----------
> From: malamute <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Nostradamus Anyone?
> Date: Thursday, September 13, 2001 2:01 PM
>
> Somebody else sent me this, and I am in the process of tracking it down
for
> accuracy. A lot of the sites are down due to high traffic. I am
officially
> spooked.
>
> Nostradamus' prediction on WW3:
>
> "In the year of the new century and nine months,
> From the sky will come a great King of Terror...
> The sky will burn at forty-five degrees.
> Fire approaches the great new city..."
>
> "In the city of york there will be a great collapse,
> 2 twin brothers torn apart by chaos
> while the fortress falls the great leader will succumb
> third big war will begin when the big city is burning"
>
> I've been listening to way too much Art Bell,
> Matthew Bos
>
Read more slashdot.
False Prophecy
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
The URL for this page is http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/predict.htm
Urban Legends Reference Pages � 1995-2001 by Barbara and David P.
Mikkelson This material may not be reproduced without permission
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 prophesies 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 prophesy 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. (A dissertation on how a somewhat similar-sounding
real prophesy of Nostradamus' has been interpreted in a variety of wildly
different ways can be found here.) It appears someone mistook Marshall's
illustrative example for an actual Nostradamus prophecy and, not content
to let well enough alone, added "The third big war will begin when the
big city is burning." A fabrication was thus further fabricated. But
that wasn't the end of it. More fakery was piled on in later versions
that now included all of the text quoted in the Example section above but
now concluded with:
"on the 11th day of the 9 month that...two metal birds would crash into
two tall statues...in the new city... and the world will end soon after"
Similarly, another enhanced version incorporates the Example text into a
more detailed prophecy:
And Nostradamus predicted this (who knows how long ago): "In the year of
the new century and nine months, From the sky will come a great King of
Terror... The sky will burn at forty-five degrees. Fire approaches the
great new city..." "In the city of york there will be a great collapse, 2
twin brothers torn apart by chaos while the fortress falls the great
leader will succumb third big war will begin when the big city is
burning"
Needless to say, these versions are as fake as the first was. Barbara
"la cosa nostradamus" Mikkelson Last updated: 11 September 2001
