NZ Skeptics Articles

Articles tagged with "nostradamus"

The World Will End Last Week

1 November 1999

IT IS WELL, at the start of a discussion, to declare an interest. So, I begin by admitting that my fascination with the year 2000 was aroused nearly 70 years ago. Like many mechanically-minded lads of the 20s and 30s, I was a keen reader of "The Meccano Magazine". One issue of about 1930 looked forward to the distant future, and to what life would be like in 2000. I have forgotten the text, but a picture remains in my mind of tall, elegant buildings lining a wide street, along which glided, speedily but noiselessly, clean streamlined trains. The pictures and accompanying description appealed to the young Howard, and I dreamed how wonderful it would be to grow so phenomenally ancient as to be around at that splendid time.

Nostradamus -- The 1994 Annual Almanac by V.J. Hewitt

1 February 1994

This book explains an approach to interpreting the French "prophet" Nostradamus's predictions. It is the culmination of 16 years research by an English woman, V.J. Hewitt. She has invented a system of decoding his quatrains using anagrams -- and not just the sort that you get in cryptic crosswords, but huge, French ones. She takes a Nostradamus quatrain, mixes up all the letters, removes the letters of the subject she is interested in (and it could be anything from soccer hooliganism to an air traffic controllers' strike), adds the date, and then rearranges the remaining letters to produce the prophecy that Nostradamus had clearly intended. What's more she does it in French.

'Wilson's Almanack'

1 May 1991

About this time every year some diligent journalist trawls through all the year's events that made news and matches them against a list of predictions published a year earlier.