The Lost Tarot of Nostradamus Ebook. John Matthews
interpretation, we arrived at Quatrain X:49:
Jardin du monde au pres de cite neufve
Dans le chemin des montaignes cavees …
In the Garden of the World near the New City
On the road of the hollow mountains …
The prophetic reference here is to the attack on the Twin Towers in New York, on September 11, 2001, and also to the hubris of capitalism which we are seeing in our own time. The pairing of Nostradamus’ words with the inherent meaning of the tarot cards seemed too precise to ignore. We’re not suggesting that these prophetic messages are a part of a personal reading; they are merely there to show how closely the writings of the seer can come to the traditional interpretation of the tarot. However, if looked at in an impersonal way, we may well find echoes of our own situations within these cryptic interpretations.
This leads us inevitably to an aspect of Nostradamus’ work that is impossible to ignore. The Centuries have, since they were penned, been seen, again and again, to offer only words of doom. They are, it must be said, often grim reading, but they are also, as we have indicated, open to many different kinds of interpretation. In recent times we have heard a great deal about the end of time in 2012, buttressed by the misunderstanding of Mayan calendrical glyphs, which in fact only point to the ending of one cycle and not to all of time. In the same way, Nostradamus’ prophecies are almost universally interpreted as referring to vast tidal waves of death and destruction. But there is a simpler, more intimate side to the Centuries, which we have sought to extract. Belief or otherwise in such things is, of course, the prerogative of the individual. However, it is important to realize that the oracles of The Lost Tarot are not intended to offer any kind of prediction of the future on a global scale. They are, simply and directly, images that, in the context of tarot, offer us advice and pointers to ways in which we can deal with issues in our lives. The following section offers further suggestions on how to interpret the new quatrains.
Translating the Quatrains
Translating Nostradamus is a daunting task. He not only wrote in sixteenth-century French, with seemingly familiar words that have since shifted meaning or nuance, but he wrote poetically, inverting words, punning, and alluding darkly to matters that he wished to cloak. In this context, I’ve pursued clarity of translation and tried to convey the implicit metaphor; this has sometimes meant using more words in English than are conveyed by the French. I’ve put brackets around these to indicate where this has been necessary; this has sometimes occurred because it isn’t always possible to lift just two lines from a quatrain, where the meaning is clarified by the remaining lines.
Nostradamus wrote at a time when religion and statecraft were beginning to abrade each other’s authority. The warlike intentions of the French upon Italy and the Papal States, the rise of Protestantism in Northern Europe, and the very recent expulsion of the Jews from Spain were all in the pot together. Nostradamus purposely cloaked his Centuries, using words that couldn’t definitively point to religious or state matters. For healers, prophets, and astrologers, the Inquisition was an ever-present deterrent, and he needed to be careful. For example, he frequently uses the word seul (alone) to refer to monks or priests, in the sense of them being “solitaries,” when an explicit mention might have brought suspicion upon him. He seems also to have embedded an anagram of the various French kings called Henri in the word Chyren—the “y” in the English “Henry” being interchangeable with the “i” in the French “Henri.” Henri II and Henri III both reigned during his lifetime, but some of his prophecies refer to the future Henri IV of Navarre, who was born a Huguenot and became a Catholic on his accession. Others think Nostradamus speaks of a King Henri V yet to come.
Some of Nostradamus’ emblematic references may derive from the sixteenth-century Orus Apollo, a pair of volumes in verse epigrams, purporting to explain Egyptian hieroglyphs. Without the critical help of the Rosetta Stone, not to be discovered for another two centuries, this speculative work guesses at meaning, but Nostradamus had certainly read it as some of his code words are derived from it: grasshopper means “mystic”; star stands for “God and destiny.” He often uses animals and classical references to signify countries or groups of people: for example, Neptune often indicates Britain; Venus is sometimes Venice; and mastiff usually refers to “an invading general.” But he isn’t above wordplay, homonyms, hidden meanings, and, of course, his own code words, not to mention, other tricks. For example, the word mabus, which appears in Quatrain II:62, has excited many commentators: if it is held up to a mirror, it reads “sadam” …
When there are so many theorists and others intent to steer Nostradamus’ Centuries through the goalposts of their chosen agenda—Redemptorist, astrological, alarmist, or conspiratorial, among others—we’ve tried to let the quat-rains speak for themselves, through their metaphors and images. Metaphor is the language of seership and prophecy, after all: it is the first language of the soul, and the way in which our imaginations receive and embed information. After that, everything is a matter of interpretation.
Finally, although we have worked from the most authoritative and reliable texts, the Centuries were copied and recopied many times from the original publication, with the result that misreadings, misspellings, and even intentional reinterpretations crept into the text. We have done our best to address these factors, but you may find yourself making your own translations, which might differ from ours. This is one of the reasons why the quatrains are so open to reinterpretation by virtually every person who attempts to understand them.
NOTE: All our card interpretations include a reversed meaning. If you wish, you may ignore these and turn the card the right way up; however, these cards do often fall in reverse for a reason, so be sure you want to change them before you do so.
Part Two
THE CARDS AND
THEIR MEANINGS
Divining rod in hand in the tree’s heart,
He takes water from the wave to root and branch;
A Voice makes my sleeve tremble with fear –
Divine glory, the god sits near.
quatrain I:2
THE MAJOR ARCANA
Metal: Gold
Gold is associated with the Sun. In alchemy, it is the state of near perfection, the Rubedo, when matter itself begins to transmute. In tarot terms, it represents the most powerful influences in the reading—the Major Arcana—which draw the minor cards to themselves and cause changes to occur in the meanings of adjacent cards.
0
THE FOOL
The Fool is one of the most ancient characters in the history of the world. He is the traditional safety valve, the one who bursts the balloon, who challenges the establishment, who moves at his own pace in the world. He is an explorer, one who sets out on a great journey in a state of ignorance, yet he possesses a willingness to learn. An outsider, exempt from retribution even when he speaks against those in power, he exemplifies crazy wisdom, the ability to see through the obscuring veils of the world to the strange and remarkable truth of life itself. Jack, the eternal simpleton of faery tale is a type of fool, as is Perceval, the Grail winner, who succeeds where others fail because of his simple faith. He is the comedic clown of ancient Greek drama, the simpleton of Shakespeare’s darkest plays, Merlin in his madness, Lear with his own personal fool, the mad and divinely inspired shaman of Irish myth, Suibhne Geilt. He is also Nostradamus, who exhibited many of the qualities of the fool. He was a visionary who was often perceived as mad; a wise man who seemed to act without forethought; a joker who taught through strange and unlikely actions; a wanderer who seemed without goals yet who kept to his path with a diligence seldom equalled. In the context of The Lost Book, we may be reminded of the thirteenth-century story of the Wandering Jew who, according to legend, mocked Jesus on his way to the Crucifixion and was condemned to