Thanks
to Rowan for this:
Claim: A 1654 Nostradamus prediction said World War III would
begin with the fall of "two brothers," a reference to the destroyed
World Trade Center towers.
Status: False.
Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2001]
"In the City of God there will be a great thunder,
Two brothers torn apart by Chaos,
while the fortress endures,
the great leader will succumb,
The third big war will begin when the big city is burning"
Nostradamus 1654
Origins: The turmoil of recent events has us all scrambling, some
to look for solace and meaning, others for the terrorists responsible,
and yet others for signs that what happened could have been prevented
or at least foreseen. The 11 September 2001 attack on America
destroyed not only the two World Trade Center towers in New York
City, a chunk of the Pentagon in Washington, and caused untold
loss of life, it also shook America's sense of invulnerability.
No longer do Americans presume safety in an unsafe world.
For some, that realization is an eye-opener, unsettling but necessary,
in that a child's blissful unawareness has been replaced (at great
cost) with an adult's more clear-eyed view of the world and its
sometimes horrifying ways. For others, it spells the beginning
of the end, in that they equated an illusion of safety with its
reality and thus now feel their world is ending. It is the fears
of that second group that are given voice in the Nostradamus prediction
circulated on the Internet even before the dust had settled in
New York.
The French
physician and astrologer Nostradamus (1503-1566) penned numerous
quatrains populated by obscure imagery that the credulous have
ever after attempted to fit to the events of their times. These
predictions can often ring somewhat true in that the images employed
are so general they can be found in almost every event of import,
but by the same token, the prophecies are never a dead-on fit
because the wordings are far too general. Not that this stops
anyone from believing in them; our society's need for mysticism
runs far too deep to ever allow for that.
Those looking for the certainty of a Nostradamus prophecy come
true have been known to sledge hammer the results to force a fit
by inventing fanciful translations from the original French, bend
over backwards to assert one named term is really another, and
(as in this case) outright fabricate part or all of the prediction.
Nostradamus did not write the quatrain now being attributed to
him. (One wonders how a guy who died in 1566 could have written
an item
identified as being penned in 1654 anyway.) It originated with
a student at Brock University in Canada in the 1990s, appearing
on a
web
page essay on Nostradamus. That particular quatrain was offered
by the page's author, Neil Marshall, as a fabricated example to
illustrate how easily an important-sounding prophecy can be crafted
through the use of abstract imagery. He pointed out how the terms
he used were so deliberately vague they could be interpreted to
fit any number of cataclysmic events.
This "prophecy" is bogus. The second quatrain is entirely made-up,
and the first quatrain is composed of lines taken from two completely
different prophecies of Nostradamus' linked together for effect
(Lines referencing "Normans" and "Mongols" which have no plausible
application to current events have been excised by whoever concatenated
these two pieces.) The first two lines are from a verse which
describes events that would supposedly have taken place in July
of 1999 (not September of 2001) and has long since been associated
with a wide variety of occurrences -- both real and fictional.
(An excellent dissertation on this "prediction" can be found here.)
The second two lines of the first quatrain are taken from what
is often cited as a Nostradamus writing identified as Century
6, Quatrain 97:
Cinq and quarante degrez ciel bruslera
Feu approcher de la grand cité neuve
Instant grand flamme esparse sautera
Quand on voudra des Normans faire preuue.
An approximate English translation would be:
Five and forty steps the sky will burn
Fire approaching the large new city
Instantly a great thin flame will leap
When someone will want to test the Normans.
Even if this is a real prophecy of Nostradamus', it simply provides
more evidence of how much shoehorning has to be performed to get
one of these vague "predictions" to fit modern occurrences. It
cites no date whatsoever. The line about a sky that "will burn
at forty-five steps" is interpreted to refer to New York City,
the "forty-five steps" being the Big Apple's latitude -- never
mind that New York City is actually below the 41° latitude mark,
and that several major North American cities (e.g., Boston, Milwaukee,
Chicago, Minneapolis, Toronto, Montreal) are much closer to 45°
latitude than Gotham. As well, New York (one of North America's
oldest cities) is only "new" in the sense that its name contains
the word "new" (a criterion which describes many other of the
world's large cities, such as New Delhi),
the flames resulting from the terrorist attack in New York were
anything but "thin" (or "scattered"); and nobody has a clue what
"Normans" (i.e., the French) have to do with hijacked airliners
crashing into American cities.
All in all, the Great
Chicago Fire of 1871 is a much better fit for this one. So
is the explosion resulting from the collision of the ships Mont
Blanc and Imo in 1917, which killed thousands of people and destroyed
much of Halifax
-- a city just a few degrees shy of 45° latitude. To top it all
off, this very same verse was widely cited five years ago as having
"predicted" the mysterious crash of TWA
Flight 800 in July 1996.
So yeah... I got it wrong, Gav. I didn't see it at a history site,
someone else did! :0)
