Supernatural (75 page)

This is an impressive number of ‘hits’.
But we have still failed to explain ‘Herne the white stone’, and the black monk.
The king was of monkish temperament and had been impotent, so it
could
refer to this; one commentator says that Herne is an anagram of reine—queen, and that Marie Antoinette always dressed in white.

Other ‘hits’ concern Henry of France, the French Revolution, and the massacre at Nantes.
But literally hundreds of other stanzas remain totally obscure, like the following:

Weak warships will be united together

False enemies, the strongest one on the ramparts,

The weak attacked, Bratislava trembles,

Lübeck and Misnen will hold the barbarous part.

The only word that leaps out of all this is Bratislava, the capital of Czechoslovakia, and since two German place-names are also mentioned, a modern interpretation will obviously start out from the assumption that this is about Hitler’s annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, and possibly his invasion of North Africa in 1941 (’the barbarous part’).
The German navy was not strong in 1939.
Jean Charles de Fontbrune explains in his edition of Nostradamus that the ‘false enemies’ are the Hungarians whose threat led Czechoslovakia to proclaim independence; the ‘strongest one on the ramparts’ is presumably Hitler, but what he is doing on the ramparts is not clear (Fontbrune suggests keeping watch).
Czechoslovakia has no sea coast, so it is hard to see why Bratislava is trembling at the German navy, or why Lübeck, which is 15 kilometres inland from the Baltic, should be mentioned.
(Misnen
is
on the North Sea.) Altogether, it requires something of an act of faith to believe that Nostradamus was really prophesying the events of 1939 and 1941.

This should bring comfort to those who recall Nostradamus’s most famous prophecy:

L’an mille neuf cens nonante neuf sept mois

Du ciel viendra un grand Roi deffrayeur.

Rescusciter le grand Roi d’Angolmois

Avant que Mars regner par bonheur.

This declares that in July 1999, the ‘great king of terror’ will come from the sky.
The great king of the Mongols, Genghis Khan, will be resuscitated (Angolmois is supposed to be an anagram of Mongolais), before which Mars (war?) will reign happily.
But the Millennium was regarded with superstitious terror in the Middle Ages (and even today, the word is synonymous with breathtaking events, either agreeable or appalling).
Mother Shipton, another remarkable prophet who lived in Yorkshire at the time of Nostradamus declared confidently that

The world to an end shall come

In eighteen hundred and eighty one.

Mother Shipton also prophesied ‘carriages without horses’, thought that would fly around the world ‘in the twinkling of an eye’, iron ships that would float on water, and men flying in the air—a remarkable record of success.
She even prophesied that Cardinal Wolsey would see York but fail to reach it, and was correct—he saw it from the top of a castle tower, but was then recalled to London, and died on the way.
But it also seems clear that her powers of prophecy lost their accuracy as they reached into the distant future.

Another prophet who predicted horseless carriages—but this time drawn by chariots of fire (i.e railway engines)—was known as the Brahan Seer, and he lived a century after Nostradamus.
Coinneach Odhar (or Kenneth Mackenzie) was born in Uig, on the Island of Lewis (in the Hebrides) around 1600.
News of his powers of ‘second sight’ reached his feudal overlord, Kenneth Cabarfeidh Mackenzie—Lord Mackenzie of Kintail—who lived in Brahan Castle—and he released the seer from his job as a farm labourer and allowed him to live rent-free in a sod-roofed cottage.
The seer attributed his powers to a ‘divining stone’ with a hole in it, through which he used to look to see the future.
It was his powers of short-term prophecy that impressed Lord Mackenzie, as when he predicted that a Lochalsh woman would weep over the grave of a Frenchman in Lochalsh graveyard.
It seemed unlikely, since there were few Frenchmen in Scotland; but, within a few months, Mackenzie heard of a Lochalsh woman who spent much of her time weeping beside the grave of her French husband, a footman, who had died after the seer’s prediction.
When an elderly man, Duncan Macrae, asked the seer how he would end his days, there was general incredulity when Odhar said he would die by the sword, since there had been peace for some time.
In 1654, General Monck led Cromwellian troops to Kintail, and when he met Macrae, asked him some question which Macrae failed to understand.
Macrae put his hand on his sword, and was promptly cut down.

In 1630, the seer was passing over a patch of moorland when he predicted that it would be ‘stained with the best blood of the Highlands: 116 years later, it was the site of the battle of Culloden.
Perhaps his ‘longest shot’ was a prophecy that a woman called Annabella Mackenzie would live in the village of Baile Mhuilinn, and that she would die of measles.
This prophecy took more than two centuries to be fulfilled; then an old lady of that name
did
die of measles in Baile Mhuilinn—at the age of 95.

There are two stories about the end of the seer.
One states that his lord’s wife asked him what her husband was doing—Mackenzie was at that time in Paris—and Odhar was injudicious enough to tell her that he saw him kneeling at the feet of a fair lady.
The Countess then ordered him to be burned in a tar barrel.
The more likely story states that when the local gentry were gathered at Brahan Castle, the seer remarked (in Gaelic) that he saw more in the children of footmen and grooms than in the children of gentlemen.
Apparently this remark was interpreted as meaning that the aristocratic guests had actually been fathered by footmen and grooms.
The Countess sentenced him to be burned; Lord Mackenzie arrived home too late to save him, although he rode like the wind to try to prevent the execution.
Before his death, the seer made predictions about the Mackenzie (Seaforth) family, including the statement that the last of the line would be deaf and dumb, that four sons would precede him to the tomb (one of them dying by water), and that his ‘white hooded’ daughter would kill her sister.
In fact, the last Lord Mackenzie was born in 1754, and scarlet fever impaired his hearing at the age of 12; in later life his speech also became affected.
His four sons all predeceased him (one being drowned).
His daughter Mary married Admiral Samuel Hood, and when her husband died, her widows weeds included a white hood; she was driving a carriage with ponies when the animals bolted and the carriage overturned, killing her sister.

Perhaps the best-authenticated stories of accurate prediction of the future concerns the French essayist and occultist Jacques Cazotte, best known for his novel
Le Diable Amoureux,
in which the Devil takes the form of an attractive girl who wins the love of a Spaniard who made the mistake of invoking him.
Early in 1788, Cazotte (who was then 69) attended a dinner given by the Duchesse de Grammont, at which Jean de la Harpe, a well-known atheist, was present, and he wrote down at some length an account of a prophecy made by Cazotte.
After dinner, the talk turned to the possibility of revolution, which was obviously in the air, and which most of them (being liberals) welcomed.
Cazotte suddenly declared that he could tell them that they would see the revolution very soon.
The philosopher Condorcet asked for more information, and was told that he would die, lying on the floor of a prison cell, of poison that he had taken to cheat the executioner.
The dramatist Chamfort, he said, would cut his own veins, but would die some months later.
The astronomer Bailly would die at the hands of the mob.
The duchess herself would be taken to the scaffold with her hands tied behind her, as would ‘even greater ladies’.
The atheist de la Harpe was told he would become a Christian.
An M.
Vicq-d’Azir would die on the scaffold, as would M.
de Nicolai.

All these prophecies proved to be accurate.
De la Harpe himself became a monk, and his account of the evening was found after his death in 1803.
A scholar named Walter Borman went into the whole matter in the early 20th century and found abundant evidence for Cazotte’s prophecy in journals and letters of the time.
(Harpe’s own ‘account’ could, of course, have been a forgery; it was published as part of a new edition of
Le Diable Amoureux
in 1871, edited by Gerard de Nerval.) Moreover, the Baroness d’Oberkirch described in her autobiography (1852) how a group of people in her salon discussed Cazotte’s prophecy before it was fulfilled, and how a medium who had been brought along by the Marquis de Puységur (the discoverer of hypnotism) had then made some even more astonishing prophecies about people who were present, all of which proved accurate.
Oddly enough, Cazotte failed to foretell his own death on the guillotine in 1792; but it is generally accepted that ‘prophets’ are unable to foretell their own future.

The whole subject of precognition raises a fundamental question: of whether, in some sense, the future has already taken place—in other words, whether our lives are totally predetermined.
In a book called
Beyond the Occult,
I suggested that the answer to that question is: probably yes.

‘As I now look out of the window I can see the wind blowing washing on the line and also swaying the syringa bush.
To me, the next movement of the bush or the clothes seems purely a matter of chance; in fact, they are just as predetermined as the movements of the stars—as the weathermen could tell you.
What
is
true is that human beings introduce an element of genuine chance into the picture; my wife may decide to water the garden instead of hanging out the washing.
But the bushes, although alive, can introduce little chance into the picture.
Moreover, even free will can be described in terms of statistics.
The sociologist Durkheim was surprised to discover that it is possible to predict the suicide rate with considerable precision.
This seems to imply that, with sufficiently detailed knowledge, we could predict exactly who will kill himself next year.’

The mathematician Laplace took a similar view.
He wrote a classic book on the movements of the heavenly bodies, and remarked that if a human being had sufficient knowledge of the present state of every particle of matter in the universe, he could go on to predict the whole future of the universe.

Understandably, we find such a notion disturbing, for it seems to suggest that we are merely cogs in a gigantic machine.
I go on to suggest that this negative attitude is absurd, because we accept
spatial
‘predetermination’ every day without concern—on the contrary, I would be very worried if I didn’t know whether the next bus would take me to Piccadilly or Pontefract.
What is more, I realise that spatial predetermination makes no difference to my free will; I can
choose
whether to go north, south, east or west.

Yet there is a paradox in all this.
In
Man and Time,
J.
B.
Priestley quotes a case from Dr Louisa Rhine.
A young mother had a dream in which she was camping with some friends on the bank of a creek.
She took her baby with her to the edge of the water, intending to wash some clothes.
Then she remembered that she had left the soap in the tent, and went back to fetch it.
When she returned, the baby was lying face down in the creek, and when she pulled him out, she discovered he was dead.

In fact, that summer she went camping with some friends, and they set up their tents on the bank of a creek.
She was just about to do some washing when she remembered that she had forgotten the soap.
At that point she remembered her dream.
So instead of leaving the baby behind, she tucked him under her arm and took him back with her to the tent.

If we assume that her dream was a genuine premonition, then it saved her from disaster, and changed her future.

Brian Inglis quotes another interesting example in his book
The Power of Dreams.
A girl woke up in bed one morning, and, before she opened her eyes, had a strong impression that she was in the bed of a male colleague.
He was not a man in whom she had taken any particular interest, and, in fact, he had a girlfriend and she was in love with someone else.
When she opened her eyes, the feeling vanished.

That evening, at some official university function, she and the male colleague got bored, and slipped out to a nearby pub.
Eventually they ended up in a ‘necking situation’ in a car, and he pressed her to return home with him.
She was about to agree when she recollected her odd ‘dream’ of that morning, and changed her mind.
It struck her later that she might have averted disaster: in those days of inadequate contraception, she might have ended up pregnant, faced with a shotgun wedding or single parentage and the loss of her job.
She concluded that the ‘dream’ had been intended as a warning.

Many other stories could be cited to make the same point: that premonitions
can
change the future.
One man (cited in Arthur Osborn’s
The Future is Now
) had a premonition that a car would come round a corner on the wrong side of the road; in fact, as he approached the corner later in the day he recalled his premonition and pulled over to the other side of the road.
Seconds later, the car came round the corner at high speed.

The conclusion would seem to be that the future is
not
predetermined as far as human beings are concerned—at least, not rigidly predetermined.
We
can
affect it with our decisions.

At the time I was writing
Beyond the Occult
I was unaware of the discoveries of ‘Chaos Theory’, developed by scientists and mathematicians like Benoit Mandelbrot, Mitchell Feigenbaum, Kenneth Wilson and Edward Lorenz.
Chaos theory flatly contradicts Laplace.
Edward Lorenz was responsible for the original discovery in 1961, after devising a computer programme that would simulate the weather for some months ahead.
In re-running a part of the programme, he decided to save space by cutting down some decimals from six figures to three, assuming that the difference of one part in a thousand was unimportant.
In fact, this tiny difference caused an increasing change in the weather pattern of the future.
He summarised his discovery by saying that an event as small as a butterfly flapping its wings in Siberia could alter the long-term weather pattern.
This means, in practice, that no matter how sophisticated our computers, the weather pattern cannot be accurately forecast for more than a day or so ahead.
Beyond that, it begins to diverge more and more widely from the forecast.