`As the awful day approached, the excitement became intense, and great numbers of credulous people resorted to all the villages within a circuit of 20 miles, awaiting the doom of London. Islington, Highgate, Hampstead, Harrow, and Blackheath were crowded with panic-stricken fugitives, who paid exorbitant prices for accommodation."
Since the great panic of 1761, when it was widely believed the city was about to be destroyed by an earthquake - as recorded in Charles Mackay's 1841 compendium of mass hysteria, Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds - the landlords have become no kinder, but we like to think we're less credulous. So why are we still fascinated by the versified ravings of a French astrologer who died more than three centuries ago, who wrote in a language - early modern French - that few English speakers understand, and whose prophetic stanzas make little sense even when translated? Why Nostradamus?
With over 130 English language books in print about him, Nostradamus is big business. Any producer filling a half-hour latenight slot need do no more than zoom a rostrum camera in on an engraving of the French fortune-teller, fade up a low, menacing note on a cheap synthesiser and see if John Hurt is available to do a quick voiceover. Channel 4 is pushing the theme to its extreme tonight with a seven-hour Nostradamus extravaganza, based on the premise that the seer foretold the end of the world on July 4th, 1999.
Nostradamus looks strangely evergreen within the vast paranormal industry, which has its fashions. Crop circles and Aztec astronauts have been ridiculed. UFOs, the Loch Ness monster and the Yeti have been suffocated by the attentions of under-occupied scientists. Even the Turin Shroud looks as if it has been picked over once too often. Yet Nostradamus's hundreds of four-line verses (1,141 to be precise) seem capable of being endlessly repackaged and resold to new generations of university students and lonely seekers of inside information on the metaphysical forces which, they hope, work unseen at our destinies.
One striking feature of Nostradamus's reputation is how the names of other prophets, once read with equal wide-eyed fear and wonder, have fallen away. The sceptic Mackay gives pride of place to Merlin and to Mother Shipton, "the most popular of British prophets". Mother Shipton was once believed to have sold her soul to the Devil, but since the conditions to trigger her most famous prophecy have been met - London and Highgate have, as she foretold, been joined by one continuous line of houses - we now know that she was, at best, channelling for property developers.
Mother Shipton committed the fatal error for a prophet of being specific. Most of her fellow seers have blundered into the concrete at some point, knocking themselves out of the running when it became clear that they were talking nonsense. (When Highgate merged with London, the accompanying bloodbath did not materialise.) But not Nostradamus. In his screeds of prophecy there are precious few hostages to fortune. Only a few dozen of his verses, known to Nostradamus aficionados as quatrains, have specific dates in them. As they pass, other interpreters will jump on other verses, perpetuating the Nostradamus industry. The only certain prediction to be made about the year 3000 is that, assuming the planet hasn't been wiped out by an unforecast asteroid, there'll be a Nostradamus flap on.
There are two quatrains which have anxious believers expecting the end of the world tomorrow (although by another interpretation, it should have happened yesterday, which means Nostradamus is wrong already). One appears to say that in the seventh month of 1999 "a great King of Terror" will come from the sky; the other that something will happen on the day "the eagle celebrates her feast". American doom-watchers who dominate the numerous Nostradamus internet sites say the eagle's feast must refer to the Fourth of July holiday. Hence the panic and anticipation.
Even without analysis from a linguist, the forecast makes no sense. The two verses are several quatrains apart and there is nothing to connect them. Nor is there any reason why the eagle should refer to the Fourth of July; many countries, including Russia, Poland, Germany, Napoleonic France and Imperial Rome have employed eagles as their emblems over thousands of years. To make things worse, there is nothing in the "prophecy" which suggests that the world is going to end. What will the Great King of Terror do? He will "revive the great King of the Angolmois". What is Angolmois? Er . . . Nostradamoids suggest this is an anagram of "Mongols" (it isn't, of course). Clearly this refers to an invading army from the east made up of Russians and Muslims who will put Europe to fire and sword. Clearly?
"It's nothing to do with the end of the world. It's a disgrace," says Peter Lemesurier, England's foremost Nostradamus expert, who has long trodden the thin line between credibility and profit by debunking most of the Nostradamus legend while never quite ruling out the occasional correct prophecy. "Most of the stuff published about Nostradamus is utter nonsense. Some of his predictions are pretty good, and a hell of a lot of them are up the creek."
For anyone expecting apocalypse, even a small one, tomorrow, it gets worse. Lemesurier points out that both the "eagle" and "great king of terror" translations are wrong. What Nostradamus actually said for "eagle" was "Alquilloye", which doesn't mean eagle at all. It refers to the Italian town of Aquileia - turning this verse into a fantastically obscure, undateable reference to Italian politics and a pair of Siamese twins. The "King of Terror", on Lemesurier's translation, is actually "the spendthrift king". Even so, the British writer can't resist putting his own spin on the prophecy, not quite as exciting as the popular vision of hordes of bloodthirsty eastern and southern barbarians flooding across Europe. He reckons Nostradamus foresaw the advent of Romano Prodi.
There is a debunking and a reinterpretation for every Nostradamus prophecy. His foreseeing of Napoleon, Hitler, General Franco, the space shuttle disaster, even the bug which marred the launch of Intel's Pentium processor, have all been proved in loving detail and, with equally obsessive care, demolished. All that remains constant is the desperate desire to find in the Frenchman's garbled words some key to the secrets of the universe.
"He called his prophecies perpetual prophecies. They come again and again," said Lemesurier. "Things that were originally said to apply to Napoleon have been reapplied to Hitler and then to Gorbachev, whoever was the bogeyman of the moment. Unfortunately, what people generally do is see what happened, and then find a prophecy to match."
He sees in the process evidence of a natural instinct in humanity to search for something metaphysical to believe in. "People are enthusiastic to believe anything. Having lost religion, they find themselves in a chaos of belief. Where there's chaos, they try to impose order. Nostradamus himself is chaos, but it's easy to convince yourself there's an order there. You're using one form of chaos to make order out of another."
Perhaps it is simply the inevitable effect of so many prophecies - a few were bound to hit the target - but the odd eerie accuracy does creep in. His forecast of a revolution which would take place in October and launch a regime which would last 73 years and seven months does seem peculiarly close to the 20th century story of Russia. Yet, even here, the past 300 years have seen so many revolutions and so many regimes. Given long enough, any prophecy is bound to succeed.
The danger of Nostradamus, if there is one, is not in his prophecies coming true of themselves, but in people trying to make them true. In 1989 a visitor called on Michel Chomarat, who looks after more than 2,000 original Nostradamus texts in the municipal library in Lyon. The visitor made prodigious copies, some on microfilm, and returned to his native Japan. Six years later, the Tokyo underground was attacked with homemade nerve gas. The visitor, and the mastermind behind the apocalyptic assault on the subway, was Shoko Asahara, leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult. When faith goes astray, Nostradamus has laid down many strange channels into which it can flow.