Nostradamus’s Prophecies and Uncertainty of Future

Abstract

The article interprets Michel Nostradamus’s quatrains in terms of the eventeme theory developed by the author. An eventeme is an abstract possibility of various single events. The main hypothesis of the article is that Nostradamus described eventemes as single events and filled them with details, thus making an illusion of a prophecy. It was not the only method of Nostradamus’s work, though. Believing in recurrence of historical events, Nostradamus extrapolated past events to the future. This paper analyses some quatrains representing single manifestations of a certain eventeme. The article contains a fragment of the quatrain table where the author reflected both event-driven and eventematic content of the Centuries. The research demonstrates the differences between a prophecy, a foresight and a prediction. The author justifies a thesis on impossibility of exact prediction of single events due to uncertainty of the future

Keywords

• nostradamus
• event
• eventeme
• prophecy
• prediction
• uncertainty of futur