ProjectMoosed Research Lab · Graded Evidence
Michel de Nostredame — "Nostradamus" — is the most famous prophet in Western history. This site reads his actual book, in its actual words, and grades every famous claim against the record: what is proven, what is documented, and what is hype built by 470 years of interpreters matching vague verses to events after the events happened.
Under a strict test — written before the event, specific enough to settle, translated faithfully, and interpreted that way before the event, not after — no Nostradamus quatrain is a proven prediction of a specific future event. That is not the same as saying he was a fraud. He was a real plague doctor and a working astrologer who told his readers, in his own preface, that he had written obscurely on purpose, that his calculations could fail, and that he declined the title of prophet. The hype was built later, by other people. The closest claim in the whole book — the death of King Henry II — is genuinely striking and still does not pass. His one famous quatrain carrying a real date, 1999, failed on schedule. Both facts belong on the record, and both are graded below.
The documented man is interesting enough without the embroidery: an expelled medical student who made a real living as an apothecary-physician, plague worker, almanac publisher, and court astrologer. His degree, his plague "cure," and his magic ritual are all later decoration.
Born in December 1503 to a family of Jewish converts to Catholicism. The birth itself is documented; the exact day — the 14th or the 21st — is not settled by a surviving record.
The university register survives: he matriculated on 23 October 1529 and was expelled for having worked as an apothecary — a manual trade barred to students — and for slandering the doctors. The famous doctorate he is usually given has, in the words of his leading modern scholar, "not a scrap of contemporary evidence" behind it. He practised for the rest of his life as an apothecary-physician, later styled "Doctor."
At Agen he married and had two children; wife and children all died, most likely of plague — documented in outline, her name and the cause not firmly recorded. Called to plague-stricken Aix in 1546, he became famous for his epidemic work. His rose pill is real — the recipe is in his own Traité des fardemens — but its efficacy is unproven, and the popular claim that he heroically refused bloodletting is contradicted by his own book, which describes bloodletting among his methods.
Settled at Salon, remarried (Anne Ponsarde, six children), and built a living on annual almanacs — the everyday, checkable forecasts almost nobody now reads. In 1555 he published the first part of Les Prophéties.
Royal patronage is documented: summoned to court in 1555–56, horoscopes commissioned, and under Charles IX appointed Counselor and Physician-in-Ordinary. The famous specifics — that he explained the "young lion" quatrain to the Queen, or examined the royal children's futures at Blois — are not in the contemporary record; they surface in print generations later.
He died at Salon on the night of 1–2 July 1566. The story that he predicted the day of his own death rests on a text his editor published after the fact, adjusted to fit. And the best-known detail of all — that he was buried standing up so no one would tread on him — appears nowhere in his surviving will. Vivid, universal, and absent from the one document that would have settled it.
Les Prophéties was published in stages: a first edition at Lyon in 1555 (353 quatrains — three "Centuries" and part of a fourth, with his Letter to his son César as preface), an enlarged edition in 1557, and the complete text known today through the posthumous 1568 edition, which adds the Epistle to King Henry II. The final count is 942 quatrains. A "Century" is simply a set of 100 verses — not a hundred years — and Century VII was left at 42, short of the thousand-verse "milliad" he announced. Only 18 of the 942 quatrains are tied to any date at all. His stated horizon, in the Letter to César, runs "from now to the year 3797."
In his own prefaces he is explicit: the work was "calculated" from the movements of the stars — judicial astrology, which he pointedly exempted from his own condemnation of magic. Knowledge came, he wrote to César, from "the revolution of the stars," worked at nightly vigils; not from frenzy, though the Epistle also speaks of "natural instinct accompanied by a poetic furor."
He also states the obscurity was deliberate policy — a protective style for dangerous times — and that the calculations "may not hold good for all nations." Grade: DOCUMENTED as his stated method, in his own words.
The working technique, his and his era's: find the planetary configuration that accompanied a known past event, project it forward to when the configuration repeats, and read the past event as the future one. His professional peers rejected exactly this — the astrologer Laurens Videl attacked him by name in print in 1558 for incompetence and for assuming comparative horoscopy could predict the future at all. The technical critique of Nostradamus is contemporary with Nostradamus.
Read against his sources, the workshop is books, not visions. The Mirabilis Liber (1522), a bestselling apocalyptic anthology, supplied much of the disaster material. Richard Roussat's Livre de l'estat et mutations des temps (1549–50) was taken over, in places, almost word for word — including the arithmetic behind his end-dates. Livy, Suetonius, and Plutarch, the medieval chroniclers, the biblical apocalypses, and a prodigy-book supplied the events and omens; even his lists of place-names track a contemporary road guide. History, projected forward under returning stars.
"Plagiarist" as a one-word verdict is an anachronism — borrowing was the era's normal method. His leading scholar's label is fairer: Bibliomancer — a diviner who worked from books.
Quatrains I.1–I.2 describe a solitary night ritual: seated alone, a rod, a moistened hem, a flame. Popular books render the French selle d'aerain as a brass tripod; the word means a brass stool. The passage is modelled, scholars find, on Iamblichus's ancient De Mysteriis — a literary self-portrait, not a report. The verses are documented; that he actually performed this ritual is unproven.
Thirteen famous claims, graded against the original French text. Every claim was tested the same way: Is the text authentic and pre-event? Is it specific — a name, a date, a place that can settle it? Is the translation faithful? Was it read this way before the event? And does it fit this event better than a dozen others? A claim that fails the tests is not upgraded to make a better story.
Two of the thirteen claims above are not bad readings of Nostradamus. They are texts he never wrote at all.
The verse that flooded the world after September 11, 2001 — "In the City of God there will be a great thunder, two brothers torn apart by Chaos…" — was invented by Neil Marshall, a Canadian university student, in a 1997 essay demonstrating how easy it is to manufacture a convincing fake prophecy. Unknown hands cut it from the essay, credited it to "Nostradamus, 1654" — 88 years after his death — and added a "third big war" line. Later versions spliced in lines from a real quatrain (X,72) with its failed 1999 date quietly removed, and eventually added "two metal birds" lines that exist in no text at all. Grade: FABRICATED, established and documented by Snopes and by the text record itself.
The prose passage shared worldwide in 2020 — "a twin year (2020) from which will arise a queen (corona)…" — exists in no Nostradamus work, in no edition, anywhere. Fact-checkers at Snopes, PolitiFact, and Reuters searched Les Prophéties and found nothing resembling it; it is unattested before the pandemic it "predicts," and it is not even in quatrain form — the glosses are baked in as parentheses, a format he never used. The genuine plague verses then pressed into service are real but generic: the corpus mentions plague at least 35 times, because plague was the catastrophe of his own lifetime. Grade: FABRICATED (the viral text); the real plague verses, UNPROVEN.
The skeptic James Randi once invented a quatrain of deliberate gibberish, circulated it as authentic Nostradamus, and watched interpreters confidently match it to a real disaster. Marshall's student essay was the same experiment by accident, at global scale. If a method can "confirm" a text written in 1997 — or gibberish written as a joke — the method is confirming nothing. That is why this lab grades the text first, and the story second.
What is useful in Nostradamus, we kept: long-horizon attention to the recurring patterns of the world — wars, plagues, successions, disasters — the study of cycles, and the nerve to catalogue many calls instead of a few safe ones. What made his calls ungradeable, we discarded: the vagueness, the anagrams, the missing dates. At predictions.projectmoosed.com this lab now publishes its own world predictions the way his never were: in plain language, with a probability, a deadline, and a named source that settles each one — locked at publication and graded in public, hits and misses alike. The founding register of 18 predictions for 2027 was locked on November 3, 2026.
Grades rest on the primary text of Les Prophéties (early-edition transcriptions, Internet Sacred Text Archive and the nostredame.info full text; quatrain II,51 from the 1558 edition as printed in James Randi's JREF Encyclopedia of Claims), his Letters and Epistles in the Ward (1891) translations, and the modern scholarship: Peter Lemesurier, The Nostradamus Encyclopedia and Nostradamus, Bibliomancer; Pierre Brind'Amour, Nostradamus astrophile; Stéphane Gerson, Nostradamus: How an Obscure Renaissance Astrologer Became the Modern Prophet of Doom; the claimant literature itself (Ward 1891; Cheetham 1973; Reading 2005) quoted as the claim, not as authority; and the Snopes / PolitiFact / Reuters fact-checks for the fabricated texts. One limit, stated plainly: quatrain texts were verified against early-edition transcriptions; direct page-image verification against the BnF/Gallica facsimiles of the 1555 and 1557 editions is a logged open item for the next tranche, and spelling variants between editions are noted in the research file wherever they could matter. They change no grade in Edition 1.