Sixteenth-century French physician and mystic known today for his cryptic poems that purported to foretell many future events. Born in to a well-educated Jewish family who later converted to Roman Catholicism, Nostradamus had a wide and deep education in languages, science, religion, and Astrology. A gifted healer, he saved many patients from the ravages of the great plague, and he also developed his own remedies, which were said to be more benign than the bleeding and blistering techniques that were popular during his day.
After he lost his own wife and two children to the plague, he drifted around Europe for a time and became more involved in the occult. He married a wealthy widow and began auguring, summoning mystic visions in a bowl of water. Astrologer to French kings Henry II and Charles IX, he became known for the accuracy of his prophecies. Around 1550, he began to record his prophetic visions in a great series of poems he called “centuries” each century contained 100 four-lined verses or quatrains. Because of the era’s ambivalent attitude toward the occult and its virulence toward anything that could be considered heretical, he couched his prophecies in mystery, mingling a variety of languages and ambiguous images. Most of these poems were published during his lifetime in two editions of Les Propheties de M. Michel Nostradamus. He composed 10 centuries (the seventh had only 42 quatrains, for some unknown reason) and was planning two more at the time of his death. He told one of his sons he had made forecasts up to the year 3797.