Quick informal poll: whose your favourite French sixteenth century apothecary ever? For me, there’s only one candidate even in the running, and that’s Michel de Nostredame.
My friend Sara linked me to this story earlier, in which one of the aforementioned judicial astrologer’s quatrains is quoted. The writer (and I use the term loosely) of the article asks us to consider whether this prophecy might warn that the Large Hadron Collider – the massively exciting particle accelerator soon to begin operating at CERN in Switzerland – is going to destroy the world and kill us all.
The prophecy reads as follows:
All should leave Geneva.
Saturn turns from gold to iron,
The contrary positive ray (RAYPOZ) will exterminate everything,
There will be signs in the sky before this.
My first thought on glancing at it was that this wasn’t even a real Nostradamus quatrain. After 9/11, certain entirely fake quatrains were attributed to him, as if he’d predicted the attacks on the World Trade Centre with much greater accuracy and specificity than was actually contained in anything he’d said. It seemed plausible that someone might have essentially fictionalised something similar in this case, to add to all the doomsaying surrounding the LHC.
But no, I was wrong. What’s quoted above is actually the 44th quatrain of the ninth “century” (sets of one hundred prophecies into which they were grouped) written by Nostradamus. Well… sort of.
It’s not simply been made up, anyway, but it is a very loose translation. This makes it very easy for the article to ponder how all this might relate to the LHC. I mean, it’s in Geneva, and a “contrary positive ray” sounds like something a particle accelerator might have, right? And turning gold to iron, that’s… well, that’s chemistry, in a sort of reverse-alchemy type sense, which still sounds like science, right? Which means we’re all doomed! Oh noes!
It doesn’t actually say any of that as such, of course. It just asks “what-if” type questions and tells us that “there are those would theorise [sic]”, in the kind of way that suggests that it’s just something fun to think about and not to be taken too seriously, but it’d be closed-minded and arrogant of you to call it out as being total bollocks.
Well, you don’t scare me. This is utter bollocks.
What Michel actually wrote was this:
Migrés, migrés de Geneue trestous,
Saturne d’or en fer se changera:
Le contre Raypoz exterminera tous,
Auant l’aduent le ciel signes fera.
My French is a little rusty, but this place seems to have a pretty thorough dissection, so let’s take it line by line.
As far as getting the hell out of Geneva is concerned, there’s not much ambiguity.
In the next line, Saturne could apparently also be translated as: “The sky”. I’m not entirely clear why this should be (though in ancient mythology Saturn was the son of Ouranos, the sky-god), but it’s thought that the sky changing colour is a reference to chemical war – suitably apocalyptic, perhaps, but bugger all to do with a black hole being created and swallowing up the planet. Saturne is simply translated as “Saturn” here and here, but this doesn’t do much to make the line any more relevant to the LHC.
More interesting than this is something that must have shorted out my bullshit detector the first time I skimmed the article. I’ve only just noticed the conclusion they’ve drawn from this: “‘Saturn turns from gold to iron’ surely refers to a transmutation of elements, or maybe even a black hole created that will fly off into space and land on the planet Saturn, turning Saturn into a black hole.”
Something this retarded deserves a moment of silent contemplation.
…
A black hole “that will fly off into space and land on the planet Saturn” (emphasis mine). I’m no Bad Astronomer (more of a plain old bad astronomer, if I’m honest), but even I can see that this is painfully, comically stupid, and I hope the hack who came up with this piece has a shard of glass from his computer monitor fly off into space and land on an artery in his hand the next time he sits down to type up something this moronic. (Not really. It’s a joke used for humourous effect.) They’re already having to stretch Nostradamus’s words to breaking point and still they can’t say anything to predict danger more sensibly than this.
And as we see on the third line, they really are stretching it. As far as I can tell, the translation “contrary positive ray” is entirely fanciful, based solely on some English words that sound a bit like the word (Raypoz) that the French guy wrote in the middle of a load of French words. It’s only terminologically accurate in referring to anything about the LHC in the faintest sense, and it seems unlikely this would have any bearing on anything Nostradamus is likely to have meant.
The best suggestion that I could be bothered to find about Raypoz itself is that it’s a corruption of Ray (as in light) and Pax or Paz (as in peace), and in fact refers to Christ (the “light and peace”). So, “Le contre Raypoz” refers to the anti-Christ. This makes some sense, inasmuch as it’s not out of character for Nostradamus to be making predictions about the anti-Christ. Granted, the guy who suggested this in the article I’m reading on the site Nostradamia could be less of a learned academician, and more of a nut who actually takes all this crap seriously, but he’s the guy with what seems like the most coherent explanation so far.
And then, signs in the sky, yadda yadda. This could be anything. Literally anything remotely unusual, anywhere in the sky – from aircraft activity to the behaviour of stars billions of light years away – could be interpreted as being a “sign”, if that’s what you want to prove. There’s nothing useful about telling us something this vague. Actual scientists – you know, people whose predictions aren’t generally laughable – tend to be a bit more specific, and say things that are actually testable. If they didn’t go any further than “If stuff falls down, then we’re definitely right about this gravity thing” then they probably wouldn’t have got so far with inventing things like enormous particle accelerators.
There’s a poll attached to this article asking whether we should be worried about the world ending this weekend, when the first bits of the LHC are switched on. After several thousand votes, “No” is currently winning by 55% to 45%.
Well, now I’m depressed.
Question time:
– Do you think Nostradamus had any predictive powers worth paying attention to? Why, or why not?
– Without using the phrase “for fuck’s sake”, why is a black hole unlikely to fly off into space and land on the planet Saturn, turning Saturn into a black hole?
– Why on earth did I make the title of this post into a Harry Potter pun? I mean, what’s the boy wizard got to do with any of this?
Update 10/09/08: Wow, this has become a hugely well-viewed post over the last few weeks, at least by this blog’s usual standards. There’s some more stuff I’ve written in my most recent entry here, if you’re interested in learning some more about the Large Hadron Collider itself, and the blog is updated daily with news and thoughts about stuff, sometimes a bit less vague than that, so feel free to stick around or check back later, or leave comments on anything of interest.
Saturn has greater gravity than Earth, so it is theoretically plausible that a micro black hole created from a head on collider collision could have enough velocity to escape Earth’s gravity but not have enough velocity to escape the Sun or another planet with more gravity than Earth such as Saturn.
Dr. Rossler calculates that a micro black hole would require 50 months to 50 years to destroy a planet.
If the Large Hadron Collider begins collisions and stable micro black holes are created, CERN predicts that the micro black holes would likely be created at a rate of one per second and two years might be required before CERN could confirm that stable micro black holes were actually created.
Unless the LHC created a few micro black holes and then shut down, it is likely that Earth would be destroyed before the Sun or other planets.
Cheers,
LHCFacts.org
jtankers, you don’t know what you’re talking about. LHCfacts is bullshit from beginning to end, and Rössler either doesn’t know what he’s talking about or just says something to stay in the media. Even if you don’t read German, go here and click on the links.
Incidentally, Rössler has updated his “prediction” to “50 to 500 years”. In other words, he’ll be able to say he’s right for the rest of his life. Neat, eh?
Well In order to answer your last question I would like to take into account point #2 on your “What Kind of Sick Weirdo…” page If you are referring to Nostradamus as a character in a book then you most likely are reading it and being an omniscient character, so you know what is going to happen already.
WAY long sentence. lol :p
But, seriously, I have no clue…
I forgot the period in that big long sentence. Hence, big long sentence.
Iron is the final element made by stella nucleosynthesis ( the nuclear reactions that occur within stars ). In extremely large explosions stuff becomes iron ( Saturn? ). Just a thought.
p.s. Saturn has a large ring
Who is the moron that would actually want to play around with something as catastrophic as a black whole? For people who are supposed to be brilliant they sure rank the highest on the stupid scale. I just worry about our childrens future and with all of the people playing God with science, if they’ll have one.
well the only thing i can say about norstradamus’s prediction about Geneva being in shit loads of trouble would be the only thing right now thats under way is the LHC…We can all speculate this and that but all i can say is The only thing that might threatin Geneva would be this LHC if it goes wrong……….But Norstradamus predictions also indicate that there will be signs in the sky before that. It time to buy those UV glasses Genveans and try to sit in your front yard looking up in the sky when the LHC is opperating and have a One way ticket to qautimala…
Nostradamus has made mistakes with names in the past, like calling Hitler Hister. CERN was colliding gold ions at the RHIC before they built the LHC, so maybe he made a mistake by calling CERN Saturn, so CERN is turning from colliding gold ions at the RHIC. It seems all too eerily accurate to me.
Maybe when Nostradamus referred to ‘Hister’, he was actually predicting the inexorable rise of a different evil despotic dictator entirely, Heston Blumenthal. The alchemical references to turning gold into iron show eerie parallels with Blumenthal’s popular TV series and accompanying book Kitchen Chemistry, in which ingredients are combined in a manner reminiscent of nuclear fission. It’s all starting to fit together with a chilling clarity.
Sorry, Hister has to do with a river, the Hister. It’s not a misspelling of Hitler.
Just throwing this out there. Many believe that Nostradamus spoke metaphorically and was just relaying what he saw in his visions as best as he could givin the times he lived in.
Maybe the whole Saturns gold turn to iron thang relates to the actual vision of a atomic/nuclear blast.
how many of us have seen these explosions go off in the history channel etc. What you have is a quick flash that expands as fast as the blink of an eye. That flash resembles the rings of saturn, no? and everything left starting from the core of the explosion, stretching as far as the “rings” do, are left burned black like iron.
I believe that everything from Nastradamus predictions, Apocalypse, Aztec, Quran, Bible are constantly speaking metaphorically and obviously different people will interperet it differently.
Just thinking 0utside the box…
In answer to:
“…the article I’m reading on the site Nostradamia could be less of a learned academician, and more of a nut who actually takes all this crap seriously,”
I appreciate you commenting my website, but I wish it wasn’t insulting.
Am I a scholar? I don’t have a PhD in Nostradamus studies. But, who does? Most interpretations in the Nostradamia net (not org, check your link) website are scholar explanations and not interpretations.
I speak fluent French, English, Spanish and a couple more languages and I am not a nut. I have a passion. I read the Nostradamus text in old French and understand most of it, which you can’t say of most “scholars” on the net and elsewhere. I simply do research. What you were able to read in English is an early version of a collective works, which is now advanced but only available in French. I realized there was so much crap on the English language web side, where SEO tactics take precedence over facts and pertinence, that I gave up the maintenance of that website a good 10 years ago.
As to whether I (or we) take this crap seriously, the answer is an unquestionable “Yes’ insofar the Nostradamus prophecies have consistently appealed to humans since they were redacted. They are not to be ignored.
As to whether they have a prophetic value, the answer is “so far yes” since the 2 Nostradamus prophetic dates were accomplished. Don’t be fooled by amateurish biased interpretations and story telling. There are only 2 specific dates in the Nostradamus Centuries from the day of their writing to today. They are the following:
1) The foreword of the Centuries ‘Letter to the king Henry II’ reads: “…year 1792 will be thought of / believed to be a renovation of centuries…” As any scholar should know, the French revolution took place in 1792. Don’t be confused by history books that mention 1789 instead. The French revolution took place in 1792. 1789 marks the beginning of riots in Paris, and was not a revolution. A new revolutionary calendar was enacted from Sept. 22 1792. It redefined year 1. Monarchy was abolished in November, the king sentenced to death in Dec. and beheaded in January of 1993. I personally find the seer’s enigmatic sentence brilliant of truth and predictive value.
2) 1999 “A great king of terror will come from the sky… in ‘Sept. 1999′”.
The temptation to pretend this refers to 9-11 was great for all webmasters. But, there is no way it comes anywhere close. It refers to a Sun-Moon eclipse that took place all over France in August 1999. ‘Sept’. may take the double meaning of ‘seven’ or ‘September’. Difficult to chose! Let’s just say that the Nostradamus days calendar was Julian and we are now using the Gregorian, which caught back 17 missing days since the calendar was defined. So, our 11 of August 1999 would have been July 17 for Nostradamus. It was a common Roman practice to associate eclipses with dark predictions. So, you may speculate that it had to do with the 2d war of Chechnya that developed from August to October 1rst 1999 and resulted in the bombing of Grozny by the Russian AF. This last one is called an interpretation. The Moon eclipse is a fact. Sept 2001 had nothing to do with terrorism (history will tell). The second war of Chechnya is referred to by historians as the ‘first war on terror’.
Am I a nut? I think I am quite rational, using method, empirical knowledge and thoughts in a balanced way.
http://www.nostradamia.com/
Repost : please void if duplicate
Ever so often all the planets line up in the universe with the sun, this makes each planet in turn eclipse each other from the suns rays & magnetic pull ! This would cause each planet to change colour & also effects the natural habitat of each planet ! This is what most of the old astrominers banked on to put the fear of God into people. This universe has been well designed by something, not a human !!!
If he refers to sign in the sky, why not interpret the “saturn turns from gold to iron” as planetary constellation: Afaik the alchemists used the same symbols for gold and sun aswell as iron and mars. So maybe it can be read as something like “at the time saturn changes from sun to mars (in the sky)” marking a point in time rather than a transmutation. The contre RAYPOZ may also indicate that you should read it backwards “contre” and since its written in caps maybe its an anagram then. If you count letters in alphabet backwards (R->I, A->Z, …) it may read as “IZLAMB (or anagrams of it) will exterminate all ( in Geneva?)”. Just an alternative interpretation.
Reblogged this on Haunebu7's Blog .
CERN is trying to open portals to other dimensions, not just find the “God Particle.” Even Steven Hawking has warned what they’re attempting could destroy the universe. So yeah, out of all of Nostro’s prophecies (Hisler, etc.) this one could actually come true. Weird that he chose Geneva.