THE NOSTRADAMUS CODE

Editor's Note: The Nostradamus Code is a new book just released by Destiny Books of Rochester, Vermont. The following is an edited excerpt (including material from the foreword and introduction) printed here with the permission of the publisher.In 1994 members of the Italian National Library in Rome made an amazing discovery: buried in their archives was an unknown manuscript consisting of eighty mysterious paintings by the famed prophet Michel de Nostradamus. This manuscript, never published by Nostradamus, was handed down to the prophet's son and later donated by him to Pope Urban VIII. It did not surface again until now, almost four hundred years later.Containing symbolic portraits of the popes of the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries, the menu script confirms the hidden chronology of Nostradamus's quatrains discovered by the well-known Nostradamus scholar Ottavio Cesare Ramotti. Knowing the power that his prophecies contained, and wary of this power falling into the wrong hands, Nostradamus scrambled both the meaning and the order of his quatrains so that humanity would not be able to use them until we had become sophisticated enough to decode them. That time is now. Using a software program he created, Ramotti spent years analyzing the entire body of Nostradamus's work until he cracked the code.In both the paintings and accompanying quatrains within, Nostradamus correctly predicts such key events as the Nazi Blitzkrieg, the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, the burning of the oil wells of Kuwait by Iraq, and Boris Yeltsin's rise to power. But when the secret prophecies-within-the-prophecies are decoded, even more world shattering predictions for the twenty-first century come to light: the destruction of the PLO and the emergence of a new dictatorship in Russia; the coming of a brilliant new pope, Petrus Secondus, who will transform Christianity across the planet; and the arrival of extra-terrestrials who usher in a new era of peace and enlightenment. For many years program analyst for the Interforce Electronic Center of the Italian National Police, Ottavio Cesare Ramotti has dedicated the past ten years to decoding more than 600 of the quatrains of Nostradamus. He lives in Rome.For centuries, the cryptic, prophetic quatrains written by Michele Nostradamus in the sixteenth century have fascinated people the world over, not merely because of our unwavering interest in all things paranormal, but because so often the events predicted by Nostradamus have come to pass. The world is filled with seers and mediums, but none continues to hold the public's interest and collective imagination as does Nostradamus, the master prophet. And as the end of one millennium approaches and the beginning of a new age dawns, the predictions of Nostradamus take on a growing significance as we strain to foresee how humankind will fare in the coming century.It seems more than coincidence that at this point in time Ramotti, a highly respected decryption expert-formerly with the Italian state police and who in an earlier book The Keys of Nostradamus presented the first mathematically sound system for ordering the quatrains-has now unearthed a previously lost manuscript written in the hand of Nostradamus. This manuscript contains eighty illustrations by the master prophet himself further corroborating Ramotti's previous ordering of the prophetic quatrains. More importantly, using an inscription left by Nostradamus on the stone of Turin, Ramotti has discovered a deciphering code that unlocks the secret texts within the quatrains, further expanding and clarifying the full messages of the prophecies that until now have remained hidden. In his characteristic enigmatic style, what Nostradamus did was create a giant puzzle, the pieces of which he left for future generations to put together.For the first time in the English language, The Nostradamus Code reveals the secret meanings of many of Nostradamus's predictions, throwing the door wide open to the new millennium. By applying the code he deciphered from the stone of Turin, Ramotti shows how the quatrains, which were originally written in French, contain embedded messages from Nostradamus in Italian. Afraid of retribution from the Church during the Inquisition, multilingual Nostradamus encoded his prophecies so that their full meaning would be understood only in a future time by those prepared to use the knowledge for good rather than evil.THE SECRET IMAGESEdited by Ramotti and Enza Massa, these mysterious prophetic paintings concerning the fate of the popes of the modern era are brought to light in an ancient manuscript left by Michele Nostradamus to his son Cesar, who, due to the interest of Urban VIII Barberini in the seventeenth century, sent it on to a religious order in Rome. These paintings confirm the exact ordering of the quatrains.Cesar Nostradamus, to whom his father Michele dedicated his prophecies, was one of the leading citizens of the city of Salon, and wrote a book on the history of Provence. He lived until 1631 and was most certainly alive when Cardinal Barberini, a francophile, received the manuscript.Confirming the antiquity of the manuscript are declarations by Beroaldo (Brother Cinus Beroaldus) and Guidini that the document was restored because it had been damaged by the passage of time. These declarations would have been impossible had they been written ad hoc by Cesar Nostradamus. Michele Nostradamus explicitly states that he destroyed the prophetic sources available to him, inherited no doubt from Jean (grandfather of Nostradamus's mother Renata of St. Remy), a celebrated esotericist and cabalist converted to Catholicism, councilor to King Rene. Later, he himself knew Luca Gaurico, an Italian with whom he shared a prophetic vision of the death of Henry II in a joust.It appears that Gaurico prophesied for Pope Paul III, and that after Gaurico's death Nostradamus took his place as court astrologer. Carlo Patrian, from whom this information was obtained does not credit the destruction of the texts, of which word may have been spread deliberately to avoid the Inquisition. In the twentieth century, Einstein brought to light the relativity of time and its strict relationship with the planet in which it manifests. Time, however, even now is an unresolved scientific question. Linear time, which we perceive and consider unique, is the result of a multiplicity of cycles interwoven in complex ways. It is similar to saying that the year is composed of days, weeks, months, and seasons; or that a symphony expresses itself in times, rhythms, and various musical instruments, each one with its own temporal rate. Today we speak of biorhythms, of circadian cycles, to point up the rhythmic multiplicity inside a single human body and, at the level of physics and mathematics, that of dimensions and hidden variables, of virtual realities, and, therefore, of invisible parallel worlds in which temporal rhythms or "times of the Father" are diverse and multiple.As Nostradamus himself explains, the translation of heavenly temporal multiplicity to the apparently linear time of terrestrial history is the theme at the core of all his prophetic quatrains, suggesting some keys to their arrangement and interpretation. These keys represent the principles of a multidimensional, temporal science, as yet undiscovered, but on the brink of being born-a science Carl G. Jung put forth in his theory of synchronicity. The relationship between the multidimensionality of time (time which the clairvoyant sees) and historic linear time is the concept Ramotti has applied to Nostradamus's quatrains, following those keys of arrangement suggested by Nostradamus himself. Mine is an empirical application that has remarkable and verifiable results, as well as historic validation.HERMETIC ROOTSThe following comes from Nostradamus's letter to his son Cesar, translated by Carlo Patrian:"And although that occult philosophy (of prophecy) was not disapproved of, I have never wanted to share these inspired writings, although various volumes that had remained hidden for long centuries have been revealed to me. But being uncertain as to what might happen [if they were found], after I had read them I made a gift of them to Vulcan, and when he came to devour them the flame rose up to lick the air and produced an unusual and extremely clear light, clearer and brighter than natural flame, like the swift flash of lightning, which suddenly illuminated the house as if there had sprung up in it a dazzling conflagration.And so that they would not be abused in times to come by those seeking perfect transformation, whether lunar or solar, or searching for incorruptible metals in the bowels of the earth or the waves of the occult, I reduced them to ashes."And so it would seem that the ancient secret of divination based on hermetic texts was destroyed. Though apparently not forever, given that Nostradamus adds later in his letter:"But being seized by inspiration many times a week, and by lengthy calculations, I have gathered together some books of prophecy, each one containing one hundred astronomical and prophetic quatrains which I have attempted to compose in a somewhat abstruse manner: these are prophecies extending far into the future, from now until the year 3797.THE SECRET OF THE CABALANostradamus's father was a scholar of the ancient Cabala. His grandfather, Giovanni Nostradonna, a Jew from Sicily, came to St. Remy in Provence following the troops of Carlo d'Angio. It is probable that Nostradamus, although Catholic, inherited from his forebears an ancient knowledge along with the hermetic texts, as well as an intimate acquaintance with the Italian language, which he perfected both through contact with Italian sailors in Marseilles and during his travels in Italy.It is said that Nostradamus visited the Sistine Chapel while Michelangelo worked there-and it is possible that he provided some inspiration for the artist's fantastic fresco of the Last Judgment. It seems Nostradamus also had some contact with Leonardo da Vinci. This contemporaneity of universal geniuses can be no accident. It came about at the first unfurling of the epoch of modern man, laboriously emerging from the darkness of the Middle Ages. During the Renaissance an occult literature flourished that derived from ancient hermetic texts dating back, according to tradition, to Melchisedek, the priest of God, eternally living, who initiated Abraham in the esoteric teachings that gave rise to the Cabala.Raffaele Bessi says, in the August 1994 issue of Giornale dei Misteri:The Hebrew alphabet is the language God used for creation. Based on scripture, the Cabalist Abulafia developed a theory of mystical contemplation of these letters, given and understood as contributing parts of the Name of God, which contains in itself all of created reality, an absolute entity reflecting the secret sense and the totality of existence.The true ecstatic world is the world of letters and every letter of every language, springing from the original Hebrew tongue, can be used as a means of pursuing mystic ecstasy through the scientific study of their combinations.Setting aside any conclusions on the ecstatic heights that were the purpose of the medieval Cabalists, it is natural to assume that the Tree of the Sefirot had a very ancient and more concrete origin and that only later, in the Middle Ages, did it give rise to mystical-philosophical-esoteric speculations. If not, what was this combinatory "science" of the letters based on?The Tree of the Sefirot is represented by ten small circles connected by lines, resembling a hole-based coding system. A plate pierced just so, at regular intervals, could be placed upon the Torah, and the divine letters that appeared in the openings, when read in sequence, allowed the reader to travel the exact path-the true significance of the sacred words.This particular system of ciphering has been used since the dawn of time and it is still used in modern times. In an old Clark Gable film we see a Russian spy place a handkerchief pierced with holes over a letter to read the hidden message.CABALISTIC NATURE OF THE STONE OF TURINIn an attempt to reconstruct the ancient occult science burned by Nostradamus, Ramotti made public in the October 1993 issue of Quaderno Nuovo (New Notebook) the method he used to decipher the hidden message in the walled inscription on Via Lessona in Turin. This is the method by which Ramotti was able to travel the exact path of decipherment, according to what appears in Prophecy number one in clear Italian, and the method which he used to decipher all the quatrains.With the aid of the "Zephirot" the stone can be read in Italian by the following algorithm of the date 1-5-5-6 four times and 6-5-5-1 four times, for three turns. The blanks count as letters.A second message appears in the Seal of Solomon (the hexagram) by combining the same letters differently and reading them counterclockwise.