mysteries. She invited Nostradamus to Paris in July 1556 and asked him to cast a horoscope for her children. What the seer told her is not recorded, but there are very clear references to the fate of her family in the Centuries. Of the seven children, three became kings of France, but six died young in tragic circumstances—all as predicted by Nostradamus.
The queen’s patronage assured the seer from the south his fame, and he was soon besieged by courtiers and nobles seeking predictions, cures, and horo-scopes. However, this success was to be short-lived. Claims for the accuracy of Nostradamus’ visions soon came to the attention of the authorities, and it was only after “a certain lady” warned him of impending arrest that Nostradamus slipped away from the court and returned home to Salon.
There, made wealthy by the royal patronage, he settled into a comfortable life with his wife and their six children. Curiously, he seems never to have been troubled by the authorities again, despite publishing a third edition of the Centuries, containing a further 300 quatrains, in 1558. This last volume now only survives as part of an omnibus edition, now called The Prophecies, published after his death in 1568. This version contains one unrhymed and 941 rhymed verses, grouped in sets of a hundred, and one of forty-two. Apparently, another fifty-eight quatrains existed but these vanished without trace.
Nostradamus died in 1566, aged sixty-three. On the evening of July 1, having already received the last rites, he told his secretary, Jean de Chavigny, “You will not find me alive at sunrise.” The next morning he was reportedly found dead, lying on the floor next to his bed. His widow commissioned a plaque which bore the inscription:
Into Almighty God’s hands I commend the bones of illustrious Michel de Nostredame, alone judged by mortal men to describe in near-divine words the events of the whole world under the influence of the stars.
The Book of Images
Nostradamus’ reputation as a prophet and seer is paramount, but in 1994 a volume was discovered that threw new light on his work and in the process captured the attention of the world. Two Italian journalists, Enza Massa and Robert Pinotti, were browsing the collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma (Central National Library of Rome) when they came across an illustrated codex entitled the Vaticinia Michaelis Nostradami de Futuri Christi Vicarii ad Cesarem Filium D. I. A. Interprete (The Prophecies of Michel Nostradamus on the Future Vicars of Christ to Cesar his son, as expounded by Lord Abbot Joachim), or the Vaticinia Nostradami (The Prophecies of Nostradamus) for short. In the library catalogue its shelf mark is the rather anonymous Fondo Vittorio Emanuele 307 (VE 307), which perhaps accounts for the fact that it had not been noticed before. It contained a collection of eighty remarkable watercolour images, clearly representing mysterious and hidden meanings. They included a number of ecclesiastical figures—numerous popes, cardinals and so on—as well as symbolic images of hands holding swords, seven-spoked wheels, banners and a gallery of curious creatures. The presence of so many people wearing the papal crown has led several commentators to suggest that The Lost Book is a version of a thirteenth-century book known as the Vatician de Summis Pontificibus, which consists of a collection of prophetic statements made by various pontiffs throughout the history of the Holy See.
The mysteries of The Lost Book
Several editions of Vatician de Summis exist and there are a number of undoubted parallels to the imagery of the Vaticinia Nostradami. However, this doesn’t mean that the latter was anything more than influenced by the earlier work. The reference in the title to the Abbot Joachim, suggests a link with a much earlier, millennial prophet, Joachim of Fiore (1135–1202), who wrote several books based on an interpretation of the biblical Book of Revelations in which he prophesied that a new age would dawn in which the Church would no longer be needed. This heretical view influenced several important leaders of the day and a number of (possibly spurious) prophecies were later produced in his name. However, it seems unlikely that the Vaticinia Nostradami had anything more than a passing connection with Joachim’s work.
Looking through the volume, Massa and Pinotti were astonished and excited to find the name “Michel de Nostredame” inscribed on the title page. Then, in the back of the volume, they found a postscript dated 1629, apparently added by one of the librarians through whose hands the book had passed, which stated that the book had been presented by one Brother Beroaldus to Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, who would later become Pope Urban VIII (1623–1644). The same covering note suggests that the images were devised by Nostradamus but painted by his son César de Nostredame (known to have studied art), who later sent the book to Rome as a gift. A letter written by César to the French scientist Fabri de Peiresc in the same year (1629) mentions a collection of miniatures painted by himself, and a booklet destined to be a gift for King Louis XIII. Could this booklet be The Lost Book? No precise evidence exists to connect the two, but there is no reason to discount the possibility.
What we can say, with reasonable certainty, is that César de Nostredame was an artist (though admittedly of little talent) and that he refers to a book of images he had painted. These could well be the original volume now known as the Vaticinia Nostradami or The Lost Book of Nostradamus. If so, there is every reason to believe that the images were painted at the behest of Michel de Nostrademe himself, possibly even from sketches he had made, and that they constitute a series of visual references to the Centuries. César himself never showed any sign of following in his father’s footsteps, so the idea that he might have originated these himself seems unlikely.
The story of the discovery was an overnight sensation and the volume, now known as The Lost Book of Nostradamus, was much publicized. The Nostradamus Code (Destiny Books, 1998), by Ottavio Cesare Ramotti, claimed that the images related directly to the Centuries and that with them the key to a more accurate understanding of the prophecies could be extracted. This was followed in 2007 by a History Channel documentary, The Lost Book of Nostradamus, in which even more extravagant claims were made. Since then, the subject of The Lost Book has become a frequent topic on websites ranging from the intriguing to the ridiculous.
None of the writers or film makers made more than a passing reference to a fact that leapt out from the pages of The Lost Book the first time we saw a selection of the images—that many of the paintings reflect the symbolism of the tarot. Once we began to examine the available pictures in detail, we became ever more convinced that what we were seeing was a series of visual glyphs which would, once completed, have formed the basis of a tarot designed by Nostradamus himself.
The Lost Tarot
A variety of claims have been made for the origins of tarot. Some have suggested that its beginnings date back as far as ancient Egypt, or to the Templars, or to the Gypsies—but most experts now see this most popular of all predictive systems as beginning some time in the late Middle Ages, growing out of the older practice of cartomancy, the reading of fortunes with playing cards. Of one thing there is no doubt: tarot cards were all the rage during the period in which Nostradamus lived, so it’s quite possible that he considered making his own set. And, if so, what more likely scenario is there than that he should have drawn upon his own visionary skills to create what would have been a unique system, combining the archetypes of the predictive tarot with his own prophetic gifts.
Once we began to look into the imagery of The Lost Book, we found that not only were there a number of pictures which exactly matched those of the basic tarot archetypes (the Burning Tower, the Hermit, the Wheel of Fortune, and the Fool, to name but four), but that the remaining series of paintings contained, hidden within them, references to many more. We became increasingly convinced that we were looking at an incomplete set of images destined to be become a tarot—a Nostradamus tarot.
Tarot and Nostradamus
Did Nostradamus begin to create a tarot deck based on his visionary insights? We became convinced that he did, but that he was prevented from completing it by death, and that the images he had begun to prepare languished for many years and were consistently misunderstood as something
