NOSTRADAMUS CHILDHOOD

Nostradamus was born on 14, or 21 December 1503 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France, where his claimed birthplace still exists, Michel de Nostredame was one of at least nine children of Reynière  de Saint-Rémy and grain dealer and notary Jaume  de Nostredame. The latter's family had originally been Jewish, but Jaume's father, Guy Gassonet, had converted to Catholicism around 1455, taking the Christian name "Pierre" and the surname "Nostredame" (the latter apparently from the saint's day  on which his conversion was solemnized). Michel's known siblings included Delphine, Jean I (c. 1507–77), Pierre, Hector, Louis, Bertrand, Jean II (born 1522) and Antoine (born 1523). Little else is known about his childhood, although there is a persistent tradition that he was educated by his maternal great-grandfather Jean de St. Rémy—a tradition which is somewhat undermined by the fact that the latter disappears from the historical record after 1504, when the child was only one year old.

Student years

At the age of 15 Nostredame entered the University of Avignon  to study for his baccalaureate. After little more than a year (when he would have studied the regular trivium  of grammar , rhetoric  and logic , rather than the later quadrivium  of geometry , arithmetic , music and astronomy /astrology ), he was forced to leave Avignon when the university closed its doors in the face of an outbreak of the plague . After leaving Avignon, Nostredame (according to his own account) travelled the countryside for eight years from 1521 researching herbal remedies. In 1529, after some years as an apothecary , he entered theUniversity of Montpellier  to study for a doctorate in medicine. He was expelled shortly afterwards by the university's procurator, Guillaume Rondelet , when it was discovered that he had been an apothecary, a "manual trade" expressly banned by the university statutes, and had been slandering doctors. The expulsion document (BIU Montpellier, Register S 2 folio 87) still exists in the faculty library. However, some of his publishers and correspondents would later call him "Doctor". After his expulsion, Nostredame continued working, presumably still as an apothecary, and became famous for creating a "rose pill" that supposedly protected against the plague.

Marriage and healing work

In 1531 Nostredame was invited by Jules-César Scaliger , a leading Renaissance scholar , to come toAgen . There he married a woman  name is  Henriette d'Encausse, who bore him two children. In 1534 his wife and children died, presumably from the plague . After their deaths, he continued to travel, passing through France and possibly Italy .

After lambesc earthquake in 1909 Nostradamus reconstructed his house in salon –de – provence. On his return in 1545, he assisted the prominent physicianLouis Serre  in his fight against a major plague outbreak in Marseille, and then tackled further outbreaks of disease on his own in Salon-de-Provence  and in the regional capital, Aix-en-Provence . Finally, in 1547, nostradamus settled in Salon-de-Provence in the house which exists today, where he married a rich widow named Anne Ponsarde, with whom he had six children—three daughters and three sons. Between 1556 and 1567 he and his wife acquired a one-thirteenth share in a huge canal project organized by Adam de Craponne  to irrigate largely waterlessSalon-de-Provence  and the nearby Désert de la Crau  from the river Durance .

Seer

After visit to Italy, Nostredame began to move away from medicine and toward the occult . Following popular trends, he wrote an almanac  for 1550, for the first time Latinizing his name from Nostredame to Nostradamus. He was so encouraged by the almanac's success that he decided to write one or more annually. Taken together, they are known to have contained at least 6,338 prophecies, as well as at least eleven annual calendars, all of them starting on 1 January and not, as is sometimes supposed, in March. It was mainly in response to the almanacs that the nobility and other prominent persons from far away soon started asking for horoscopes and "psychic" advice from him, though he generally expected his clients to supply the birth charts on which these would be based, rather than calculating them himself as a professional astrologer would have done. When obliged to attempt this himself on the basis of the published tables of the day, he always made numerous errors, and never adjusted the figures for his clients' place or time of birth. (Refer to the analysis of these charts by Brind'Amour, 1993, and compare Gruber's comprehensive critique of Nostradamus’ horoscope for Crown Prince Rudolph Maximilian.)

He then began his project of writing a book of one thousand mainly French quatrains, which constitute the largely undated prophecies for which he is most famous today. Feeling vulnerable to opposition on religious grounds, however, he devised a method of obscuring his meaning by using "Virgilianized " syntax, word games and a mixture of other languages such as Greek , Italian, Latin , and Provençal . For technical reasons connected with their publication in three installments (the publisher of the third and last installment seems to have been unwilling to start it in the middle of a "Century," or book of 100 verses), the last fifty-eight quatrains of the seventh "Century" have not survived into any extant edition.

The quatrains, published in a book titled Les Propheties (The Prophecies), received a mixed reaction when they were published. Some people thought Nostradamus was a servant of evil, a fake, or insane, while many of the elite thought his quatrains were spiritually-inspired prophecies. In the light of their post-Biblical sources (see under Nostradamus' sources  below), Nostradamus himself encouraged this belief. Catherine de Médicis , the queen consort of King Henri II of France , was one of Nostradamus' greatest admirers. After reading his almanacs for 1555, which hinted at unnamed threats to the royal family, she summoned him to Paris to explain them and to draw up horoscopes for her children. At the time, he feared that he would be beheaded, but by the time of his death in 1566, Catherine had made him Counselor and Physician-in-Ordinary to her son, the young King Charles IX of France .

Some accounts of Nostradamus's life state that he was afraid of being persecuted for heresy  by theInquisition , but neither prophecy  nor astrology  fell in this bracket, and he would have been in danger only if he had practiced magic  to support them. In fact, his relationship with the Church was always excellent. His brief imprisonment at Marignane in late 1561 came about purely because he had published his 1562 almanac without the prior permission of a bishop, contrary to a recent royal decree.

Final years and death

Nostradamus' current tomb in the Collégiale Saint-Laurent , Salon, into which his scattered remains were transferred after 1789.

By 1566, Nostradamus's gout , which had plagued him painfully for many years and made movement very difficult, turned into oedema , or dropsy. In late June he summoned his lawyer to draw up an extensive will bequeathing his property plus 3,444 crowns (around $300,000 US today), minus a few debts, to his wife pending her remarriage, in trust for her sons pending their twenty-fifth birthdays and her daughters pending their marriages. This was followed by a much shorter codicil . On the evening of 2 July, he is alleged to have told his secretary Jean de Chavigny, "You will not find me alive at sunrise." The next morning he was reportedly found dead, lying on the floor next to his bed and a bench (Presage 141 [originally 152] for November 1567, ass2w posthumously edited by Chavigny to fit what happened). He was buried in the local Franciscan chapel in Salon (part of it now incorporated into the restaurant La Brocherie) but re-interred during theFrench Revolution  in the Collégiale Saint-Laurent, where his tomb remains to this day.

Works

Copy of Garencières ' 1672 English translation of the Propheties, located in The P.I. Nixon Medical History Library of TheUniversity of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio .

In The Prophecies he compiled his collection of major, long-term predictions.* The first installment was published in 1555.* The second, with 289 further prophetic verses, was printed in 1557. * The third edition, with three hundred new quatrains, was reportedly printed in 1558, but now only survives as part of the omnibus edition that was published after his death in 1568. This version contains one unrhymed and 941 rhymed quatrains , grouped into nine sets of 100 and one of 42, called "Centuries".

The Almanacs: by far the most popular of his works, these were published annually from 1550 until his death. He often published two or three in a year, entitled either Almanachs (detailed predictions), Prognostications or Presages (more generalized predictions).

Nostradamus was not only a diviner, but a professional healer. It is known that he wrote at least two books on medical science. One was an extremely free translation (i.e. a "paraphrase") of The Protreptic of Galen  (Paraphrase de C. GALIEN, sus l'Exhortation de Menodote aux estudes des bonnes Artz, mesmement Medicine) , and in his so-called Traité des fardemens  (basically a medical cookbook containing, once again, materials borrowed mainly from others) he included a description of the methods he used to treat the plague – none of which, not even the bloodletting, apparently worked. The same book also describes the preparation of cosmetics.

A manuscript normally known as the Orus Apollo  also exists in the Lyon  municipal library, where upwards of 2,000 original documents relating to Nostradamus are stored under the aegis of Michel Chomarat. It is a purported translation of an ancient Greek work on Egyptian hieroglyphs based on later Latin versions, all of them unfortunately ignorant of the true meanings of the ancient Egyptian script, which was not correctly deciphered until Champollion  in the 19th century.

Since his death only the Prophecies have continued to be popular, but in this case they have been quite extraordinarily so. Over two hundred editions of them have appeared in that time, together with over 2,000 commentaries. Their popularity seems to be partly due to the fact that their vagueness and lack of dating make it easy to quote them selectively after every major dramatic event and retrospectively claim them as "hits" .