Här följer en liten artikel på engelska som jag har skrivit om siaren (?) Nostradamus
Me and some of my friends somehow came to discuss the 16th: century seer Nostradamus over a cup of coffee the other day. And even though I have never believed in these sorts of things, I find it remarkable that so many people around the globe seem to accept the fact that he was a true prophet who could foresee the future. So I decided to refresh my knowledge about this man, and see if I had missed something important. And the easiest way to go about if you want to get some information about something is to do it through the internet. So I typed in Nostradamus name at www.google.com and got more than 208 000 hits. The article that I finally decided to work with contained a biography of Nostradamus . And for someone who has never heard anything about Nostradamus before, this biography contains some fundamental information. You can of course read about his life in general, when and where he was born, when, where and why he died etc. The article also contains a little bit about his education, his family and how it was to live in Europe during this era.
But I found nothing new about his claimed ability to see into the future. The man or woman who wrote this article only states that he indeed was a seer, without even trying to explain how or why. Nostradamus wrote hundreds of predictions in verse called quatrains, and all of these quatrains are supposed to reveal some future events, or actually his future and our past. It is believed that he was able to predict a lot of major historic events, like Napoleon's rise and fall, both of the world wars, Hitler, the atomic bomb, mankind’s journey to the moon and many many other things. The only problem is that his quatrains are written in some sort of secret code that makes it completely impossible to interpret, or so it is claimed. So the prophecies can’t be translated into an understandable prediction until the events that it was supposed to foresee already have happened. And I don’t know, but this seems to be a little bit fishy to me. And what is the use of having prophecies about the future if you can’t understand them anyway?
But there is one other theory to what these quatrains really are about, and that alternative doesn’t have anything to do with forecasts. It is instead suggested that Nostradamus was only describing what took place in France and the world during his lifetime. But due to the political climate that existed in France at this time, he could not describe it without camouflaging it. If he had written it as it truly was, he would surely have gotten some kind of punishment. And he was already accused of heresy so I can understand that he didn’t want to take any chances. This theory sounds much more accurate to me, but I think that it is hard to alter the popular seer-theory that is so widely spread.
If there really exists people with the ability to see into the future is hard for me to speculate about, but if there were I think that some proof already would have been presented. It is so easy for charlatans to claim that they have abilities such as this, because it is almost impossible to prove them wrong. No one but the person himself knows what is going on inside his or her mind. But I am sceptic to all of these kinds of hocus-pocus; it doesn’t matter if it is an astrologer or fortune-teller. It is, to my humble opinion, only a question of swindlers who deceive innocent and gullible people.