To date, only three or four copies of the 1557 issue have been seen on the Internet. All of them are different from each other. Copies stored in Moscow and Budapest contain only forty quatrains of the seventh Centuria, and do not contain the spell "number 100" of the sixth. They are dated November 3, 1557.
By some irony of fate, the next copy of the "Prophecies", stored in the Netherlands, in the library of the city of Utrecht, dated September 6, 1557, is more complete. As I have already indicated, there are two more quatrains in it, and there is a spell in Latin. The fact that it is this edition, the most authentic, will be proved by me later. As for others a huge question for the Author WHY? Fear, because everything conceived and stated will be quickly revealed? May be!
There are several main differences between the editions of 1555 and those of 1557. I will give some of them as an example.
Perhaps the main, and, as will be shown later, intentional difference is contained in quatrain 3-18, all attention is on its third line.
Option editions of 1555 :
Apres la pluie laict asses longuete,
En plusieurs lieux de Reins le ciel touché:
Helasquel meurtre de seng pres d'eux s'apreste,
Peres & filz roys n'oseront approcher.
Option more late editions :
Apres la pluie laict asses longuete,
En plusieurs lieux de Reims le ciel touche':
O quel conflict de sang pres d'eux s'apreste,
Peres & filz roys n'oseront approcher.
" Seng " is an untranslatable word, and most likely means " sang " blood. Such a "mistake" for this book, as it turned out, is very significant. In addition, these editions differ from each other by words composed entirely of capital letters. One example is in quatrain 3-51: " PARIS " (1555), " Paris " (1557)
Another distinctive feature of the 1555 editions is the replacement of words with symbols, as, for example, in quatrain 4-30: "The Moon and the Sun" ( Luna Sol ) are replaced with drawn symbols.
And, of course, there have been cases of substitution of the main prepositions ( de , du , la , le , etc.).
It is possible that the next, already complete edition of the Prophecies, was published in 1558 or 1559, which has not come down to us. At present, the earliest complete Les Propheties " are copies of the year 1568, i.e. published after the death of the Author, in Lyon, by the Benoist Rigaud .
The book contains:
Preface dedicated to the Author's son Cesar;
The first seven Centuries: the first five have 100 quatrains each, the sixth has 99 quatrains plus an unnumbered quatrain a warning written in Latin, the seventh consists of 42 quatrains;
Quite capacious Epistle to Henry the Second;
The last three Centuries, 100 quatrains each.
Total 941 full-fledged quatrain.
Linguistic analysis of the 1568 editions gives reason to believe that this is an amended version of the 1557 edition with forty-two quatrains in the seventh centurion (Utrecht).
What is this book? As the name implies, this is a collection of short, four-line poetic prophecies. Unlike other works of Nostradamus, they are simply replete with disastrous and terrible events. Plague, famine, death, blood, flood, fire this is the future the Prophet foretells to mankind. The lack of dates, with rare exceptions, gives interpreters a reason to tie "liked" quatrains to various events that happened. The vague style of writing and the complexity of translation contribute greatly to this. In general, it all depends on the imagination of the interpreter.
The Author himself, which can be seen in the Preface to Cesar, assured that: I compiled books of prophecies, each of which contains a hundred astronomical quatrains, composed of prophecies that I wished to compose a little vaguely, these are continuous predictions from the present time to the year 3797. It was this date, openly named, that captivated all those who were eager to reveal the secrets of the future. It took me quite a long time.
A huge number of books have been published on this subject. I read somewhere that the "Prophecies" are, after the "Bible", the most mysterious book in the world.
It took me a very long time to come to an understanding of the secret writing of Nostradamus, but the beginning of this process gave such a rapid acceleration to everything that followed, which cannot be described in words.
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In from him, quatrain is the motivator of everything else:
1-15 Mars nous menasse par sa force bellique,
Septante foys fera le sang espandre: Auge & ruyne de l'Ecclesiastique, Et plus ceux qui d'eux rien voudront entendre.
Mars leads us with its military power,
Seventy times blood will be shed:
Apogee and destruction of the Church,
And more than those who do not wish to hear anything from them.
Yes, a gloomy, but rather inconspicuous-looking quatrain. Prophetic, this is clear at once. But what historical event, past, present, or future, could fit such a description? If you count all the bloodshed that took place in the world, or Europe, or in France, then from what date do you start? Nostradamus, you outdid yourself with this quatrain, I thought, that's exactly seventy, no more, no less, you should have counted the bloodshed. Have you made a mistake in the calculation? Feeling that with this quatrain there was a complete dead end, out of desperation, I started counting all the blood sang in the Centuries. So, manually, with a pencil, I began to highlight these words right in the book
As is probably already clear, there were exactly seventy of them in the first seven centuries.
Quatrain 1-15, as an introductory one, did not participate in the calculation. It mentions " sang " for the first time, and the countdown starts right after it. It was a real breakthrough! The book of Nostradamus has finally spoken. The lines of other quatrains began to be perceived differently. For example , the line quatrain 4-1:
Sela du reste de sang non espandu
This is the remnant of unshed blood
Or the line of quatrain 8-1, which begins the second stage of the "Prophecies":
PAV, NAY, LORON plus feu qu'a sang sera
PO, NAY, LORON, there will be more fire than blood
Now I want to return to the previously mentioned quatrain 3-18. In the edition of 1555, one blood is killed in this quatrain, changing sang to a mangled, incomprehensible word seng . Considering such a "murder", the blood already sounds seventy times already in the first seven Centuries, even taking into account quatrain 1-15. This, apparently, is the formation of the "rules of the game", not otherwise. What can I say, the Author himself claims this. The line of quatrain 3-18 in the version of the 1555 edition:
helasquel meurtre de seng press d' eux _ s ' apreste
Its a pity what kind of murder is being prepared because of the seng around them
The same line from the 1557 edition:
O quell conflict de sang pres d'eux s'apreste
Oh, what a bloody conflict is being prepared around them
Murder is replaced by a simple conflict, which, I think, is also settled.
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After the first success, I, of course, rushed to look for something similar in other quatrains, and hoped for the same results. Everything turned out to be more complicated and interesting. Nostradamus, apparently, set the task of consistently raising the bar, leading deeper and deeper into the secrets of his texts.
Literally a stone's throw from the quatrain with seventy " sang ", obviously, the following task was located:
1-17 Par quarante ans l'Iris n'aparoistra,
Par quarante ans tous les jours sera veu: La terre aride en siccite croistra, Et grans deluges quand sera aperceu.