The most famous of all non biblical prophets, Michel De Nostredame, or Nostradamus, was born at St. Remy in south France in 1503. He first became famous for his medical work with victims of the plague that broke out at Aix-en-Provence and Lyons in 1546-47 and only after this began making prophecies. His first collection was published as an almanac of weather predictions in 1550, and in 1555 he published the first of the 10 collections of prophecies (almost a 1000 in all) under the title of centuries. He died at Salon, in southern France, in 1566. Nostradamus wrote his prophecies in verse, for the most part in a highly symbolic style. This, and the fact that he choose not to arrange them in any particular order, makes their interpretations, in many cases, a matter of conjecture. Nonetheless, a number of the prophecies do seem to point rather clearly to events that has not yet occurred when "centuries" appeared. The first prophecy to bring Nostradamus fame was as follows.

Four years later, in July 1559 King Henry 2nd of France, who sometimes used the lion as his emblem, engaged in a jousting contest. The lance of his young opponent pierced the Kings helmet and wounded him; Henry died after prolonged agony. Few of Nostradamus's prophecies contain anything so precise as a date. But he seems to have given one for the great fire of London in 1666 saying it would occur "in three times twenty plus six". Most of Nostradamus's prophecies concern large scale political movements and the affairs of the high and mighty. The French revolution seems to be the subject of several verses, including this:

The first sentence is straightforward. "The headless idiots" of the second sentence are thought to refer to the demands of the French populace as "prayers", and who, ultimately corrupted by their new power, were them selves overthrown and guillotined. In a letter to King Henry 2nd, Nostradamus also predicted 1792 as a key date in the affairs of the state. In September of that year, at the culmination of the revolution, France was declared a republic. The deaths of Queen Marie Antoinette and Madame Du Barry, a mistress of Louis XVI, also appear to have been forecast by this remarkable seer. Like most prophets, Nostradamus seems to have had a particular talent for predicting disasters and falls from power. He is held to have described the fate of Napoleon, whose rule over the French empire ended with his imprisonment on the tiny island of St. Helena in 1815, and to have predicted the abdication of King Edward VIII of Great Britain in 1936. In two quatrains Nostradamus came close to naming Adolf Hitler and described his calamitous activities with some accuracy. According to the first one;

In content the verses are remarkably apt. Liberty was seized, or occupied, by an evil (black hearted and black haired) man. Venice, along with the rest of Italy, was indeed eventually "vexed" by her former ally. Hitlers troops did cross rivers, and other boundaries, like ravening beasts, even through the majority of countries were against them/ The last sentence is unclear but may refer to the German naval blockade of Britain, which, before Pearl Harbor, was the lone leader of the free worlds battle for survival.

Swedenborgs Vision

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was equally famous in his native Sweden as a scientist, a mystical theologian and a clairvoyant. A well-authenticated instance of latter ability, investigated by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, occurred on July 19, 1759, in Goteborg, a port on Sweden's southwest coast. It was a Saturday, about four o'clock in the afternoon, and Swedenborg just returned to Goteborg from a visit to England when he became restless and upset. He excused him self to his friends and went for a walk. Upon his return he told them that he had seen a vision, a fire that had broke out near his house, 300 miles away, and was now raging through his home town. He remained distressed until 8pm. When he informed his friends that the fire was now extinguished.

News of the vision spread quickly, and Swedenborg was asked to described it in person to the governor. On Monday morning a royal messenger arrived in Goteborg with news of the fire, and confirmed Swedenborg's vision in all particulars.

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