Nostradamus in popular culture


The prophecies of the 16th century author Nostradamus have become a ubiquitous part of the popular culture of the 20th and 21st centuries. As well as being the subject of hundreds of books, Nostradamus' life has been depicted in several films, and his life and prophecies continue to be a subject of media interest. In the Internet age, there have also been several well-known hoaxes, where quatrains in the style of Nostradamus have been circulated by e-mail. The most well-known example concerns the attack on New York City's World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.

Supposed prophecies

Nostradamus enthusiasts have often credited him with predicting numerous events in world history, supposedly including the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, the atomic bomb, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, and the last pope. Indeed, they regularly make similar claims regarding each new world crisis as it comes along as there is a tendency to claim that "Nostradamus predicted whatever has just happened." These claims rely heavily on the role of interpretation.
One well-known supposed prophecy is that "a great and terrifying leader would come out of the sky" in 1999 and 7 months "to resuscitate the great King from Angoumois." But the phrase d'effraieur in fact occurs nowhere in the original printing, which merely uses the word deffraieur, and Nostradamus sometimes uses the word ciel simply to mean 'region', rather than 'sky'. On the basis of Nostradamus's by now well-known technique of projecting past events into the future, Lemesurier suggests that therefore refers to the restoration to health of the captive Francis I of France following a surprise visit to his cell by his host, the then Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1525. No fewer than five of the planets were in the same signs on both occasions.

September 11, 2001

The September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City's World Trade Center led to immediate speculation as to whether Nostradamus had predicted the event. Almost as soon as the event had happened, the relevant Internet sites were deluged with inquiries. In response, Nostradamus enthusiasts started searching for a Nostradamus quatrain that could be said to have done so, coming up with interpretations of Quatrains I.87, VI.97 and X.72. However, the various ways in which the enthusiasts chose to interpret the text were not supported by experts on the subject. In addition, Nostradamus himself in his dedicatory letter to King Henri II states that his prophecies were about Europe, North Africa and part of Asia Minor only.
The nearest that the former could come up with was , which in the original 1557 edition ran:
With instant evidently a version of the Latin instanter, a reasonable English translation would thus appear to be:
'Five and forty degrees' was said to be the latitude of New York City, and was interpreted as '40.5 degrees'. 'New City', similarly, was claimed to be New York ; and most of the attempts to fit in the 'Normans' of line 4 seemed contrived at best. While it is true that New York State, which has the same name as New York City, crosses 45° latitude, it cannot, of course, be described as a 'new city', and so doesn't fit line 2 of the verse.
Lemesurier suggests that the verse is merely an undated projection into the future of the capture of Naples by the Normans in 1139 during a year marked by a notably violent eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius that is recorded in the contemporary Annales Cassini. In this case, the first expression may simply be a version of
– which is indeed the latitude of Naples.
Another quatrain which came under the scrutiny of enthusiasts was , which in the original 1555 edition ran:
or, in a possible English translation:
Here, once again, the cité neufve was claimed to be New York; au tour de had to refer to the Twin Towers ; the Deux grands rochiers had to be the Twin Towers themselves; and Arethusa was said to be an anagram of 'the USA'. Once again, however, a rather more sober investigation by Brind'Amour had already revealed that the reference was probably to Naples and its nearby volcano. Subsequent investigation by Lemesurier and his colleague Gary Somai suggested that it applied particularly to the Annales Cassini's report of its lava eruption of 1036, at a time when the Lombards of Capua and the Byzantine dukes of Naples were constantly at war over the city prior to the decisive intervention of the Normans. For 968, similarly, Leo Marsicanus had reported in the same annals that ‘Mount Vesuvius exploded into flames and sent out huge quantities of sticky, sulfurous matter that formed a river rushing down to the sea’. Thus, given that Arethusa was the classical nymph of springs and rivers, with a well-known 'spring of Arethusa' still visible today in the Sicilian port of Syracuse, the case for a '9/11' interpretation was evidently unfounded.
The Julian Calendar was indeed the calendar system used during Nostradamus' lifetime. In his Almanachs, Nostradamus published at least eleven Julian calendars of his own – but all of them in fact started on January 1, and in all of them the seventh month was consequently July. Lemesurier consequently suggests that X.72 does not predict the 9/11 attacks at all, but refers back to the allegedly 'miraculous' restoration to health of the captive Francis I of France in August 1525 by his then Roy deffraieur Charles V, and then projects it forwards into the future as a prophecy.
As for the various interpretations of the line usually rendered as "To resuscitate the great king of the Mongols", the verse in fact contains no such line, but merely refers to the well-known French region of Angoumois, of whose capital Francis I was duke: he was thus, as the verse states, Le grand Roy d'Angolmois of Nostradamus's own day.
In these and other ways, Nostradamus's statement in his open letter to his son Cesar that his quatrains were "written in a nebulous rather than plainly prophetic form" is widely taken by enthusiasts as carte blanche for suggesting that they can mean almost anything that they want them to say.

Hoaxes

'Mabus' as Antichrist

Some have interpreted the writings as predicting a series of three antichrists. However, the name "Mabus" as a synonym for or embodiment of the third antichrist is not suggested by any of the Prophecies. In fact the verse in question merely states that a character of a similar-sounding name will die. Otherwise, the reference says nothing about what "Mabus" will do or what he will be like.
More recently attempts have been made to link the name "Mabus" anagrammatically with "Obama", as previously with "Saddam", "Osama" and "Bush". This tendency to attempt to adapt quatrains to fit current events can be traced all the way back to Nostradamus' own time.

Village idiot hoax

Following the contentious 2000 U.S. presidential election wherein George W. Bush was elected President, this text was widely circulated:
As with other hoaxes, only the purported English translation was given. It is likely that this verse was written as a joke.

World Trade Center prophecy hoax

Shortly after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the following spoof text was circulated on the Internet, along with many more elaborate variants :
As it turns out, the first four lines were indeed written before the attacks, but by a Canadian graduate student named Neil Marshall as part of a research paper in 1997. The research paper included this poem as an illustrative example of how the validity of prophecies is often exaggerated. For example, the phrases "City of God", "great thunder", "Two brothers", and "the great leader will succumb" are so vague as to be meaningless. The fifth line was added by an anonymous Internet user, completely ignoring the fact that Nostradamus wrote his Propheties in rhymed four-line decasyllables called quatrains. Nostradamus also never referred to a "third big war".

Psy hoax

Towards mid-December 2012, an internet hoax related to South Korean singer and rapper Psy being one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was widely circulated around social media platforms. The hoax text, purportedly written by Nostradamus in 1503, is as follows:
"Calm morning" is said to be in reference to Psy's birth country – South Korea, nicknamed in English "The Land of Morning Calm". "Dancing horse" refers to Psy's Gangnam Style "dancing horse" routine, whereas the "nine circles" refer to the number of zeroes in one billion, which is nine. It was believed that once Psy's Gangnam Style video on YouTube amassed a billion views, the world would end.
The video did reach one billion views on December 21, 2012, a popular date for which the world was predicted to end. However, the quatrain could not have been written by Nostradamus in 1503, when he was less than one year old.

Political and military manipulation

During World War II, leaflets with false Nostradamus quatrains predicting the defeat of France were launched by German planes over European skies. It seems that this operation was mastered by Nazi political secretary Rudolf Hess, and that even Adolf Hitler believed in Nostradamus' quatrains. Certainly his propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels did, under the influence of his wife Magda. Subsequently, the Allies responded in kind, both with air-dropped leaflets and via the American film Nostradamus Says So.
After Rudolf Hess left Nazi Germany in a mysterious solitary flight to Scotland, probably seeking a peace agreement with the United Kingdom, Hitler issued the Aktion Hess, a mandatory prosecution of any divinator or future-teller in all Nazi-occupied countries.

Entertainment

Film

is the subject of many films and videos, including:
The television series Alias prominently features the character Milo Rambaldi, a fictional prophet who seems to be an amalgam of Nostradamus and the non-prophetic but visionary inventor, artist, and genius Leonardo da Vinci. In the science fiction series First Wave, the protagonists use a previously unknown book of quatrains of Nostradamus to fight back against an alien invasion. Nostradamus was also a regular character on This Morning With Richard Not Judy, played by Emma Kennedy. Nostradamus appeared semi-regularly on the Warner Bros. animated series Histeria! as an eccentric red-bearded man in stereotypical wizard garb.
On Mr. Show with Bob and David, an episode contains a sketch called "Nostradamus and his companion". In it, Nostradamus is a gay man who falls in love with a fashion designer, played by David Cross. Nostradamus is left behind by his constant chum, who goes on to achieve fame and fortune in the fashion industry. The sketch ends with a school being named after them: "Nostradamus and His Constant Chum Elementary School."
On Chappelle's Show, the sketch comedy show hosted by Dave Chappelle, there is a character called Negrodamus, an African-American version of Nostradamus who makes various predictions in response to questions.
In the Nickelodeon cartoon CatDog, the title characters find a prediction in a book by the fictitious prophet "Nostradummy" that they interpret as predicting the imminent end of the world.
In The Simpsons episode "Thank God It's Doomsday", Homer Simpson is sarcastically called "Nostradumbass' by Comic Book Guy after his initial prophecy of the end of the world is incorrect.
In the Hong Kong ATV series My Date with a Vampire, Nostradamus was held to have made a prophecy of the end of world in 1999, with a third of the world's population turning into monsters or vampires and the rest perishing. The antagonist, vampire Yamamoto Kazuo and later Yu Meng Sap Sam or his true identity--Lo Hau, sought to make the prophecy come true and rule the world, but the protagonists Fong Tin Yau and Ma Siu Ling were able to stop this from occurring. The anime Occult Academy revolves around an artifact called the Nostradamus Key, an object that will open a dimensional rift on July 21, 1999 that would trigger an alien invasion in the year 2012. In fact, it seems that the survivors of the 2012 invasion used alien technology to send someone to tell Nostradamus as part of a plan to prevent the invasion.
Bob Bainborough portrayed Nostradamus in an episode of History Bites, appearing in an infomercial to sell his books, referencing C1Q35, among others, as an example of his prophecy. A two-hour documentary on Nostradamus first aired by the History Channel on 28 October 2007 suggests that a book of paintings in the National Library at Rome is The Lost Book of Nostradamus.
In an episode of The Sopranos, Bobby Baccalieri gets Nostradamus mixed up with Quasimodo, saying that Quasimodo predicted 9/11 and the end of the world.
He also appears in various episodes of the MTV animated show Clone High as a teenaged clone of the original Nostradamus.
The Doctor Who Past Doctor Adventures novel The King of Terror features the Fifth Doctor and UNIT dealing with a group of terrorists called the Sons of Nostradamus who consider it their duty to ensure that his prophecies-apparently predicting the end of the world in 1999-come true, but the prophecies are eventually revealed to have been part of the efforts of the alien race known as the Canavatchi to retard humanity's development.
The History Channel periodically airs a series of films on supposedly apocalyptic prophecies under the general title The Nostradamus Effect, but in his book 2012: It's Not the End of the World, Nostradamus specialist Peter Lemesurier describes them as 'largely fiction' and 'lurid nonsense'.
In Germany and Japan worry about the end of the World due to one of Nostradamus's prophecies. However, Britain and France ignore this warning, due to having lived through another supposed apocalypse, and instead tell Japan and Germany not to worry.
Nostradamus is featured in CW's drama Reign.

Books

Fiction
British singer/songwriter Al Stewart's album Past, Present and Future was a concept album including a song about every decade of the 20th century. As Stewart wrote the album in 1973, events from the latter years of the century were covered by the song "Nostradamus", in which some of the prophecies are quoted. One of the prophecies appears to refer to the future fall of the Berlin Wall and the unnatural death of a Pope named Pol; events which might have been considered predictable, even if the date was not.
1977 Moody Blues member Justin Hayward wrote a song on his album Songwriter called Nostrodamus.
Iron Maiden's "Die With Your Boots On" from the 1983 album Piece of Mind pokes fun at Nostradamus and his believers.
In 1984, Manfred Mann's Earth Band released the album Somewhere in Afrika, which contains a cover of the Al Stewart song, mistitled as "Eyes of Nostradamus".
Project: Driver is a studio album by the heavy metal supergroup M.A.R.S., released in 1986 thats contains the song "Nostradamus" about the prophet.
Composer Robert Steadman has twice used Nostradamus' prophecies in pieces of music: in 1987, quatrains by Nostradamus were juxtaposed with the Latin Requiem Mass text and poems on environmental issues. And in 1999, he set what was thought by some to be Nostradamus's prediction of the end of the world for soprano and chamber ensemble in The Final Prophecy.
The 1993 album The Window of Life by Pendragon includes a song entitled "Nostradamus ".
Marilyn Manson said that his Antichrist Superstar CD, which came out in 1996, was an answer to the Nostrandamus prophecy in which he said that "The 3rd. Antichrist was going to come to the earth in the year 1996".
Haggard produced two albums dealing with the seer Michel de Notredame in the dark days of The Black Plague in Europe: And Thou Shalt Trust... the Seer in 1997 and Awaking the Centuries in 1998.
Darkane's Song "July 1999" from Rusted Angel, is all about the Nostradamus dated prophecy.
Rapper Nas refers to himself as Nastradamus and released an album titled Nastradamus along with its first single titled the same name in 1999.
Bulgarian guitarist Nikolo Kotzev released a rock opera called Nikolo Kotzev's Nostradamus in 2001, based on the life and times of Nostradamus. In 2005, Dutch band Kayak released a rock opera called Nostradamus - Fate of Man.
German power metal band Helloween's 1996 album The Time of the Oath is based on Nostradamus' supposed prophecy of a world war between 1994 and 2000.
In 1997, Finnish metal band Stratovarius recorded a concept album loosely based on the life and prophecies of Nostradamus. The album was called Visions.
In 2008, the British heavy metal band Judas Priest released a concept album based on the life of Nostradamus. Simply named Nostradamus, the album itself focuses on Nostradamus' life and his prophecies.
"Nostradamus said 'I predict that the world will end at half past six' / What he didn't say was exactly when," are the opening lyrics of "Tinderbox", penned by Bernie Taupin and sung by Elton John.
Modest Mouse vocalist Isaac Brock seems to take a stab at Nostradamus in a song called "Education" from the band's fifth studio album, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank. The verse is as follows: "Good old Nostradamas / he knew the whole damn time / there would always be an east from west / and someone in there fighting".
In the bonus track of Dane Cook's "Harmful if Swallowed" he speaks of how a person would wake up and think he is late, then look at his clock to find out that he is in fact late. He would yell "I HATE it when I'm like Nostradamus and I predict that I'm late!"
Several songs by the Stranglers contain references to Nostradamus' prophecies: "Goodbye Toulouse", "Shah Shah a go go", "Four horsemen", "It's a small world".

Comics

In an Italian Mickey Mouse story, Mickey and Goofy travel back in time and by accident a young boy followed them back to the present. The boy had to go back to his own time and his memory of the future was erased, but before that he grabbed pieces of books. The boy of course became Nostradamus and the ripped pages from books explained his visions of the future. The story was made by Massimo Marconi and Massimo De Vita.
In 1989 Scrooge McDuck story "The Curse of Nostrildamus" by Don Rosa, Scrooge enters the prophet's tomb to take the amulet that was the source of his power. However, whoever wears the amulet also attracts disasters - though Donald Duck ends up as the victim of the disasters instead of Scrooge. In author's commentary in the Finnish album release, Don Rosa says he was inspired to write the story based on the legend that whoever drank from Nostradamus's skull would be given the gift of prophecy.
A Phantom story from 1983 by Ulf Granberg and Jaime Vallvé featured an appearance by Nostradamus.
In the DC Comics Universe, Nostradamus was an ancestor of Zatara and Zatanna.
In the Marvel Comics series S.H.I.E.L.D. Nostradamus is held prisoner of Isaac Newton and kept alive for centuries using the Fountain of Youth so he can read the future for him.
In Scott Adams's comic strip Dilbert, "Nostradogbert" is a pseudonym of Dogbert.
In Mad Magazine's section entitled the "strip club" a comic strip entitled Middle School Nostradamus appears every so often. Nostradamus is depicted as a preteen in wizard garb who makes predictions of impending despair for the people he is around at inopportune times.

Games

Face released an arcade game Nostradamus. Though the game itself had nothing to do with Nostradamus, the game's title screen showed a resemblance to his son's portrait of him, however he is facing the other direction and looks older.
In ', the prophecy of 1999 was used as the resurrection of Dracula and added that all born of the day of Dracula's demise are "Dark Candidates" meaning that they have the potential to become the next Dark Lord. This prophecy is referenced again in '; the Belmonts cannot wield the Vampire Killer whip until 1999, when Dracula is revived.
In the eroge Nostradamus ni Kiite Miro♪, a girl named Stra claims to be the writer of Nostradamus' predictions.
The prophet Nostradamus appears in the 2003 video game '.
In ', Nostradamus appears as an adviser to his daughter during the game.
In Super Ninja Boy for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, there is a prophet named Notruedamus.
In Ninja Gaiden , the hero is a nameless ninja on a quest to defeat an evil cult led by a fictional descendant of Nostradamus.
In Spy Hunter , the hero, Alec Sects, has to stop an organization called Nostra, led by Daemon Curry, who believes in the prophecies of Nostradamus, thinks he is the figure mentioned in several religions and plans to stop all the world's electricity.
In Assassin's Creed Unity, there are Nostradamus riddles hidden in Paris for Arno to solve.
In the PopCap game Insaniquarium, there is an obtainable pet with the ability to postpone alien attacks named Nostradamus.

Theatre

The soothsayer Thomas Nostradamus is a main character in the musical "Something Rotten!", where he was originally portrayed by actor Brad Oscar.