Nostradamus – physician, astrologer, soothsayer, and prophet

Nostradamus is a very strange person, who brought and still brings profits for publishers, but who is referred to only briefly in books devoted to the Renaissance, if not ignored completely by them.

Why is there this contempt for, or deliberate ignorance about him by contemporary historians? According to them, it is because Nostradamus is not someone who can be taken seriously, but also and more importantly perhaps, because, all things considered, very little is known about him. What is known, comes more from legend and folklore than from the philosophy and occult sciences of the Renaissance. Today, we have misgivings about admitting that these sciences were the cradle of modern science; however, that was very much the case.

All this makes Nostradamus hardly credible in the eyes of serious modern academics; yet he was the man who was called the “Salon Magician”, not just because he spent a lot of time in fashionable salons, but because he lived the last fourteen years of his life at Salon-de-Provence, where princes and kings came to consul him. In fact, he does not fit into any particular within the framework of our modern society.

What is more, if you spend a little time reading Nostradamus biography, you will discover (oh horrors!) that Michel de Nostradame, or Nostradamus, was a qualified doctor and that, in his time, he practiced his art with talent and good reputation. How can we accept today, in the century of rationalism and technology, that a doctor could suddenly take on the role of magician, astrologer, and prophet? Finally, in the ultimate heresy, he took pride in predicting historical facts, as if history as a whole, had already been written in advance.

Who was Nostradamus?

Before discussing the question of his famous prophecies, let us think about the man himself, his life, and the context in which he lived. Incidentally, the prophesies were first published in 1555, in Lyon and, as Nostradamus himself emphasized in the preface to his book, foretold the future up till 3797. Master Michel de Nostradame, doctor of medicine in the town of Salon-de Craux, in Provence, first saw the light of day on 14th December 1503 (that is the 23rd December according to the later Gregorian calendar) at Saint-Remy-de-Provence, in a family of Sephardic Jews who had been converted to Christianity.

Born at the very beginning of the 16th century, he belonged to that period called the Renaissance when the arts, culture, and the sciences were inspired by those of Antiquity. It was the reign of Francois I, when France was being torn apart by the wars with Italy, and when the religious wars were threatening to bring bloodshed to France and Europe. His Jewish roots were not insignificant since the prophetic tradition can be found in the Old Testament of the Bible. He, himself, liked the fact that he was a descendant of the prophets of Israel.

Nostradamus, travelling physician and healer

He was enrolled at the School of Medicine at Avignon, where he studied the sciences of apothecaries and practitioners of his time, as well as the Trivium, made up of the study of grammar, rhetoric, and logic; and the Quadrivium, comprising arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. Then in 1529m he obtained his Diploma as Doctor of the Faculty of Montpellier, His fellow student and friend was Francois Rabelais, who would go on to become equally famous.

Leaving the Montpellier Faculty of Medicine, Michel de Nostradame (who did not yet call himself Nostradamus), a fervent follower of Hippocrates, Galen, and Menedotes, the celebrated physicians of Antiquity, became a traveling physician. So, for many years, he traveled all over France, treating and healing. His talent as a doctor earned him such a reputation that the highest authorities in medicine of that day, who were based on Aix-en-Provence and in Lyon, consulted him about the epidemics of plague, which, in 1546, were ravaging Europe.

Indeed, he perfected a remedy which, according to him, did not cure those who were already suffering from this terrible disease, but acted as a preventative measure, and kept from death those who drank this potion. His recipe was written up and published, among others, in his work “Book of Several Recipes, Remedy for the Plague“, published in 1550 in Lyon. He wrote of this recipe that “…eventually, we found unquestionable evidence that it gave great displeasure to a number of doctors of his day, who opposed his science, notably Antoine Sarrazin of Lyon, the common people concluded that Michel de Nostredame was curing the plague. His fame as a healer grew and grew.

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Nostradamus The Prophet

Indeed, Michel de Nostredame was not content to rest here, Like all his contemporaries, he was convinced that plague epidemics originated from a curse, which could be recognized and interpreted through heavenly phenomena. So, from 1552 till 1556, the year of his death, he devoted himself more and more to divination and astrology than to medicine. He started the annual publication of almanacs and ‘prognostications’ which were very much valued in those days, and the forerunners of our modern yearly horoscopes, which are so very lucrative for book publishers and for authors.

Francois Rabelais also used to write annual almanacs and prognostications. In 1555, Nostradamus raised himself to the rank of the prophets and published, to considerable success, his first edition of Prophesies, comprising 353 quatrains. Catherine de Medici consulted him, as did Henri II of France. In the years that followed, kings, queens, princes, princesses, counts of France, Italy, and Germany, even the popes, regularly visited Salon-de-Provence, where Nostradamus had settled.