Interpretations
Most of the quatrains deal with disasters, such as plagues, earthquakes, wars, floods, invasions, murders, droughts, and battles—all undated and based on foreshadowings by the Mirabilis Liber. Some quatrains cover these disasters in overall terms; others concern a single person or small group of people. Some cover a single town, others several towns in several countries. A major, underlying theme is an impending invasion of Europe by Muslim forces from further east and south headed by the expected Antichrist, directly reflecting the then-current Ottoman invasions and the earlier Saracen equivalents, as well as the prior expectations of the Mirabilis Liber. All of this is presented in the context of the supposedly imminent end of the world—even though this is not in fact mentioned – a conviction that sparked numerous collections of end-time prophecies at the time, not least an unpublished collection by Christopher Columbus.
Nostradamus has been credited, for the most part in hindsight (see under 'Alternative views' below), with predicting numerous events in world history, from the Great Fire of London, and the rise of Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. In 1992 one commentator who claimed to be able to contact Nostradamus under hypnosis even had him 'interpreting' his own verse X.6 (a prediction specifically about floods in southern France around the city of Nîmes and people taking refuge in its collosse, or Colosseum, a Roman amphitheatre now known as the Arènes) as a prediction of an undated attack on the Pentagon, despite the historical seer's clear statement in his dedicatory letter to King Henri II that his prophecies were about Europe, North Africa and part of Asia Minor. Skeptics such as James Randi suggest that his reputation as a prophet is largely manufactured by modern-day supporters who fit his words to events that have either already occurred or are so imminent as to be inevitable, a process sometimes known as "retroactive clairvoyance" (postdiction). Thus, no Nostradamus quatrain is known to have been interpreted as predicting a specific event before it occurred, other than in vague, general terms that could equally apply to any number of other events. This even applies to quatrains that contain specific dates, such as III.77, which predicts 'in 1727, in October, the king of Persia captured by those of Egypt' — a prophecy that has, as ever, been interpreted retrospectively in the light of later events, in this case as though it presaged the known peace treaty between the Ottoman Empire and Persia of that year. Similarly, Nostradamus's notorious '1999' prophecy at X.72 (see Nostradamus in popular culture) describes no event that commentators have succeeding in identifying either before or since, other than by dint of twisting the words to fit whichever of the many contradictory happenings they are keen to claim as 'hits'. Moreover no quatrain suggests, as is often claimed by books and films on the alleged Mayan Prophecy, that the world will end in December 2012. In his preface to the Prophecies, Nostradamus himself stated that his prophecies extend 'from now to the year 3797'—an extraordinary date which, given that the preface was written in 1555, may have more than a little to do with the fact that 2242 (3797-1555) had recently been proposed by his major astrological source Richard Roussat as a possible date for the end of the world.
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