Forgotten Ages Research

The Nostradamus Keys to Decipherment—Prophetic Sources

Report Topics:

• Hebrew Ancestry
• The Egyptian Connection
• Christian and Arabic Mysticism
• Classic and Celtic Traditions
• Renaissance Influences
• The Native American Question
• Other Prophets and Apocalyptic Sources

Full Report:

Hebrew Ancestry

Both of Nostradamus’ grandfathers, according to family accounts, were of the tribe of Issachar, described in First Chronicles 12:31 as “having the understanding of times”—the knowledge of the movements of the sun, moon and stars, who set the lunar solar calendar dates for the annual solemn feasts. By age-old Jewish tradition, Issachar was also the record-keeper of the past as well as possessed the spirit of prophecy for forecasting the future. Along with the priests of Levi, the Issachar visionaries were given access to the Urim and Thummin, the sacred stones of divination, part of the fourteen planetary gemstones which once composed the Breastplate of the High Priest of the Tabernacle.

As a further indication of their identity and work, when the prophet’s family was forced to convert to Catholicism in 1501, they chose a new name that had a hidden meaning, for those who understood it: Nostra-dame, “we give ours,” or “we are given” (nous donné). This was a secret code that they were of a tribe which possessed the spirit of prophecy, and was to be shared among their people.

When the Romans under Titus besieged and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem in A.D. 70, they discovered the sanctuary completely empty of all scrolls, its great library vanished. As the Jews were driven out in the Diaspora, various portions of the ancient Hebrew books of wisdom were placed in the safekeeping of certain tribal elders. Much of the lore was of religious texts, but also a good number dealt with the more esoteric, hidden wisdom—the Lost Books of Moses, the Keys of Solomon, the original Book of Enoch, the Zohar, and many others.

These had been works slowly collected and codified since the ancient days when Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees, the enslavement in Egypt, the glorious reigns of David and Solomon, the age of the great prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, the Babylonian Captivity, and the brief return to glory under the Maccabees and Herod the Great.

With Israel and the Temple gone, however, it was now up to the passing generations of Jews scattered throughout Europe and the Mediterranean to hold onto and preserve their written heritage.

During the mid-1400’s under René the Good’s reign of benevolent toleration, many Jews flocked to Provence as a welcome refuge, and undoubtedly several Keepers of the Ancient Wisdom came as well, looking for a safe haven for their hidden volumes. Particularly after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1451, many Byzantine Jews came to southern France by ship, bringing with them not only Jewish scrolls, but also rare volumes of the Incunabula, classical Greek science and philosophy.

Being court physician-astrologers and advisors to the local ruler, Nostradamus’ two grandfathers were in influential positions to oversee the secret arrival and storage of untold numbers of scrolls and manuscripts, some of which we know came into their own private collection. These Nostradamus inherited, for in his “Preface” to the Centuries, the seer told how several books of occult wisdom were passed down to him. Having studied their contents and incorporating them into his own writings, he “presented them to Vulcan”—he was obliged to consign them to the flames of his fireplace. The prophet would not let them be desecrated by the unruly mob in the street below his study, who periodically threatened to ransack his home. The prophet described that, as these ancient scrolls burned, “the flame shot forth in unaccustomed brightness, clearer than the light of natural flame, casting a subtle illuminating glow over the house, as if the whole were wrapped in sudden conflagration.”

Some evidence suggests that Nostradamus may have visited his ancient homeland of Israel during his “lost years” from 1538 to 1544. Here he may have acquired still other works of hidden lore, especially from the city of Safed, the center of Kabbalistic studies and medieval Jewish mysticism.

The Egyptian Connection

Nostradamus appears to have had a particular fascination with the land of the Nile, its High Initiations, and the buried treasures of lost knowledge that one day is prophesied to be brought back to light.

The first two quatrains in the Centuries, describing the seer’s methods of divination, are almost word for word taken from Marsilio Ficino’s translation of the classical author Iamblichus’ De Mysteriis Aegyptorum, first printed in Venice in 1497, and reprinted at Lyons in 1547.

The prophet himself wrote and had published about 1552 a most enigmatic work entitled The Book of (H)Orus Apollo, Son of Osiris, King of Egypt, partly based on the Hieroglyphia of Horapollon of Phaenebytis, which initially appeared in Greek in the fourth century, and in Latin in the fourteenth. Nostradamus’ version was composed of 182 Epigrams, with a total of about two thousand lines, a rare copy of which is presently kept in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris.

At first glance, the writing is most obscure, with little literary merit—until it is realized that, like his later prophecies, this too was deliberately couched in coded language, to be understood only by Initiates prepared to solve its symbolism.

The prophet very likely visited Egypt in his travels during the “lost years.” His detailed descriptions of the Temple of Isis at Philae, the sacred complex of Saqqara near ancient Memphis, and especially his understanding of the hidden aspects of the Great Pyramid and Sphinx at Giza, are strong indications he had seen those crumbling sacred sites with his own eyes.

A number of his predictions also correlate directly with the prophetic time-line preserved in the measurements of the passageways and chambers inside the Great Pyramid, and in the secret symbolism of the Sphinx.

Christian and Arabic Mysticism

While the Jews and Catholic Christians in the sixteenth century remained very much separated along official dogmatic religious lines, in the hidden world of the esoteric Mysteries the lines were virtually nonexistent. Though the Church made every attempt to portray itself as the “one true faith” which had always been and would forever be, here and there secret mystic societies preserved the truer history and beliefs of early Christianity, which harkened back to the purer teachings of its origins—origins which the more spiritually progressive of the Jews, such as the Essenes and the Gnostics, had once shared in.

As early as the year 496, the Papacy had issued lists of prohibited books, which later, in Nostradamus’ lifetime, were organized into the Index Librorium Prohibitory (1559). When Nostradamus as a teen had been sent to Avignon to study, he found himself in the city that had been two centuries before the residency of the Popes, and the center where “forbidden works” were kept safely hidden. After the Pontiffs returned to Rome, however, the works remained behind, and in Avignon’s liberal Renaissance atmosphere, these were made accessible to budding scholars of the day. Much of this literature dealt with the existence and teachings of the secret Christian sects, many of whom were located in southern France.

The port of Marseilles, for example, was the traditional first century landing site for a ship carrying many of the major individuals who had been involved in the life of Jesus of Nazareth—Lazarus, his sisters Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, Mary Cleophas-Jacob, Joseph of Arimathea, and several of the apostles. They had been banished from Israel soon after the Crucifixion, and sought refuge in the more remote regions of the Empire.

Many legends and stories surrounding Mary Magdalene and her “servant” Sara (who some scholars now believe was her daughter by her husband, Jesus) in particular sprang up in southern France, associated with the valley of Rennes-le-Chateau south of Carcassone—visited several times by Nostradamus.

The same general area, the Languedoc, was the seat of the Cathars, also known as the Albigensians, and related to the Waldensians—all of whom had been ruthlessly hunted down and nearly exterminated by the Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and as late as the massacre of 1543, yet managed to still survive incognito. The off-the-cuff remark the prophet had made to a local sculptor in Agen about the Virgin Mary, that had gotten him in deep trouble with religious authorities, had actually been a Catharist rebuke, not a Protestant-inspired statement as suspected. Nostradamus fled, not because of his Huguenot leanings, but to avoid his more secret Cathar affiliation, which the Church hated even worse.

The south of France was likewise an important last stronghold for other esoteric societies, that were more visible yet considered semi-acceptable, such as the Templars and the first Rosicrucians. During his initial traveling period, from 1525 to 1529, Nostradamus made an important connection with the Grand Master of the Knights of St. John, who later became the Knights of Malta, a respected offshoot from the original Knights Templar of Jerusalem. In fact, René the Good, under whose rule Nostradamus’ two grandfathers had flourished, had as one of his titles, “King of Jerusalem,” in name only, but esoterically linking him to the tradition of the Nine Crusader Guardians of the old Jerusalem Temple precincts.

Later, Nostradamus is known to have sojourned at the Cistercian Abbey of Orval. The Cistercians under Saint Bernard had joined ranks with the Templars, whose wealth and ancient mystic wisdom they unburied from the destroyed Jerusalem Temple helped the monks to design and build the majority of the Gothic cathedrals, situating them on the sacred power places of Europe, within a single century’s time.

Inspired by the prospects of what the Templars had not yet found, only two decades before the French seer was born, the German mystic Christian Rosencreutz traveled all of Europe and as far east as Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus and Baghdad-Babylon, to locate the forgotten lore of the ages. Another mystic, a fellow countryman of Nostradamus’, Guillaume Postel, journeyed to the same regions a half century later. It is thought that these epic odysseys may have inspired Nostradamus in his own voyaging quest, for self Initiation, during his “lost years.”

Rosencreutz reportedly established before his death in 1474 the First Order of the Rosy Cross, though this secret society would not see its full rise to public notoriety until the seventeenth century.

One of the tenets of medieval Templarism and Rosicrucianism was to bridge the gap not only with the Jewish Mysteries, but also with the Arabic Mysteries as well. While the Jews and Arabs saw Abraham as their common genetic forefather, their esoteric wisdoms were related through the spiritual marriage between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, also embracing the pre-Masonic tradition.

In Nostradamus’ boyhood Provence, the Moors had equal toleration with the Jews in the eyes of René the Good. The King himself had been with Saint Louis on the last Crusade, and had shared imprisonment with him. When René returned home, he brought back with him a number of Moorish and Turkish scholars, and in their honor he dressed at court in Arabic garb. The Moors carried with them their own translations and discoveries made upon the foundations of Graeco-Roman philosophy, geometry, science and art. It was this imported wisdom which was no doubt later included in the seer’s early education by his grandfathers.

The Arabic Mysteries, like the Christians’, ran the full gamut from dark to light—from the terror of the Assassins of the Old Man in the Mountain of Alamut, to the sublime Elixer of Blissfulness, a Sufi work by Al Ghasali, read by Nostradamus as a youth. The prophet’s subsequent travels to Spain, Portugal, North Africa and the Middle East would have put him in more direct contact with Arabic esoteric wisdom and prophecies, many of which were reflected in his own predictions written later in his life.

Classical and Celtic Traditions

If we peel back the layers of the Provençal psychic landscape, we find that the Judeo-Christian-Arabic Mysteries firmly rested on a very well-established Graeco-Roman stratum underneath it, and deeper still, a far earlier Celtic-Druidic-Megalithic foundation lies beneath that, stretching back into the dim mists of prehistory. These were—and to some degree still are today—the primordial sources of mystical inspiration.

The physical countryside of Provence is fairly littered with the remains of Roman arches, amphitheaters, temples, old roads, fountains and statuary—ghosts of a lost age of classical predominance that would have had a profound influence on the prophet as a young boy. Here is where the Romans had fought the Carthaginian Hannibal, and where general Marius received a favorable oracle from the local prophetess, Marta, who dwelt in a cleft atop Mount Saint Victoire. It was said that in the seer’s day, a sibyl still functioned within the rock, in secret.

As was the educational practices of the Renaissance, we know that all of Nostradamus’ formal learning was squarely based on the greatest rational thinkers that Greece and Rome ever produced. Yet such geniuses as Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Cato and Seneca, constituted only one half of classical thought. The other, more intuitive side of the Graeco-Roman world view had been dominated by the Oracular and Sibylline Mystery Schools. Michelangelo, among his powerful figures that peer down from the Sistine Chapel, gave honor to many of the ancient Oracles and Sibyls, portraying them on an equal footing with the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament apostles as a source of predictive pronouncement.

Though long defunct, the sacred oracular centers of the Mediterranean and the Middle East were still regarded as important places of pilgrimage as late as Renaissance times. How many of these Nostradamus may have attempted to visit during his “lost years” of personal Initiation we cannot say.

What we do know is that many of the divination tools he described as using—the tripod, the brass bowl, the laurel branch dowsing rod, the magic mirror, the scrying flame, and others—were instruments once employed by the ancient oracular mediums. Chavigny, in his book The Pleiades, drew several connections between his teacher’s prophecies and the more ancient words of at least one of the Sibyls, the Tiburtine. This had been only one among the most respected of the Sibylline and Oracular sources in the classical world, totaling twenty-eight in number.

When the Romans conquered what is now Provence in the second century B.C.E., they endeavored to destroy the major school of Druidic Initiation that was situated in the region, and with it a library of Druidic wisdom said to have been composed over two hundred thousand scrolls. This deliberate destruction was done to deliver a deathblow to Celtic civilization. Yet Celtic tradition itself claims that what really happened is most of the library escaped decimation. Instead, the scrolls were secreted away into the hidden sacred oak groves, buried at the old earth energy centers, far beyond the taint of Roman culture, guarded over by the great flame-colored phoenixes of the Camargue mists.

The Old Religion of the Druids and Wiccans, the Wyrdd and other Celtic Mystery sects, were in themselves a remnant of the still older civilization of the Megalith Builders—the architects of Stonehenge, Carnac, the Earth Mother Temples of Malta, and thousands of other silent yet imposing stone monuments scattered across Europe and the entire world. All these were strategically placed along energy leys or lines, and at points of convergent earth forces, utilized to balance weather, soil fertility, the harmony of consciousness, and the abundance of all life.

When the Romans came, they built their classical temples atop several of the older power places to dominate them, and engineered their military roads along the prehistoric straight tracks of sacred energies. Christian missionaries followed, in turn supplanting the centers, erecting the first churches and incorporating the Celtic earth deities and celebrations as saints and feast days into the Catholic religious repertoire.

Later still, the Cistercians and Templars, as “guardians of the roads of pilgrimage,” also made an attempt to take over the old energy system, by raising their Gothic cathedrals and Templar castles at the key power points. In the end, however, Cistercian activity was curtailed by the Church, while the original Templars were all but exterminated.

By Nostradamus’ time, the Church had thoroughly rooted out and burned at the stake most adherents of the Old Religion as “witches and wizards.” So the continued preservation of the prehistoric wisdom had to take on another, safer form. The wisdom was turned into ballads and allegorical songs; the priests and bards became troubadours and minstrels; and the priestesses and novitiates were transformed into mystery play dancers and theatrical troupers. They wandered along the old paths of power, visiting from town to town, performing at local festivals and fairs that still marked the seasonal times of fertilizing energy, entertaining while subtly instructing in the prehistoric ways of staying attuned to the Earth.

Once again, Provence played an important role, this time as a haven for the most secret of wisdoms. Here is where the ancient Druidic books were still extant, from which the prophet drew upon for a number of his verses.

The port of Marseilles, the gateway into this entire region, had been an important link for the early Phoenicians in their trade with the Celtic “Tin Islands” of Britain to the north. From here too the Greek Pytheas had sailed to explore and make contact with the Celts. In reverse exploration, the Archdruid Abaris had traveled through Marseilles on his way to Greece, where he taught Pythagoras in the lost sacred sciences of measurement, number and vibration.

Later still, at the beginning of the Renaissance, René the Good of Provence was also called the Minstrel King, surrounding himself with the best and most advanced of the wandering troubadours. In several instances in his quatrains, Nostradamus employed Celtic mythology as part of his cryptic symbols, even evoking the memory of the ancient Celtic Hercules, named Ogmios, predicting his return.

One of the seer’s younger brothers, Jean de Notredame, became a noted scholar and supporter of the Provençal troubadours—indicating that his family was indeed closely involved in the preservation of the secrets of the Old Religion.

Renaissance Influences

If we imagine the Judeo-Christian-Arabic-Classical-Celtic Mysteries as composing ever deeper layers of a great “cake,” then Nostradamus’ Renaissance connections might be considered the “icing” on top of that cake. One must not forget that, given the life span years of the prophet, that he was contemporary to the major geniuses of his day, and for that matter of the entire Renaissance era. A listing of those who shared his time slot in history reads like a “Who’s Who” of the most well-known and celebrated of Europe’s fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth century artists, scientists, philosophers, mystics, explorers, religious leaders and heads of state. These were:

Bellini, Botticelli, Columbus, Vespucci, Da Vinci, Erasmus, Machiaveli, Da Gama, Durer, Copernicus, Cesare Borgia, Pizzaro, Michelangelo, Titian, Thomas More, Magellan, Luther, Raphael, Zwingli, Scalinger, Catherine of Aragon, Henry Cornelius Agrippa, Von Hutten, Mother Shipton, Henry VIII, Loyola, Paracelsus, Sulieman the Magnificent, Rabelais, Tyndale, Melanchthon, Charles V, Mendoza, Cardano, Knox, Palladio, Calvin, Pare, Mercator, Ronsard, John Dee, Ivan the Terrible, Elizabeth I, El Greco, Mary Queen of Scots, Brahe, Gabrielli, Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, Galileo, and many others too numerous to list here.

Through his secret travels we will probably never really know just how many of these Nostradamus actually encountered. We do know that he was a student of Scalinger for a time, Ronsard celebrated the arrival of Nostradamus at the French court in 1556 with verses in his honor, and Rabelais attended the University of Montpelier the years that Nostradamus taught there and may have made contact.

At the very least, through his education and his readings, we can say that the seer was deeply familiar with most of these great thinkers by reputation. And they in turn were very likely familiar with his name and renown, by way of his widely published prophecies.

The Native American Question

The idea that Nostradamus may also have been influenced by Native Americans may at first sound not very possible, unless we were to assume that the seer, in his many voyages during his “lost years,” managed to sail to the New World and back. However, his limited general knowledge concerning the Americas indicates he had known about them only from contemporary explorers’ reports, not firsthand observations. Yet despite this, he seems to have captured something of the energy of the land, of the sense of freedom and dedication to the Great Spirit of its Indigenous Peoples, that would later be passed down through to the founding fathers of the American Republic. Did the prophet, without visiting the Western Hemisphere, somehow come in contact with its Native Keepers?

Jack D. Forbes, a published scholar and anthropologist associated with the University of California, has built a strong case for the presence of Native Americans in Europe in the early sixteenth century. Beginning with Columbus, who was himself a slaver, and in all the initial voyages to the New World, a good portion of the coastal peoples of the Caribbean, the Yucatan and the southeast portion of what is now the United States, were forcibly rounded up and shipped off by the thousands to work in the fields of Portugal and Spain. The slave trade became so lucrative that whole islands and entire coastlines were completely emptied of their inhabitants.

Not until the mid-sixteenth century, when the Portuguese, with the help of the Arabs, began exploiting the west and south coasts of Africa for a newer and closer source of slaves, did the wholesale imprisonment and exportation of Native Americans from the New World drop off, replaced by black Africans who soon became the mainstay of the burgeoning slavery business.

As Forbes’ research shows, Native Americans were not only employed as forced labor in Iberia, but were also sold into Italy and even France. It is therefore not unreasonable that Nostradamus may have come in contact with them and learned of their rich, diverse cultures and ancient wisdom. A number of his predictions, in fact, bear strong resemblances to several age-old Native American prophecies, particularly those of the Maya, Aztecs, Hopis and Iroquois.

Other Prophets and Apocalyptic Sources

As we have noted several times already, the French seer was not only familiar with a wide variety of influences and sources of information available to him, but he was especially knowledgeable concerning the prophetic wisdom preserved by each. Coming full circle from where we started, with Judeo-Christian mysticism, these traditions in particular have a rich heritage of visionary and apocalyptic literature, which Nostradamus drew upon quite readily for his own forecasts. These traditions were partly based on older Sibylline and classical concepts of the cyclical death of the world amid fire and flood (Plato, Hesiod, Ovid), in turn having their origins in the still older Hindu belief in the Yuga-cycles of time and destiny, mixed with Zoroastrian-Babylonian fatalism, and the idea of a universal war between good and evil.

Above and beyond these origins, both Hebrews and early Christian prophetic works managed to add their own distinctive, colorful portents and signs of impending Eschatos. Herein were described grand panoramic scenarios of phantasmal beasts rising out of the sea of humanity, eclipses, great earthquakes, Messiahs, Antichrists, global wars, hailstorms, persecutions of God’s people, cataclysmic fire, damnation—and the ever-present promise of a return to Paradise, and a Millennial New Earth beyond.

In the Old Testament, the Book of Daniel stands head and shoulders above the other Hebrew prophetic lore, while the New Testament foreshadowing for the future came to a climax with the apostle John’s apocalyptic extravaganza, the Book of Revelations. The French seer had his own very definite interpretations of the Biblical symbols describing the end of the present world, and the birth of a new world on the other side of the darkness.

[Copyright 2009. Joseph Robert Jochmans. All Rights Reserved.]