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On the Prophecies of Nostradamus by Harold Gans

Nostradamus

Harold Gans, Director of Research for Aish HaTorah, spent 28 years as Senior Cryptologic Mathematician with the National Security Agency, United States Department of Defense.

Nostradamus was a French astrologer and physician who lived during the 16th century. His book, "Centuries," contains rhyming verses that commingle French, Spanish, Latin and Hebrew words.

The "prophetic" quatrains of Nostradamus are generally very vague and a tremendous amount of leeway is permitted in their interpretation. For example, one is allowed to anagram words as well as change or delete a single letter from any key word or words. It is, therefore, not surprising that if one waits long enough, eventually an event will occur which matches one of his quatrains according to these very generous rules. There are, however, some people who are not convinced by this elementary logic and have an almost blind faith in the predictions of Nostradamus.

The following may therefore be of interest. Consider the following quatrain from Nostradamus:

Here is a recent interpretation that has been found for it:

In the summer of 1943 the Italian people were completely disgusted with the performance of their troops and with Mussolini. The Allies had landed on Sicily and had made short work of the Italian defenders. This was shortly after the Axis defeat at El Alamein in which over 250,000 Axis troops were lost along with enormous amounts of war materiel. The people were demanding a separate peace with the Allies. Mussolini's advisors tried to convince him to do this but he would not go along with it. The King (Victor Emmanuel( told him that he was now very unpopular and was harming the country. To this, Mussolini replied that if that were the case then he would resign. The King immediately said "I accept" and put him under house arrest.

Very shortly afterward, England invaded Italy. What is the "fire in the sky at 45 degrees?" It so happens that the first Allied bombing raid on Ploesti, Rumania occurred within a week of Mussolini's downfall. This was a famous air raid of World War II where, although over one-third of the petroleum facilities at Ploesti were destroyed (spewing plenty of fire into the sky), the Allies lost 40 bombers in the raid. Oh yes, Ploesti is exactly 45 degrees north.

Interesting? If someone agrees that these interpretations are vague and the match of "prophecy" and history is not significant, then you need go no further. On the other hand, if someone believes that the interpretation is specific enough and significant, you might point out one remaining fact that I have so far withheld: Each of the four lines in the quatrain was chosen randomly from different quatrains! That is, the second line is the second line of a different quatrain than the quatrain from which the first line was taken, and so on. So this is really a "composite" quatrain.

Just goes to show how easy it is to find "good" historical matches to this nonsense.

Torah Codes: Responding to the Critics Given the consequences of this research, it was inevitable that some people would take exception to the findings. Despite the integrity of the research and the researchers, critics have made many strong attempts to refute the research...