Why People Think Nostradamus Predicted The Rise Of Hitler

The strength of Nostradamus' prophecies comes from their vagueness and his use of generalizations. Additionally, he carefully selected common events that reoccur throughout history: natural disasters, epidemics, and political despots. These repeated events make them easily applicable to the specificities of any era, writes Britannica. This technique has historical precedent and was common enough to

The strength of Nostradamus' prophecies comes from their vagueness and his use of generalizations. Additionally, he carefully selected common events that reoccur throughout history: natural disasters, epidemics, and political despots. These repeated events make them easily applicable to the specificities of any era, writes Britannica. This technique has historical precedent and was common enough to get its own name: bibliomancy, says History. Like Nostradamus, the bibliomancer lifts specific historical moments from old texts and then uses astrology to predict when the event will happen again.

Nostradamus compiled his predictions into a book called "Centuries," organized into sections containing 100 quatrains each (per Britannica). His writing uses intentionally obscure language giving rise to multiple interpretations. For example, he often used "New City" to reference a location. Conveniently "New City" can be applied to any burgeoning metropolis, explains The Washington Post. "Nef," another favorite word, could refer to a cathedral or a ship, providing two different predictions for each use.

Further obscuring his prose, Nostradamus' quatrains have been mistranslated and misinterpreted. Prediction-seekers find their answers by cherry-picking whichever poor translation best fits their needs and then will ignore the rest. The linguist and translator Peter Lemesurier, in Live Science, accuses those interpreters of "shamelessly twisting half-understood words retrospectively to fit the proposed event, or in some cases even twisting the event itself to fit the words." Such is the case with those who say Nostradamus predicted Hitler's rise to power.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7qL7Up56eZpOkunCElHBrb29frLW6ec%2BepqmklWLBqbXNpGSnp6Opv6KwwKasrGWgp7KltcKtnJ1lpJ2ybr7IrJxmp5ZitarAy56paA%3D%3D

 Share!