I recently answered a question on Quora and decided to post my answer here too.
I’ve written books about Nostradamus and I don’t think his prophecies are fake, though I do think most of what people write about them are bad interpretations. If you look up a top ten list of his greatest most successful prophecies, most are sensationalized and interpreted wrong – because they are extremely vague. None of this would help convince anyone he was a true prophet and that he really described future events.
If I hadn’t been extremely familiar with the Spanish Civil War and Spain’s role in WWII, I would not have been intrigued by Nostradamus’ quatrain 9:16… I would have passed over it as more vague rambling.
De castel Franco sortira l’assemblee,
L’ambassadeur non plaisant fera scisme:
Ceux de Ribiere seront en la meslee,
Et au grand goulfre desnie ont l’entree.
Out of Castelfranco will come the assembly,
The ambassador not agreeable will cause a schism:
Those of Riviera will be in the squabble,
And they will refuse entry to the great gulf.
Until 1930 Spain was ruled by a right wing dictator, Miguel Primo de Rivera. Spanish leftists took over and executed his son. Within a few years there was a civil war, with Russia, France, and Britain giving a little help to the leftist Republic, and Germany and Italy (those of the Riviera) giving more substantial military aid to the right wing Nationalists. The left-wing Republic was defeated in Spain’s civil war by the Fascists under General Franco, who was born in what was once the Kingdom of Castile in NW Spain.
Franco’s second in command by 1941 was Serrano Suner, the “Axis Ambassador” who argued in public for joining the winning side with Germany and claiming colonial possessions from France and Britain for Spain. Franco was a master of diplomacy and managed to keep Spain out of WWII despite owing Germany and Italy a return favor for the help they gave his side in the civil war – and despite their geography at the western tip of Europe. It would have been an excellent place for American troops to land and start a Western Front. Instead America secretly gave aid to Spain so they could bolster their northern defenses and deny Hitler’s request to come through Spain to counter the American landings in North Africa. The Spanish refused entry into the great gulf of the western Mediterranean.
I think the universe makes sure no prophecy can be accurate enough to create the paradox in which world leaders could act on clear prophetic interpretations to avoid the outcomes and events they foresaw. I believe the future is as certain as the past, and cannot be undone. Therefore prophets must be vague. It sounds like a lame excuse, but I suspect this is one of the rules, like the speed limit of light, that we cannot break.
As for another clear success: In his letter (epistle) to King Henry II, Nostradamus describes a situation that matches the end of the Soviet Union in late 1991 with remarkable detail, even stating that this miserable daughter (the USSR) of the land of the North Wind (Russia) would be enlarged after a holocaust and war against fascist fatherlands (specifically describing the fascist lands as German, Roman, and Spanish) and then a cold war against “the children of opposite ideas” and would eventually collapse after just 73 years and 7 months. (January 18, 1918–August 18, 1991)
I consider this a vague but accurate prediction by Nostradamus. If these two I just covered are unconvincing, I don’t think there is anything better to convince you with. Nostradamus is very cryptic and vague and I totally understand whenever someone thinks it’s all nonsense. They might even be right! If anyone makes a thousand vague predictions and we watch and scrutinize them for hundreds of years, eventually some will seem to have been accurate.
For what it’s worth, Nostradamus also made many references to a great war between Islamic and Christian nations that would gradually intensify into a nuclear WWIII over 27 years. He suggested this war would start 1 – around the turn of the millennium, 2 – after about 57 years of peace for France, 3 – prior to an astronomical alignment that matched the skies of June 2002, and 4 – shortly after a solar eclipse in 1999. The Germans were expelled from France in late 1944 – 57 years later we reach late 2001. Other clues place the start of the war after late 1999, near the turn of the millennium, and no later than early 2002. It would seem to match the terrorism of September 11, 2001 – which has already led to wars in the Middle East including Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria.
If Iran and Turkey come to dominate the Islamic world, and especially if Russia or China get more involved, these conflicts could still lead to a world war that ends around 2028.
I’ve written several books on such prophecies – but despite everything Nostradamus wrote, it is all vague and cryptic. You can either give up and say its just nonsense or you can study history and prophecies and see if there are enough matches to be convincing. History could still prove this interpretation of WWIII in my Nostradamus books completely wrong; we could reach 2030 uneventfully. I hope so.
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