . .

A. Estimates vary. Most commentators seem to think that around half of his predictions in the Centuries have been fulfilled so far. The trouble is that they disagree about just which predictions apply to which events (see 17. below). The result is that, taken overall, one would have to say that the number of agreed bull's-eyes so far is probably rather less than 10%. Certainly such of his Presages as were specific seem to have turned out to be largely wrong at the time -their success-rate seems to have been about 5.73%!

A. Possibly, but only anonymously. At IX.90. for example, he refers to 'a captain of Greater Germany' in terms that seem to fit. The celebrated tradition, though, (much espoused by the late Erika Cheetham) that he actually names the former Führer is extremely dubious. The name 'Hister' (with old, long 's') is used three times in the 'Centuries' and (as 'Ister') twice in the 'Présages' - but on two of the former three occasions it is coupled with the river Rhine. In fact, 'Hister' was the classical name for the river Danube (which is indubitably what the word refers to in the 'Présages' and Almanachs, where Nostradamus himself specifically says so), and so there can really be little doubt that the word refers to the river, not the man (Danube and Rhine at one time formed the NE frontier of the Roman Empire). Don't tell Erika, though, that in IV.68 of the second (1557) edition the word is actually misprinted 'hilter'!

A. This recent tradition likewise owes much to Erika Cheetham. Nostradamus does admittedly refer on a number of occasions to 'three brothers', but in terms that generally suggest that he is actually talking about the leaders of three allied nations in a future Muslim/Christian conflict, not a single dynasty. Besides, Edward hasn't been obliging enough to get himself assassinated yet. Much the same applies to the alleged nuking of New York. The city is in fact never named: the widespread tradition (especially popular, curiously enough, among Americans) derives from VI.97, where a 'grand cite neufve' on latitude 45 degrees is attacked with fire from the sky. Since New York city lies well to the south of this, the verse obviously doesn't apply. The reference is clearly to some town or city that, like Naples (< Greek 'Neapolis'), is actually NAMED 'New City' (this word-substitution procedure is perfectly normal in Nostradamus): Villanova d'Asti in Italy and Villeneuve-sur-Lot in France are geographically the best candidates.

Whatever this verse is about, it is not (as most translations claim - to much justified public alarm) 'a great King of terror'. Not as it stands, at least. The last word in line 2, which only acquired an apostrophe (thus making it 'd'effraieur') in relatively corrupt subsequent editions, means 'defrayer', 'provider' or 'host'.

" Parochus...Vng deffraieur, qui nous fournist de tout ce qu'il nous fault par les chemins. " (Estienne, Dictionarium Latinogallicum, 1st edition,1538)

[Or in English: 'Parochus (purveyor)... A provider/host who furnishes us with everything that we need for the road'. Note the spelling 'deffraieur' - exactly the same as in the original version of verse X.72 of only 30 years later]

" Parochus...Un deffrayeur, qui nous fournist de tout ce qu'il nous fault par les chemins. " (Estienne, Dictionarium Latinogallicum, 3rd edition, 1552)

"Defrayeur: m. A Cater, or Steward; one that in a iourney furnishes, and defrayes the prouision, and expence of the whole companie." (Cotgrave, 1611)

"de.fray vt [MF deffrayer, fr. des- de- + frayer to expend, fr. OF, fr. (assumed) OF frai expenditure, lit., damage by breaking, fr. L fractum, neut. of fractus, pp. of frangere to break-more at break] (1536) 1: to provide for the payment of: pay 2 archaic: to bear the expenses of - de.fray.able adj - de.fray.al n"

The expression 'du ciel' ('of/from heaven' or 'of/from the sky') suggests, as elsewhere in the Propheties, that this big-spending or even appeasing ruler has some kind of divine authority. Far from being some kind of Antichrist, then, the figure concerned looks rather like the Pope himself, or at least like some divinely appointed king.

My original application of Nostradamus's usual technique of comparative horoscopy to the verse suggested that a possible historical match was with the visit of the future Pope Gregory the Great to Constantinople in 578 AD onwards to seek help from the Roman Emperor against the Lombards who were then invading Italy. Five planets, after all, were in the same signs on both occasions. The prophecy therefore seemed to be about a modern Pope - apparently the present one - who would engage in an unsuccessful effort to buy off future invaders of Europe at some point during July/August 1999. The horoscopy suggested that this might occur on the latitude of Sarajevo. Perhaps as a result, the former war would then flare up again.

Curiously, an important meeting of 40 world leaders was indeed convened in Sarajevo on 30th July 1999 to attempt to bring about and finance a lasting peace in the war-torn Balkans - but one who was conspicuous by his absence was, alas ... the Pope!

However, the above explanation did seem just a little on the convoluted side - whereas Nostradamus's approach is usually pretty direct.

Recent research, however, has come up with a match that is much more direct and convincing.

"...also called (until 1515) FRANCIS OF ANGOULÊME, French FRANÇOIS D'ANGOULÊME (b. Sept. 12, 1494, Cognac, Fr.-d. March 31, 1547, Rambouillet), king of France (1515-47), the first of five monarchs of the Angoulême branch of the House of Valois..."

... was by definition, for Nostradamus, 'the great King from Angoumois', of which Angoulême was the capital. After a brilliant early reign, he was captured by the Imperial forces of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in February 1525 at the disastrous battle of Pavia (when Nostradamus was still wandering the countryside as an apothecary), and was imprisoned in a dismal tower in Madrid, where he moped, wrote songs and poems, and became gravely ill with an abscess in the head. There were national prayers for his recovery, and the Archbishop of Tournon even came and said mass over him. Eventually a treaty was signed for his release in January 1526, on terms which eventually included the handing over of his two sons as hostages (one of them the future Henri II), a promise to send troops to help the Emperor wage war on the Muslim Ottomans, and the payment of a huge ransom amounting to some 7 tons of gold, which nearly ruined the kingdom. Thereafter, he spent his life in constant and increasing ill-health as a result of syphilis, and virtually on the run from the Emperor's agents, while the Emperor plundered Italy and even captured the Pope. Nevertheless, François managed to build all sorts of fairytale castles, found the port of Le Hâvre, send Jacques Cartier to Canada, reform the judicial system, moderate the religious feuds that were by then breaking out, found the Collège de France, and decree the use of French in all legal documents.

And it was François's truly traumatic imprisonment and release that provided the real match.

For, having duly looked up the planetary positions for that period, I discovered that in August 1525 (Julian) there was indeed a good match with July 1999 - namely:

So what does this mean? After all, the future period that is pinpointed (not the original planetary configuration!) does fall more or less within the period covered by his July (our 14th July to 13th August). [However, for those interested, the period actually pinpointed didn't include our 11th August, with its solar eclipse!]

So who was the original 'great heavenly defraying king'? The Pope at the time, whose court was certainly lavish? Or the Archbishop of Tournon, whose bedside ministrations during his captivity in Madrid apparently helped save François from death, even if they didn't actually restore him to immediate health? Or Charles V, who had of course been elected Holy Roman Emperor (and would be crowned as such by the Pope himself), who was acting as François's 'host' at the time, and who agreed to his release? Or even the 'divinely appointed' François himself, who was certainly a spendthrift?...

My guess is that it was in fact Charles V, who was by definition 'heaven's king' (he was King of Germany and Spain as well as Holy Roman Emperor), was currently spending money on arms and armies as if there were no tomorrow - and was François's 'host' to boot . At the same time, though, he was a real bogeyman for the French, so that in the possible subtext 'deffraieur' could also be hinting at 'frightful' ('d'effraieur'), as well as at the more obvious and literal 'defraying' or even 'spendthrift'.

The details of what happened at Madrid during the period in question are in fact as follow:

Apparently King François arrived in his Madrid prison in early August, but by mid-August had fallen gravely ill - severely depressed, anorexic, persistent fever, total apathy, plus nasal abscess - to the point where the doctors actually gave up.
On the evening of the 18th Charles V visited him in person. They embraced tearfully, protested their friendship. Charles made various promises.
By 22nd August the king was in a semi-coma. They gave him the last rites. Then, suddenly, he recovered - the abscess burst, the fever subsided, the king recalled Charles's tearful protestations...
Ergo, the 'grand Roy du ciel' (i.e. the Holy Roman Emperor, who had been sanctioned by heaven in the person of the Pope) had apparently 'resuscitated' the 'grand Roy d'Angolmois'.
And the comparative horoscopy of X.72, you will recall, pinpoints 17-23 August 1525. The exact period involved!

Moreover, as a final piece of the jigsaw, it turns out that François was finally released on 17th March 1526, so suggesting that the word 'Mars' in the last line refers not to war, as has so often been supposed in the past (not least by myself!), but simply to the month of March.
So this information now provides the context for a much more informed translation than has hitherto been possible, though it will also need to cater for the two possible senses of 'deffraieur' - the literal and the merely hinted at. I would therefore suggest:

The puzzling last line, in other words, is merely Nostradamus's compressed version of:

What verse X.72 really seems to be predicting then, is that at some point between 13th and 23rd July 1999 (or shortly thereafter) a ruler who has been imprisoned and/or removed from office (and who has possibly fallen ill) will be restored by a redoubtable and/or spendthrift rival (possibly a powerful politician and/or financial figure) in either Amsterdam, Berlin or Warsaw (possibly in exchange for support against Muslim powers), and that from March 2000 he will rule with great good fortune.

Well, I hesitate to be too dogmatic about this - but at the meeting of European Heads of State held in Berlin in March 1999 Romano Prodi, former Prime Minister of Italy, was selected as the next President of the European Commission (i.e. effectively, Prime Minister of Europe), to replace the disgraced Jacques Santer. His main proposers were Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder, Chancellor of Germany. Prodi presented his cabinet on July 9 1999, they first met near Antwerp (on 51 degrees 13' North!) on July 17, and were duly confirmed in office by the European Parliament on 15 September.

One of Prodi's main sponsors at the meeting in Berlin (note!) last March (note again!) was Chancellor Schröder - who, as ruler of Germany and the most powerful man in Europe, of course fulfilled the self-same role as the former Charles V (who was King of Germany among other things), as well as being the main contributor to the European budget, too ('deffraieur').

He it is, then, whom the prediction seems to see as calling back from the wilderness Romano Prodi who - like François I, as it happens! -formerly ruled in Italy and was then removed from power there, but who, from July (note yet again!), will (democracy permitting!) become President of the European Commission. So it is that, from March 2000 he should (if the prediction is correct) have started to run his much larger empire with notable success...

The fit between the events of 1525/6 and those of the present time, then - as indicated by the comparative horoscopy - seems to be remarkable. Moreover, if it is valid, it possibly gives us a powerful hint that the 'comparative horoscopy' method is the correct one to use when trying to decipher the Propheties.

If so, then the best approach to interpreting any given quatrain would appear to be:

(a)	After locating the earliest possible edition of it, work out what the 16th century French means (without feeding in any ideas as to what event it might be about).
(b)	Find and verify the ancient event on which it appears originally to have been based.
(c)	Use (b) to help sort out any obvious ambiguities or misprints in the original text.
(d)	Refine your version of it accordingly (still without feeding in any ideas as to what the prophecy's fulfilment might be), possibly adding any further refinements (e.g. geographical ones) that any clearly related verses seem to suggest.
(e)	Use comparative horoscopy (as above) to work out when the event ought - generically, at least - theoretically to be repeated (there may be several!). [In the case of X.72, Nostradamus has already done part of this for you!]
(f)	Strictly on this basis, identify and describe the likely fulfilment (now you can associate it with a known or expected event, if you like - if there is one that fits in all respects!).

A. As indicated above, around half of the prophecies are generally supposed to be 'still unfulfilled' - which doesn't of course necessarily mean that they actually will be fulfilled.

A. No. In fact he never mentions the idea in his Propheties, though he does sometimes allude vaguely to its imminence in the Presages - and the 'Last Times' idea, derived from his sources such as the 'Mirabilis liber', of course pervades the whole work. True, he does seem to indicate that there will be some kind of Apocalypse or Last Judgement. He also states quite specifically in his prefatory letter to his son César, however, that his prophecies are designed to cover the history of the world up to the year 3797 - which presumably means that the world will still be here then (always assuming that he is counting from the same point as everyone else - after all, 3797 is merely the sum of Roussat's proposed date for the end of the world [2242] and the date when Nostradamus wrote it [1555]). Whether that represents some kind of finality, though, is not stated. The standard cosmological model of the time had the world ending either in 1800 (or 1887) or in 2242, but Nostradamus seems to have stretched this model in such a way as to give a theoretical terminal date of 4722 (see FAQ B Where [sjk]).

17. Isn't it true that you can make Nostradamus's prophecies mean
almost anything?

A. Yes, if you take them in isolation, and especially if you insist on treating even Nostradamus's plain-language statements as if they were in some kind of arcane code (an approach which in fact has no evidential basis and tends to reveal only what is in the interpreter's own mind). The prophecies are like the scattered pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. There is no hope of determining what any individual piece means until you have completed the puzzle and thus established the context in which it fits - i.e. the picture on the box. There is even less hope of doing so if you insist that the design on each piece is really a blind for an
underlying picture which only you have seen. For interpretational purposes, therefore, this means that each verse has (a) to be taken to mean precisely what it says (allowing for obvious - because otherwise nonsensical -homonyms, anagrams etc.) and (b) to be placed in the context of the other verses that go with it. This is not impossible. Most verses seem to have a 'pair', while others have whole groups of 'partners' that are fairly obvious -whether on the basis of subject-matter, vocabulary, place-names, named characters or references to other events ('before this', 'after that'). Identifying the historical events on which each prediction is based can prove even more helpful. Unfortunately, most existing interpretations do not even attempt any of this: these can generally be identified by the fact that they simply attempt to analyse the verses in numerical order, or (conversely) attempt to apply isolated bits of verses selectively. Such interpretations are therefore best avoided, as are ones that are obviously credulous, paranoid or skewed towards preconceived agendas.

A. Not at all, for the most part. The Maison de Nostradamus at Salon (see below) has produced a reasonably reliable video, but this is fairly limited in scope. Virtually all the rest are ludicrously inaccurate - though The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (Warner), narrated by Orson Welles, is at least well produced, if heavily Cheetham-based.

A. Apart from The Secrets of Nostradamus (Century, 1997; ISBN 0 7126 7710 0) by David Ovason (republished in paperback as The Nostradamus Code), no general book on Nostradamus existed in English until recently that could be regarded as historically and textually reliable, and even Ovason's book deals only with a hundred or so quatrains, and pretty 'esoterically' at that. The best of the earlier ones is probably James Laver's Nostradamus, Or The Future Foretold (Mann, 1942-81 [ISBN 0 7041 0202 1]), but this is already badly out of date. The truly authoritative work is in French - Dr Edgar Leroy's Nostradamus: ses origines, sa vie, son oeuvre (Lafitte, 1993 [ISBN 2 86276 231 8]), which also exists in paperback - but even this is becoming dated. The most up-to-date research into Nostradamus' prophecies generally is contained in Bernard Chevignard's Présages de Nostradamus (Editions du Seuil, 1999). The latest and most reliable work on his astrology is contained in the late Pierre Brind'Amour's Nostradamus Astrophile (Lincksieck/Univ. of Ottawa Presses, 1993) , and possibly the most reliable analysis of the first-edition verses (1.1 to IV.53) in the same author's Nostradamus: Les Premières Centuries (Droz, 1996) -
but both, like Chevignard's work, are of course also in French. Fortunately, much of Brind'Amour's research, at least, has now been published in English by Ian Wilson in his massive Nostradamus: The Evidence (Orion, 2002) [ISBN 0-75285-263-9]. But then even James Randi's characteristically sceptical The Mask of Nostradamus (Prometheus, 1993) contains - for all its many errors of detail - far more up to date, correct information on the seer than most of the popular books in English put together!

Complete details of all the earliest editions (including their present whereabouts) are to be found in the splendid Bibliographie Nostradamus by Michel Chomarat and Dr Jean-Paul Laroche (Koerner, 1989 [3 87320 123 2]) and in Robert Benazra's Répertoire Chronologique Nostradamique (1545-1989) (La Grande Conjonction, 1990 [2-85707-418-2]). Both of these last are available from the Maison de Nostradamus at Salon (see details below). Peter Lemesurier's comprehensive English Nostradamus Encyclopedia appeared in the UK
and Australia in October 1997 (Thorsons), and its American edition (St Martin's Press, NY) shortly afterwards, but is now available only second-hand or from libraries.

(a)	The exquisite original 1555 (Bonhomme) edition (verses I.1 to IV.53, plus Preface to César) was rediscovered and republished in facsimile by Michel Chomarat in 1984, but is now out of print: your best plan is to bribe somebody who has it to photocopy it for you.
(b)	The original Du Rosne 1557 edition recently discovered in the Utrecht University Library is not yet available, but the rather more scruffy, but none the less informative and probably pirated edition from the Széchényi National Library at Budapest (verses I.1 to VII.40, plus Preface to César) is available in facsimile (quoted ISBN 2 908 185 20 2] from Editions Michel Chomarat, 160 rue Vendôme, F - 69003, Lyon, France, or from the Maison de Nostradamus, rue Nostradamus, 13300 Salon-de-Provence, France. Send for an order form.
(c)	The complete 1568 (Benoist Rigaud) edition of the Centuries (minus Preface to César and Letter to Henri II) is transcribed fairly reliably in Erika Cheetham's The Final Prophecies of Nostradamus (Futura, 1989 [ISBN 0 7088 4333 6]/Perigree, 1989), though 'reliable' is unfortunately the last word that should be applied to her accompanying translations or (consequently) her interpretations. A facsimile of the 1568 edition can now be obtained from the Maison de Nostradamus.
(d)	Many of the Présages and Sixains (1605) are to be found in Jean-Charles de Fontbrune's Nostradamus 1 and Nostradamus 2 (Pan, 1984; Henry Holt [ISBN 0 330 28062 7]/Owl, NY, 1987 [ISBN of Vol 2: 0 8050 0599 4]), albeit with 'translations' that are more in the nature of highly skewed interpretations. The original texts of all the Présages (as well as of the Centuries and both letters in the 1568 edition) are also included in Edgar Leoni's wonderfully comprehensive Nostradamus and His Prophecies (Bell, 1961, 1982 [ISBN )-517-38809-X]) and in John Hogue's massive Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies (Element, 1997 [ISBN 1-85230-959-8]). Verse-translations of many of the Sixains may be found in Peter Lemesurier's Nostradamus: the Final Reckoning (Piatkus, 1995 [ISBN 0 7499 1303 7]/Berkley Books, NY, 1996 [ISBN 0 425 15610 9]), and all the above French texts are represented in his English-language Nostradamus Encyclopedia (see above).
(e)	Online facsimiles of all the above Nostradamian texts can currently be found on Mario's Website at: http://run.to/nostradamus
(f)	Books I-IV of the 6338 presages in verse and in prose collected by Nostradamus's secretary Chavigny can be found in the immensely scholarly Présages de Nostradamus by Bernard Chevignard (Editions du Seuil, 1999 [2-02-035960-X], which can be obtained either through normal commercial channels or via the Maison de Nostradamus.
(g)	A version of Nostradamus's cookbook - i.e. Part 2 of the Traité des fardemens et des confitures - can be obtained from the Maison de Nostradamus (see above) under the title Traité des confitures: however, the original book's purported English translation, TheElixirs of Nostradamus (Bloomsbury, 1995) is not recommended if you are planning to apply it, as many of the items in what is a translation of a revision of a translation are (not surprisingly) mistranslated, and could possibly poison you. Also available from the same French outlet in Salon are his Orus Apollo - a curious and highly flawed work in verse on Egyptian hieroglyphs that is also available online from http://www.astrologer.ru:8001/Nostradamiana/horapollo/texte.html and various other publications including a facsimile of his 1565 letter to Queen Catherine de Médicis as printed and published in the year of his death, 1566. Once again, send for an order form. English-language books can be obtained either from your local bookshop or, via the Web, from http://www.amazon.com (for US editions), from http://www.amazon.co.uk or from http://www.bookshop.co.uk (for exclusively UK editions).

A. The following are suggested, though no guarantee is offered either of relevance in any given case or that they will be still up and running when you access them!…

Sources possibly used by Nostradamus and related information (mainly contributed by Erin Pittenger):