What are the Prophecies?
The Prophecies are a collection of prophetic verses by Nostradamus (Michel de Nostredame), a 16th-century French physician and astrologer. The first edition was published in Lyon, France, in 1555. The book is made up of “Centuries,” groups of 100 four-line verses (quatrains), totaling about 940 verses.
The Japanese title Shoseiki (“the centuries”) came from translating “Centuries” (groups of 100 verses) as “centuries” of time. It is now considered a mistranslation, and the book is also called the Prophecies or the Centuries.
The seventh month of 1999 and the King of Terror
The most famous verse in Japan is Century 10, Quatrain 72, which says, in effect, “In the year 1999, seventh month, from the sky will come a great King of Terror.” When Goto Ben’s 1973 book Nostradamus no Daiyogen (The Great Prophecies of Nostradamus) presented this as a prophecy of humanity’s destruction, it became a bestseller and was made into a film, and the story that “the world will end in 1999” spread across Japan.
But July 1999 came and went, and the King of Terror never appeared. The verse has been interpreted in many ways, as an astronomical event, a war or the arrival of a certain person.
Did Nostradamus’s prophecies come true?
Some of the verses, such as one said to have foretold the death of King Henry II of France, struck in the eye during a jousting tournament (1559), raised Nostradamus’s fame. His verses are also sometimes interpreted as predicting the rise of Napoleon and Hitler and the world wars.
However, most of the verses do not clearly state times or places, and their expressions are vague and symbolic, so it has been pointed out that they can be interpreted in any way once an event has occurred. Like Prince Shotoku’s Miraiki in Japan and the Illuminati card game, whose card designs are said to have predicted the future, it is a book that makes us think about how “prophecies” are born and spread.
