Nostradamus Effect

Excluding purely religious figures, Michel de Nostredame, or Nostradamus, is easily the most popular supernatural/paranormal predictor of future events in all of human history. This guy died in 1556, and yet today he continues to pop up in new books, websites, and TV shows. The History Channel seems committed to making sure the Nostradamus legacy lives on with its onslaught of questionable documentaries that link his writings to everything from the war in Afghanistan to Area 51. The funny thing is, however, Nostradamus doesn’t deserve any of this attention. His predictions, if we can even call them that, collapse under the cruel and unforgiving weight of about five minutes of thoughtful analysis.

Nostradamus was a sixteenth-century French doctor and astrologer. That mix of trades was not as crazy then as it might seem today. People in the 1500s were deeply ignorant about medicine and astronomy, so it made perfect sense to have your doctor explain how your birthdate determined the fate of your career and love life while he bled you dry in order to cure your sore throat.

Understandably, one might think that there must be something special about Nostradamus. After all, there were many fortunetellers, astrologers, and soothsayers banging about in Europe back in his day, but it’s his name that we all know. Even now, there are plenty of people who make magical predictions all the time. Some of them have many followers and earn lots of money. Their track records seem no better or worse than Nostradamus, yet he towers over them. Why?

Nostradamus is known today for only two reasons: good marketing and bad thinking. The reason his name survives and thrives is because few people take the time to think critically about what he is supposed to have written and whether or not any of it can reasonably be considered accurate predictions of important future events. The weak skepticism that is endemic in the public has allowed his myth to grow against all odds. His fame comes from the snowballing momentum of a concoction long known to capture minds and win hearts. It’s often described as “smoke and mirrors” or, if you prefer, just plain “bull.” The Nostradamus phenomenon is a good example of the illusion-of-truth effect. Hearing something over and over makes it believable to many people—no matter how silly it may be. No doubt conformity or the bandwagon effect comes into play here for many people as well. If you happen to have a circle of friends who constantly rave about the remarkable powers Nostradamus had, then your fallible human brain might be lured in.

A crucial piece of the Nostradamus puzzle is the manner in which he went about communicating his predictions. He wrote them as quatrains, four-verse poems. If you ever want to make it as a prophet, make sure to be as poetically ambiguous and confusing with your words as you can. The more flowery and hazy your language is, the more likely your predictions will be hailed as correct by sloppy thinkers one day. For example, Nostradamus did not write, “A viral plague will sweep across the world in 1918 and kill more than twenty million people.” He did not write, “On July 20, 1969, three men will journey to the Moon and two, named Armstrong and Aldrin, will walk upon its surface.” Predictions like that are far too clear and easy to give a pass or fail grade to.

We can’t even be sure that Nostradamus wrote the things his fans say he wrote because none of his original works have survived. The quotes you may have read or heard about on TV are translations of questionable copies of secondhand copies, and so on. Who knows? Maybe he really did predict the future with total accuracy, but we’ll never know because we can’t assess his original work. What we do know is that the predictions that have been popularized are not impressive by any reasonable standard. Read these lines attributed to Nostradamus and judge for yourself:

Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers: Most of the fighting shall be close by the Hister, It shall end in the great one being dragged in an iron cage, While the German shall be watching the infant Rhine.

Well, that couldn’t be any more clear. Obviously it is referring to Adolf Hitler, which is precisely what countless Nostradamus experts have declared. “Hister” is very close to “Hitler,” right? No denying that. Here we have a reference to someone who would not even be born until centuries after Nostradamus’s death, and yet Nostradamus knew of him. But hold on, “Hister” may sound a lot like “Hitler,” but it sounds even more like Hister, which is what the Danube River in Germany was called during Nostradamus’s day. Another clue that this might be about a river and have nothing to do with a twentieth-century dictator is the fact that the line preceding it says something about crossing a river. Don’t think I picked out a bad example to make Nostradamus belief seem silly. This is one of the most popular quatrains of all. No doubt some Nostradamus believers do not agree with the Hister-Hitler connection. Without exception, however, every believer I have had discussions with cited this one in an attempt to convince me that Nostradamus had supernatural powers.

There may not be much to the Nostradamus myth, but there is a valuable lesson here that can be applied broadly. If we don’t want to be duped, we have to resist placing trust in strained interpretations and trying too hard to make a claim fit the facts.

Good skeptics also give thought to context. Just because someone may be on a fancy television show that has nice special effects and a pleasing music score doesn’t mean that she necessarily knows what she is talking about or is telling the truth. Too many people hear a sound bite from a UFO, ghost, or Nostradamus “expert” and feel inclined to accept it as fact. Don’t do that! Think less about who is making a big claim and more about what is being claimed. Even if a Nobel Prize–winning scientist were to announce tomorrow that after careful study she had come to the conclusion that Nostradamus was a genuine prophet with supernatural abilities, it wouldn’t be enough to convince me. She would get my attention based on her credentials, of course, but without very good evidence, her claim would mean nothing.