World Survives The End Nostradamus Wrong Again

Skeptic, Summer, 1999

According to The Adelaide Advertiser, in an article by Ayala Goldmann of Kassel, Germany, the world has once again survived another Nostradamus doomsday prediction, this time with July or August, 1999 dates. Goldmann writes:

With time running out before the start of the new millennium, fears are growing about Nostradamus cults that prophesy the end of the world is nigh.

Psychologists increasingly are concerned about the cults that base their theories on mostly vague passages written by French astrologer and physician Nostradamus during the 16th century in four-sentence "quatrains."

"In the year 1999, in the seventh month, from the skies shall come an alarmingly powerful king" is one of the few Nostradamus passages with a concrete date. It ends with the words "before and after Mars shall reign at will"

But some doomsday prophets are seriously proclaiming that this means the world will end in the month of July "It is complete nonsense," says Munich Nostradamus expert Dr. Elmar Gruber.

Dr. Gruber says the "powerful king" is an astronomical event described by Nostradamus--a total solar eclipse on August 11, 1999, over central Europe--an event feared during the Middle Ages. Nostradamus would have been quite capable of calculating the date of such a solar eclipse during his time.

According to Mr. Bernd Harder of the Association of Scientific Research and Sciences in the German town of Rossdorf, near Darmstadt, recent New Age publications have predicted an alien force, a comet hitting Earth, or a third world war. Mr. Harder tries to catch such theorists with their own weapons.

"Even recognized Nostradamus fans will find it difficult to call their idol into the witness stand on whether the world will end in 1999, because the Nostradamus prophecies, after all, continue until the year 3797," he writes in the latest issue of Skeptiker, published by the German skeptics group GWUP.

When vague prophecies are used to stir fears of big catastrophes, Dr. Gruber warns, such "prophetic interpretation mania" can in extreme cases endanger mental health.

He points to one case where a German author, after lengthy studies of Nostradamus texts, came to the conclusion that Europe would be hit by "a terrible nuclear catastrophe" on August 5,1990. The panic-stricken man tried to calculate the time down to the second in order to make sure his manuscript was published in time to warn humanity.

"We see here an extreme example where a text proclaimed as a prophetic truth stirs up a collective fear," says Dr. Gruber. "There is nothing that indicates that Nostradamus had psychic impressions about catastrophic events in the year 1999 or in any other time period," the psychologist argues. Even prophecies that supposedly came true seldom happened in the way they had been fore-told--and then only in a fragmentary way.

Editor's note: following the "great disappointment" of July, 1999, when the world did not end, Nostradamians recalibrated for an August 11, 1999, date in conjunction with the total solar eclipse that would slice across much of Europe. Yet another disappointment ensued.