The Riddle of Nostradamus: A Critical Dialogue (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society)

Modern readers tend to dismiss Nostradamus as a leftover from superstitious ages or as an inspired visionary. In this discussion, Georges Dumezil, scholar of myth and religion, takes Nostradamus very seriously indeed. Can one foresee the future, Dumezil asks, and fail to understand it? At the beginning of the 19th century, commentators on Nostradamus found in the 20th quatrain of Nostradamus's "Century 9" a bundle of precise details that seemed to predict the arrest of Louis XVI as he fled the French Revolution. Other details in the quatrain remained unexplained. Why was the person described as "le moyne noir"? What did the second verse signify: "Deux parts, vaultorte, Herne, la pierre blanche"? Given these puzzles, what can scholarship contribute to their understanding? Dumezil explores three possibilities: a philological and historical study of the text to clarify its enigmas by a deeper investigation of Louis XVI's unsuccessful flight to Varennes; a logical analysis, determining how Nostradamus would have interpreted a view of the 18th century from his vantage in the 16th; and, finally, a metaphysical enquiry into the status and process of prediction. Written in dialogue form, this work discusses challenging dogmas, even scholarly ones, and raises questions about how much we want to know, and why.