How many of Nostradamus’s predictions have come true? The number of Nostradamus’s predictions that have come true depends very heavily on how you want to look at it. If you are asking how many have come true, then the answer is 0. If you are asking how many can be made to sound as though they have come true, then the answer is pretty much all of them.
Nostradamus was born in France in 1503, and he died there in 1566. His full name was Michel de Nostredame and he worked as an apothecary and then as an astrologer. He wrote several almanacs, which are annual calendars of important dates and statistical information. This is where he started to publish his astrological charts and prophecies. He used the Latin version of his name, “Nostradamus” on the books because he thought it would look better. His almanacs, prophecies, and astrological charts became popular, and he turned into something of a famous occultist. He was hired to write horoscopes for a lot of wealthy and powerful people, even members of various royal families. He had a lot of wealthy benefactors, and he lived a life of luxury. Despite that, he did see a lot of suffering. He lived through two plagues and his first wife, and his children all died. He remarried to a rich widow, and they had six children together.
There is no definitive figure, but throughout his life, Nostradamus wrote over 7,000 prophecies. He wrote 6,338 prophecies in his yearly almanacs. These were short and were predictions aimed at the relatively near future. They connected heavily to the astrological charts he made for the books. Then, when he realized how popular the prophecies in the almanacs were, he wrote his books of prophecies that predicted numerous things over the next 2,000 years. He even predicted the end of the world, which is supposed to be in 3797. His goal was to write ten books of 100 prophecies each, divided up into “centuries”. He ended up dying before he could finish the last one and so there are only 941 prophecies. I’m sorry, but you would think that if he was the great prophet that people say he is, he would have known that he was going to die and would have worked a little bit faster. Just saying.
The 941 prophecies in the centuries books are the ones people are usually talking about when they quote a Nostradamus prophecy. Each one of the predictions is a rhymed quatrain, which means a rhyming group of four lines. He wrote his prophecies in a mix of middle French, Latin, Greek, Italian, and a local dialect called Provencal. He also used metaphor, word games, and a lot of poetic license. He used vague words and made his prophecies as obscure as possible. His prophecies tend to be about disasters, such as natural disasters, plagues, wars, and things like that. Presumably, just like modern newspapers, bad news sells more easily than good news. He was also living through a time of incredible upheaval. Wars, plagues, and revolutions were common. His predictions were most likely to come true just because so many of each event was happening at the time and the chance of one of them happening in the next few years was high. Nostradamus also believed that history was cyclical and that events that had happened in the past were very likely to repeat themselves. If he put recent events into his prophecies, they would be very likely to happen.
A lot of Nostradamus’s predictions were actually copied from the Bible and were “borrowed” from other books of predictions that existed at the time. He took them and rewrote them into his own style. The ones he did come up with himself were so vague that they could be applied to any event. He was the Medieval version of what has come to be known as a Barnam Statement. That is a statement so general that it can apply to everyone. Cold Readers use skills like these. There has not been a single prediction that can demonstrably have been shown to be true before the event happened. The only way people can claim the prophecies are true is to find an event and then retroactively put that meaning into the prophecy. There is also a huge amount of confirmation bias because people remember the few prophecies that seem to be true but conveniently forget the other thousands that are not.
So, Nostradamus made over 7,000 very vague predictions with no specific information or dates. Meaning has been read back into some of them. However, this meaning is always seen after an event has happened, not before. And quite often, a lot of leaps of faith need to be made to put that meaning there. For example, this prophecy is supposed to predict the assassination of JFK.
“The ancient task will be completed
From on high, evil will fall on the great man
A dead innocent will be accused of the deed
The guilty on will remain in the mist.”
“Ancien œuvre sera parachevée,
Et du toit mal en povre tombera le grand homme ;
On accusera un innocent mort du crime,
Le coupable aura son corps en la matiere.”
There are no dates, no places, and no specific information. If you want to make it so, then you can find evidence that it is about JFK. He was killed by a shooter from “on high” and the man accused, Lee Harvey Oswald, was killed. The conspiracy theories say that he was innocent and we don’t know who did it, but that is for another article. This prophecy could apply to any great man that was killed by a mysterious person. That happened countless times throughout the time Nostradamus was living in and also in the Bible, from where he took a lot of his prophecies.
Since he died, other people have created prophecies that they have claimed are by Nostradamus. Many of the prophecies that people believe are true today were not actually even written by Nostradamus. I think if Nostradamus could see how many people believed what he had written today, he would have to smile. And this is what I learned today.
Sources
https://www.livescience.com/24213-nostradamus.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/who-was-nostradamus-and-what-did-he-predict
https://www.history.com/articles/nostradamus
Images By César de Notre-Dame – English Wikipedia. Uploaded there by en:User:Sasha I, 14:24, 9 August 2006, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1049386