No more sifting through unsanitary goat knuckles, searching for abstractions in tealeaves, shaking the Mattel magic eight ball, listening to Yellow Submarine backwards, or trudging India’s highlands in search of infamously reclusive gurus—instead, look no further for answers than Les Propheties, the 1555 work of Michel de Nostradame.

Basically, Notradamus assumed that planetary alignment influenced world events—he correlated celestial configurations to concurrent event, and then calculated when the planets would again reach this alignment, predicting that, at that time, similar events would occur. (This enhanced by trance-aided pseudo-scholarly interpretation of existing sources including Savonarola, Joachim de Fiore, the Bible and Egyptian hieroglyphics, the last of which had not yet been interpreted but were widely understood to be cool in a magically arcane sort of way).

Though some naysayers point to “retroactive clairvoyance” (i.e. the interpretive clarity of hindsight), it is generally understood by readers of the Celestine Prophecy and frequent posters to the news pages of National UFO Reporting Center that Nostradamus successfully predicted the death of Henry II of France, the great fire of London, the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon (and Hitler), the exile of Franco, the works of Louis Pasteur and Charles De Gaulle, and the Kennedy assassination (perhaps the terrorist attacks of September 11, as well).

For example, he writes of Henry II’s death: The young lion will overcome the older one/On the field of combat in a single battle/He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage/Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death. Henry II was killed in a jousting accident when a splinter from his younger opponent’s lance snuck through the visor of his golden helmet, piercing his left eye and exiting his ear. Henry suffered for days before finally succumbing. Both jousters used shields embossed with lions.

Spooky, huh?

Unfortunately, Nostradamus also predicts massive earthquakes, World War III and the rapidly approaching end of the world, so, generally speaking, very soon it will suck to be us.

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