- •Contents
- •Illinois man claims largest known diamond 4
- •Infidelity epidemic sweeping cheating britain 35
- •25 Easy ways to knock years off your body 52
- •Is Your Dream Job Really Out There? 74
- •Illinois man claims largest known diamond
- •Why we're slaves to the latest fashion fads
- •World’s most beautiful girls live in Stockholm, Sweden
- •Homeless billionaire gives away his 3-billion-dollar fortune
- •Why do foreign tourists hate Russians on holidays?
- •Chinese prepare to live in hell for 2008 Summer Olympics
- •Arctic region likely to become the center of World War III
- •Five terrible atrocities against women around the world
- •Slavery continues to prosper worldwide
- •Stop the poverty to stop the terrorism
- •Questions and Tasks:
- •Air rage caused by oxygen deprivation
- •Questions and Tasks:
- •Japan still unable to cut national suicide rate with over 33,000 deaths a year
- •Questions and Tasks:
- •Children do imitate violence they see on tv
- •Mum to mum special: We must beat the bullies
- •What to do if your child's a bully
- •Teens’ problems: Curfew
- •Looking for love on dating websites has its own hidden dangers
- •Best of mates
- •Infidelity epidemic sweeping cheating britain
- •Brothers and sisters are doing it for themselves
- •Will this man make you happy?
- •Women who dislike football are stupid
- •Pet therapy wins more popularity whereas Russia uses only leeches
- •25 Easy ways to knock years off your body
- •Top 5 scientists killed by their experiments
- •Humans may eventually conquer ocean world after David Blaine’s underwater stunt
- •Dolphins used to look like humans and lived in Atlantis
- •So .. Is there a god?
- •Legends about vampires and werewolves still live today
- •The Nostradamus prophecies popular in every century
- •Rambo's hardest mission .. Saving his 3 girls from perils of showbiz
- •Is Your Dream Job Really Out There?
- •Fed up with your job? ..Get a new one!
- •No ifs... No butts: mp's vote for total smoking ban
- •World on drugs
- •Truth and lies about alcoholism
The Nostradamus prophecies popular in every century
No matter how people treat Nostradamus and astrology, the book of his prophecies has been reprinted for over 400 years
It may seem astonishing but the word ᄉNostradamusᄃ is one of the most searched proper names on the Internet, even more popular than ᄉBin Ladenᄃ or ᄉMadonnaᄃ. What do people living in the 21st century want to know about Nostradamus and his prophecies? Candidate of historical sciences, the most prominent expert on the works by Michel de Nostredame in Russia, Alexey Penzensky, says that for over 400 years official science evinced no interest in the works of Nostradamus. His contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci, Titian and others living in the epoch of Late Renaissance dabbled at mysticism. But Nostradamus went down in history only as a predictor. We know little about prophecies of Leonardo da Vinci but know perfectly well his medical, cultural and engineering achievements; as for Nostradamus, he is known only in connection with mysticism.
Mysticism amateurs immediately realized they had a wonderful opportunity to ascribe every statement they wanted to ᄉNostradamusᄃ. It was at the end of the 16th century that first attempts to use Nostradamus for political ends were made. Depending upon their personal political engagement, some people often declared some prophecies as made by Nostradamus.
Alexey Penzensky says that in addition to the prophecies of Nostradamus also composed verses, but people found his verses strange because of Nostradamus's unusual telegraph style. It was just in the past centuries that his verses were appreciated thanks to new trends in literature that appeared in that time.
Guillaume Аpollinaire, one of the greatest French poets of the 20th century mentioned Nostradamus as a great poet. Historians and philologists finally realized that the Nostradamus prophecies were an epoch monument. No matter how people treat Nostradamus and astrology, the book of his prophecies has been reprinted for over 400 years which makes a lot of sense to us.
Researchers made the first attempts to do scientific studies of works by Nostradamus log ago, even before the French Revolution. Recently, researchers studying works by Nostradamus discovered a couple of anonymous publications in a French publicistic magazine where the prophecies of Nostradamus are considered in the context of the epoch and culture while the prophecies were made with no associations with the future.
What is the main idea of the Nostradamus prophecies? Many researchers have arrived at a conclusion that Nostradamus wanted to emphasize that history repeats.
There are just few scientific works about Nostradamus. James Randi's The Mask of Nostradamus: The Prophecies of the World's Most Famous Seer is one of them but the book is not translated into Russian. Randi states that Michel Nostradamus was a quack or crazy and did not believe himself in what he did. However, the texts that Nostradamus left after his death demonstrate he was not crazy at all.
When the Soviet Union broke up in the early 1990s, the post-Soviet media reported that allegedly Nostradamus had predicted that the Soviet Union would last for 73 years and 7 months. Indeed, in a message to King Henry II Nostradamus predicted coming of an antichrist some day close to the date of an eclipse of October 12, 1605. And Nostradamus was not the only who predicted coming of an antichrist in this period.
In his works, Nostradamus employs no anagrams or secret names. It often happened that typesetters confused the names of small settlements and villages. This is astonishing that Nostradamus did not mention such places as Novgorod, Berlin, Warsaw or Krakow at the time when people already knew the places. But the predictor mentioned a lot of tiny settlements which can hardly be found on detailed maps today.
Nostradamus had a library consisting of about 50 volumes or more which was not typical of people from no noble families. He had a guide-book mentioning small settlements in France. Unfortunately, many commentators failed to discover that names mentioned in the works by Nostradamus were real names of French settlements.
For some reason the world knows little about the Russian prophet monk Avel who predicted overthrowing of the Romanovs Royal Family more than one hundred of years before it actually happened. Alexey Penzensky says that Avel's legendary prophecies were not written down during his life that is why they cannot be studied scientifically. There are lots of such legendary prophecies in the west. It is important that the Nostradamus prophecies were published in 1555. At the same time, many of published prophecies were happily forgotten in the west. The arrangement of Nostradamus's texts makes them particularly popular.
It was reasonable of Nostradamus not only to write his book of prophecies but also to bring it to the audience. That was wonderful creative consistency. People who wrote in the 16th century usually sought immediate publication of their works.
Questions and Tasks:
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Do you believe in predictions? Why (not)?
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Most of those who “see” the future are quacks. Don’t you think so?
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Real seers will never make money from what they see. Do you agree?
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If you look into the future, it will change. Then what is the use of predictions?
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You can’t escape your destiny. It will take its toll on you sooner or later. What do you think?