Mystics and prophets

This is the type of lecture you would hear in a philosophy class or a class on world religions. The lecture concerns mysticism and one mystic in particular, Nostradamus.

part 1

Good morning, everyone. After our lecture last week on prophets and prediction, many of you came up to me and asked me if I would, uh, give a short talk on the famous prophet, Nostradamus. So I've decided to spend a little time doing that today.

First, I'd like to review what I said last time about prophets and, particularly, mystics. If you remember, I told you that we can classify prophets as one of two types. The first type is what we might call a divine prophet, or religious prophet, if you like. A divine prophet or a religious prophet is an inspired teacher or, uh, a messenger who communicates to us and interprets God's will, God's messages to us. These prophets are the ones who establish the great religions of the world.

The major prophets of this kind have been Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses, Jesus Christ, Muhammed, and Bahaullah. These prophets came to Earth in order to deliver divine or religious messages ... to communicate to us humans how to live on Earth. Divine prophets bring laws and so on. A society is usually formed around the teachings that they bring.

The other kind of prophet, the second kind of prophet, is really better termed a mystic. A mystic is a person who has visions and makes predictions about the future ... and claims to know what will happen.

Mystics seem to share two things – that is, they have two things in common. First, they do not generally seem to be directly concerned with the problems of this world. ... It is somehow as if they are detached ... or not connected to the day-to-day problems of living ... and they personally don't seem to have the selfish needs and desires of most people. In a word, they're different. Being detached makes them different.

Second, mystics seem to experience a kind of spiritual union with some higher power. They claim to be in some kind of contact with a power or force that is greater than most humans experience, and they all seem to have direct knowledge of a spiritual reality that exists outside of our everyday world. By spiritual reality we mean "God," or the supreme creative force in the universe, whatever we may call it. This connection is where they claim that their knowledge comes from.

Now, what direct knowledge seems to mean is not that mystics hear strange or mysterious voices or see unusual signs. Rather, it seems to mean knowledge they have obtained without using the senses – a direct spiritual link up, you might say.

Now sometimes, because mystics are in contact with a spiritual reality, they may not have words to use to describe what they are experiencing, and so what they say often sounds like nonsense to us ... the vocabulary that they need hasn't been invented yet! For instance, Nostradamus made some predictions over 400 years ago, and he actually made up words to describe the things he was seeing. For example, he had a vision of a submarine, but, of course, submarines didn't exist then, so he said things like, and I quote, "iron fish enclosing men, usually traveling with a warlike intent." And for most people, this didn't make any sense at all. So the point here is that in order to understand mystics, we often have to use our imagination.

part 2

Let me turn the discussion to the topic of Nostradamus himself, and say a couple of things about his life and his work. ... Nostradamus lived from 1503 to 1566 and was a doctor and astrologer–an astrologer, of course, is a per­son who studies the stars–or heavens, if you like–and makes predictions based on the position of the stars.

Anyway, Nostradamus studied medicine at Montpellier ... don't worry about the spelling of that right now ... Montpellier was the second-best French university, Paris being the best. Nostradamus spent much of his life moving around France from place to place and became known for his efforts to help sufferers of the plague, a deadly disease that killed millions of people in Europe in the Middle Ages. To many people, Nostradamus was a hero, and from what we know of him, he certainly was a kind and helpful person. In this sense, maybe, he was a bit different from many mystics – he wasn't quite so detached.

Anyway, it seems that his prophetic powers–his ability to make prophecies–began to appear around 1550, around the time he was fifty years old. Little by little, his fame as an astrologer and as a mystic began to grow … first in France and then abroad ... and he began to spend a lot of his time making horoscopes for visitors. Horoscopes, as you probably know, are meant to give people some insight into their own characters or personalities and often make predictions about the future.

But to continue here, many of Nostradamus's visitors were royalty – kings and queens, and princes and princesses … such as the then queen of France, Catherine de Medici. These famous visitors went to Nostradamus to ask for mystic visions of the future. So clearly, Nostradamus was quite well-known in his own time as well.

In addition to making horoscopes for the rich and famous, Nostradamus was also busy writing down his prophecies in his two most famous books, Prophecies and Centuries. Did you get those? … Prophecies and Cen­turies.

part 3

So, what were some of the prophecies of Nostradamus? Why are people still interested in him even today, over 400 years after his death? Nostradamus made many predictions in his books that seem to have been proven correct – for example, those relating to the British queen, Elizabeth I, to the French scientist, Louis Pasteur, and to other famous people. However, the most compelling reason that Nostradamus is still receiving a lot of attention is because of his so-called negative predictions – his predictions of future tragedies and disasters. Tragedies and disasters seem to catch people's interest!

One disaster that people claim that Nostradamus fore­saw was the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II. Nostradamus predicted that, quote, "near the harbor and in two cities, two scourges will fall, unlike anything seen before. Scourge means something that causes great pain and suffering. Both cities, in case you didn't know, are next to the ocean. Hiroshima borders the Japanese Inland Sea and Nagasaki is on the Pacific Ocean, so the reference to the harbor makes sense. He said there would be hunger and disease as a result of these scourges, and that people would cry to God for help. That description is a fitting one for the disasters at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nostradamus also spoke of an emperor, quote ,"born near Italy who will cost the empire very dearly." Napoleon was born in Corsica near Italy, and his politics and fight­ing certainly did cost the French empire dearly; in fact, his actions almost completely destroyed it in the end. In his writings, Nostradamus talks about "PAU NAY LORON." That's P-A-U … N-A-Y … L-O-R-O-N. Now, if the order of these letters is changed around, they spell Napaulon Roy, or "Napoleon the King" in English. In Nostradamus's time, Napoleon's name was often spelled with "au" rather than "o," and so this is often thought to show that Nostradamus knew about the coming of Napoleon.

OK. We have discussed three specific prophecies of Nostradamus's–for each one, the actual prediction is somewhat vague, but for each one, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that Nostradamus was a mystic with a real vision of the future.

Let me say one more thing before I finish. Many of the writings of Nostradamus are even less clear, even more difficult to interpret than the examples I've given you here ... so I'd like to finish by saying once again that we must be very careful about any conclusions we arrive at regarding the writings of Nostradamus. You know, some people claim that Nostradamus's followers are just bending histo­ry to fit his predictions… Which is true? Is he a prophet or a fraud? … You will have to make up your own mind about that one!

OK, that's about all the time I want to take today on the topic of mystics and predictions. Be sure to finish Chapter 17 by the next class.