Nostradamus scholars claim that five of his predictions have been assigned to happen in 2023. Photo / Getty Images
Steve Braunias assesses five predictions Nostradamus made for 2023.
Nostradamus predicted Tuesday on Monday, and by the end of the week he predicted the next 500 years. He was good like that. Seeing the future was his job; as the author of an estimated 6338 prophecies, he was a hack working to deadline in the publishing business, but he was also a great artist. He was a kind of 1966 Dylan of his age, in love with magic, symbols, random swirling images of fog, of amphetamine, of pearls. He was born Michel de Nostredame (1503-1556); like Dylan, Nostradamus was a stage name. His act will never, ever end.
Any old intellectual can have ideas. Nostradamus had visions. It’s alleged that he said to his secretary (how many poets have secretaries?) on the evening of July 1, 1556, “You will not find me alive at sunrise”. He got that right. The next morning he was found dead, lying on the floor between his bed and a bench.
He wrote his prophecies as quatrains, or four lines of rhyming verse. “A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematised derangement of all the senses,” wrote Arthur Rimbaud. Nostradamus devised an ingenious system of derangement: his prophecies came to him while sitting on a brass pole in a trance and staring into a bowl of water.
He suffered from gout. You might too if you squatted too long atop a brass pole. As for the trances and the staring – you don’t come back from that kind of experience with a firm set of dates and locations. No one ever accused Nostradamus of journalism. He came back from that kind of experience with what appear to be senseless ravings (“Between two rocks the booty will be taken”) and cryptic blather (“Sooner and later you will see great changes made, dreadful horrors and vengeances”) that filled the pages of Les Prophéties. They read like dreams.
His dreams were all about the future. He dreamed of vague shapes, sudden movements; he saw flames, white light, fog, amphetamines, pearls. He saw… something. The prophecies dealt in conspiratorial whispers – he was on the same wavelength as anti-vaxxers and alternative truthers, as the truly mad. In 1989, a Japanese man made multiple copies of original Nostradamus texts held in an archive in Lyon. Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult, was attracted to the prophecies of Armageddon. Six years later, Asahara killed 13 commuters on the Tokyo underground with nerve gas.
Maybe Nostradamus predicted it. His dreamy prophecies were big on horror, violence, death. The succeeding centuries were big on horror, violence, death, making it seem like he knew what he was talking about. He had no conscious idea what he was talking about. He was on top of a brass pole looking at a bowl of water. But perhaps, he, too, was a bowl, some sort of divine and collective unconscious receptacle. The future poured into it.
Each year his prophecies are unpacked, and turned over to see if they are fit for conditions. Nostradamus scholars claim that five of his predictions have been assigned to happen in 2023. Time, then, to rate them out of 10 for accuracy.
1. “A celestial fire on the Royal edifice.”
Well this one seems bang on the money. Verily, Nostradamus has predicted the publication on January 11 of Spare by Prince Harry, with its bonfires of the royal vanities.
You might think Mr Sussex or whatever his name is has said everything already in his boring Netflix documentary but there is always more with the Sussexes – more entitlement, more victimhood, more moaning. None of it will do the royal family any good.
The book is designed to give King Charles, the world’s most put-upon father in addition to his role as the world’s most put-upon brother (did Nostradamus predict the crimes of Prince Andrew? Probably), a headache as big as his crown. His skull pounding, the King will a-bed, close his eyes, and suffer nightmares of Buckingham Palace torched to ashes … Monsieur de Nostredame saw it all 500 years ago.
You have to give him this one. It rates 9/10.
2. “A light will go out on Mars.”
Nostradamus scholars – an actual discipline - see this gnomic prophecy as a sign of space exploration in 2023. So do I, and I think what Nostradamus is specifically getting at with this vision is that Mars will be colonised – by Elon Musk.
Earth has no more use for this wretch. Roundly booed when he recently made an onstage appearance at a Dave Chappelle comedy show in San Francisco, hated and mocked and scorned every minute of the day in the timeline of the Twitter machine, the world’s richest man is also the world’s most loathed chump.
Let us picture it. Watch him as he approaches his SpaceX (“Making life interplanetary”) rocket to Mars. The distance is 140 million miles. It will take an estimated six months to get there. It cannot be guaranteed there will be a way back to Earth… Musk waves goodbye; the world waves back, shouting in unison: “Good riddance!” We can only hope.
In terms of wishful thinking, this prophecy deserves a 9/10.
3. “Like the sun the head shall sear the shining sea: living fish shall all but boil.”
Nostradamus, the great seer of climate change. What are these lines but a better, more lyrical way of saying “global warming”?
There are two significant conferences scheduled for 2023. The New Zealand Agricultural Climate Change Conference is held from February 28-March 2 at Te Papa, and the Fifteenth International Conference on Climate Change is held on April 20-21 in Vancouver. A delegate will be present at both, in ghostly, spectral form: Nostradamus.
He saw it all coming. He foresaw the shocking video in July 2021 of fish scorched by lethal temperatures during a heat wave in the Pacific Northwest. He foresaw a story by Herald reporter Jamie Gray in September this year: “Fish deaths caused by warmer water drove NZ King Salmon to a $24.5 million loss in the first half to July 31, the company says.”
What piscine disaster awaits in 2023? You can bet there’s going to be one. This prophecy by Nostradamus gets 9.9/10.
4. “So high will the bushel of wheat rise, that man will be eating his fellow man.”
Inflation! Nostradamus called it. No need to beat around the bush: this prophecy is totally 10/10, although he might have gone a bit far with the vision of a zombie apocalypse.
5. “The trumpet shakes with great discord. An agreement broken: lifting the face to heaven: the bloody mouth will swim with blood; the face anointed with milk and honey lies on the ground.”
As previously mentioned, many of his quatrains read like senseless ravings and cryptic blatherings. In fact they are riddles, and it’s up to us to solve them and find their meaning. Sometimes it’s all laid out, like the quatrain widely credited with predicting the rise of Hitler:
From the depths of Western Europe
Will be born of poor folks a child
Who by his tongue will seduce many people.
His fame will spread even to the Orient.
It’s all there, isn’t it? The Fuhrer’s birth in Austria to the Nazi pact with Japan… But what to make of the prediction, assigned to happen in 2023, that “the bloody mouth will swim with blood”, etc?
Let us consider the opening line, “The trumpet shakes with great discord.” At first I thought what’s happening here is that Nostradamus was predicting the revival of perhaps the worst music of all times: that free-ranging, noodling, shrieking, honking, chaotic, white-boy, tuneless, mindless, sexless mess known as jazz fusion.
But he’s getting at something even more rotten. Broken agreements, bloody mouths… The whole quatrain is a vision of false promises, lies, discord, rancour, desperate times – verily, this is a prophecy of the 2023 general election.
Squint, and you can see Luxon; lean in closer, and there’s Ardern; turn it to the light, and the prophecy reveals that rough beast slouching to the polls, hoping to be reborn, Winston Raymond Peters.
In short, this prophecy warrants an absolute 10. O Nostradamus! You don’t want to know what he says about the All Blacks at the World Cup.
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