Like John Hogue, I believe Nostradamus wrote the truth. Unlike John Hogue, I know Nostradamus wrote the truth differently than John Hogue sees it. John Hogue sees the truth as sensationalism that the History Channel (at least the documentarians who sell products to them) loves to pay for. The two truths are as different as valid reliability and bald faced lie. Nostradamus wrote 943 quatrains (maybe add five more), which are 4-line verses of poetry, rhyming in an ABAB scheme. The way John Hogue approaches those is to present (at most) fifty quatrains that he has interpreted as being about something specifically known, leaving the impression that everything else is equally accurate. As far as statistical research goes, fifty out of 943 equates to .053% (a little more than five percent, or one out of twenty). A valid and reliable statistic would need to be .60% (sixty percent, or six out of ten), meaning John comes up almost 516 accurately interpreted predictions [quatrains] short. He would need to become very imaginative for that to happen; and the History Channel would have to invest in a year’s worth of non-stop programming to show it all, or begin the new Nostradamus Channel (let Hogue be the producer). This is the way I see Nostradamus these days. He is like David, who wrote one hundred fifty psalms. The Psalms of David are also poems, just more than four verses and not rhyming (in English). But, if all the Psalms were divided into ten groups of 15 Psalms each, and those were each divided into one hundred sets of verses, the result would still be 150 Psalms of David, just cut up into pieces. As long as the order of everything was maintained, so someone could say, “Here. Read this” and the result would be, “Okay. That is the Psalms of David,” then that exercise would still make the Psalms of David as understandable as they are today. If that reproduction of David’s Psalms was then tossed up into the air and let to fall into some new, unmarked order and stacked up and separated into ten groups of one hundred, the exact same poems would become very difficult to get meaning from. Certainly four verses (or so) of a David poem would have meaning, based on the meaning of written words; but the context would be missing, so different views could arise, with the poetic license of metaphor no longer recognized. That is precisely what Nostradamus wrote: a thousand-(thereabouts)-quatrain story (similar to Goethe’s Faust – auf Deutsch), which initially read like an epic poem. Then he was instructed by God to make it beyond the comprehension of “the wise and intelligent,” so everything made no sense at all. Since it was first published (1555 – the first edition), no one has been able to solve the mystery that was intentionally created. However, today John Hogue is picking up bits and pieces and pretending he knows the context of one scattered piece after another. That makes John Hogue be like Carnac the Magnificent.
John Hogue the Nostradamus salesman
Updated: Apr 12