The Internet is an
amazing thing,
innit? In
the olden days, an
urban legend would take
years to come about, going through a
decade's worth of
slow nurturing, passing
hand to hand,
mouth to mouth,
Ma Bell lending her little
twisted
wires to the cause... but now, someone creates a
neat little
factoid about
Nostradamus, and
one billion e-mails later,
Dan Rather starts rattling off various
prophecies on
live TV...
"When the eclipse of the Sun will then be/The monster will be seen in plain daylight. For more on tomorrow's eclipse and the impending doom of us all, let's go to Connie Chung at the newly-arisen Atlantis. Connie?"First thing to know about Nostradamus : the dude was French. Therefore, the dude spoke French (or the probably archaic 15th century version of French). And so translations to English are, by nature, inexact. So, you can't do exact phrase matches in a search, because the translation may be changed slightly (or more) - you're looking for information of the 'pig-faced men', and the translation you're looking in only has 'hog-faced men'.
But it's close enough for Government work - every single online search in both Yahoo!/Google search engines and specialized Nostradamus search engines yielded nothing close to the 'village idiot' quatrain above.
It's a hoax, folks, but a good one - it really sounds like it came from the desk of La Cosa Nostra himself. With one tiny exception, of course - I can't recall ever seeing Nostradamus name a month in a prophecy. Precision wasn't his strong point.
There are neat quatrains that others have found, however. Let your brain masticate on this little gem :
The year following discoveries out of a flood
Two leaders elected, the first one will not hold
For one of them refuge from fleeing a shadow
Plundered will be the house which the first will maintain.
Dubya fleeing from the spectre of His Old Man, and the House of Gore torn asunder. Apparently, Nostradamus knew about Indecision 2000 - hell, to true believers, he couldn't have gotten more precise if he had said "Dimples and Pregnacies will cause strife/No one in the land of palm trees can punch a hole". All makes sense, see?
Sort of. Not really. Anyways.
As a parting shot - Century 1, Quatrain 78.
To an old leader will be born an idiot heir
Weak both in knowledge and in war.
The leader of France is feared by his sister
Battlefields divided, conceded to the soldiers.