With all the talk about the “unprecedented” nature of the coronavirus pandemic, maybe it is worth remembering some prior encounters civilization has had with catastrophically infectious disease. Even though mainstream medicine today reserves the term “plague” for a specific disease (i.e., Bubonic) it includes, broadly speaking, any rapidly spreading contagion that kills many people. It is now clear that—advanced or not—our civilization is experiencing a time of ‘plague,’ but it is certainly not the first time. Just over a century ago, the Spanish flue epidemic of 1918 killed over 50 million, including this writer’s own grandparents, but our planet’s ghastly history of such catastrophes goes back for thousands of years.
In 430 B.C. the “Great Plague of Athens” killed an estimated 100,000, including the great statesman Pericles, his wife, and sons. Today most historians think that event set the stage for the ultimate defeat of Athens in its war with Sparta. The epidemic was probably typhus or typhoid, but a much greater threat was not to emerge for thousand years. When finally it did rear its ugly head, the Bubonic Plague would ravage the civilized world for yet another millennium.
In the first of three great and terrifying episodes, Yersinia pesis (Bubonic Plague) began in Constantinople in 541 CE as the “Plague of Justinian,” where, before running its course, it killed an estimated 30 to 50 million, or about half of Earth’s human inhabitants. In 1347 it returned as the “Black Death,” and, in just four years, killed 200 million, or about a quarter of the population of Europe. Three centuries later (1665), in the final bubonic episode, the “Great Plague of London” killed about 100,000, or twenty percent of the city’s population.
Ironically, in the middle of the 16th century in the depths of the Black Death in France, an enlightened physician was fighting back, saving many lives with what biographer John Hogue called “a mixture of cleanliness and vitamin C (rose pills).” Posterity would recall with little interest the heroic healing contributions to the time by Dr. Michel de Nostradamus. He is remembered instead, mostly for his many obscure and complex prophecies of times yet to come. In The Centuries, begun in 1554, Nostradamus offered the first of what was to be a ten-volume series, each consisting of 100 4-line verses called quatrains, which purported to offer details of ages still unborn.
Contrary to popular belief, Nostradamus was not a prophet of doom (at least for our time). Although many of his prophecies were dire, he saw no end to the world before the 86th century. The quatrains have attracted, ever since, the fascination of millions, especially as great events have sprung, seemingly, straight from his pages. It is argued that he predicted the French Revolution, the birth and rise to power of Hitler, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, to say nothing of 9/11. And now, according to a ‘viral’ and anonymous internet meme, Nostradamus is also said to have predicted COVID 19.
In 1551, said the post, he warned of the coming of the pandemic. “There will be a twin year (2020) from which will arise a queen (corona) who will come from the east (China) and who will spread a plague (virus) in the darkness of night, on a country with 7 hills (Italy) and will transform the twilight of men into dust (death), to destroy and ruin the world.” As impressive as it sounds, however, the problem is that no evidence can be found that Nostradamus ever said such a thing. According to the Snopes.com fact-checking site: “this particular prediction was not expressed in quatrain form, nor could we find anything like it published in Les Prophéties. We also found no mention of this supposed prophecy prior to the events of early 2020, which generally indicates it is a modern hoax.”
As with most genuine Nostradamus quatrains, it is virtually impossible to pin down what the writer really meant, but maybe that was part of the point. The late Joseph Jochmans, an authority on Nostradamus wrote in 1995 in Atlantis Rising Magazine, “The more one studies what (Nostradamus) actually wrote in his original Old French verses, the more one realizes there are several potential meanings to his prophecies, which can lead to several possible directions that the prophecies can take. In essence, what Nostradamus did in his prophetic messages was to set a mirror before us, showing us the different pathways we can take that already exist within us. Which of his prophecies we choose to fulfill remains up to us.”
Whether or not present calamities have been foretold by ancient prophets is a debate for another day, but there remains yet another way the present can be illuminated by the past. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain is believed to have said, “but it often rhymes,” and whether the poetry comes in epic form or in quatrains, there certainly seem to be cadences in current events that echo ancient refrains.
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Issue #31
The Nostradamus Perspective
