Not quite the End of the World
Thursday, November 16th, 2006
As my “End of the World” class discovered this week, Nostradamus amazingly is always predicting cataclysmic events, such as an impending World War III to be started by a bearded Iranian ruler, that are scheduled to occur just a few months or years in the future. We are certainly “lucky” to live in such interesting times. Forget, for now, that Nostradamus mentioned July 1999 as the date for the appearance of some sort of frightening King. That month was actually pretty quiet, though Morocco did get a new king. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_1999) Of course, the quatrains of Nostradamus are vague and ambiguous enough to get reinterpreted to fit whatever actual events end up happening. I started to wonder about something else. What if Nostradamus, or any other prophet, actually made precise predictions about people, places, and events? For example, if he had actually said back in the 16th century that “On November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas, a president named Kennedy will be assassinated” I confess that I would REALLY be impressed and would have to reconsider my views about time and history. If it were hypothetically possible for a psychic or prophet to do this, and I don’t see any evidence that it is, it raises a different kind of question. Would the people who had read his prediction about 1963 during the 400 years before the 1960s have had any reason to care? In other words, is narcissistic interest in our own time the crucial ingredient for studying prophets like Nostradamus? Even if we had good reason to believe a prophecy about, let’s say, an alien invasion of earth or the second coming of Jesus scheduled for April 15, 2500, would it really matter to anyone today? I guess this is why it is better for prophets to be vague and ambiguous, so that people in any period of history can think that they are talking about them. How do you explain the popularity of Nostradamus’s prophecies?