Historian debunks Nostradamus' predictions and compares them to 'social media of its day'
Do you really think there's something in the tea leaves, or is it all 'fake news'?
Even though the famed Nostradamus has been dead for some 459 years, his legacy lives on as one of the most famous mystics of all time. While Baba Vanga is largely remembered as the modern Nostradamus, there are still people being called the 'living Nostradamus' in 2025.
While many nowadays think it's a load of hokum, Nostradamus was something of a celebrity back in the 16th century.
Remembered for his book Les Prophéties which was published in 1555 (shortly before his death), these 942 poems 'predicted' future events. Despite his prediction the world as we know it will end in 2025, he suggested the real end of days will come in 3797.
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There have been plenty of criticisms of his work, with Cambridge linguist Peter Lemesurier suggesting that Nostradamus couldn't actually see into the future but simply used bibliomancy (interpreting the past as the future) and the mantra of history repeating himself.
Still, with Nostradamus' supporters standing by the idea that he predicted everything from the French Revolution to the rise of Adolf Hitler, the 9/11 terror attacks to the 2020 pandemic, some believe he's a magical seer.
Among those who think Nostradamus was just a man making the most of public hysteria, historian Dan Jones told The Guardian that it was effectively the social media of its day. Speaking to the outlet in 2022, Jones explained: "His time was comparable to ours. He lived when there were also massive social divisions and catastrophes."
It's ironic when it comes to the argument that Nostradamus was simply going with the idea of history repeating itself, especially with Jones comparing him to today's social media hysteria.
Jones expanded: "It was also a time in which the new invention of the printing press made the transmission of ideas, and crazy mad bullsh*t, incredibly easy. It was the social media of its day."
He goes on to say that Nostradamus combined 'the virtue of vagueness combined with apocalyptic fervor', pointing to the likes of Merlin and Geoffrey of Monmouth: "This vagueness lends itself to what we now know as confirmation bias.
“In desperate times, soothsayers have a ready audience for their insane nonsense. It’s the meeting point of cynicism and gullibility."
As for why Nostradamus took off as he did, Jones adds his own thoughts: "At moments of great change or social anxiety we do tend to go looking for explanations. We want the past and the future to make narrative sense."
Case in point, Nostradamus is famously said to have predicted his own death in 1566.
The bit that's often left out is that he's said to have only predicted it the day before.
Again jumping to the modern era, Jones concludes by saying that while he doesn't necessarily believe Nostradamus, he might've inadvertently predicted social media as we know it: "Those guys didn’t have social media, but what they were producing then would serve now as the fuel pellets on which social media runs.
"In fact, increasingly, Nostradamus is spreading through social media."
When it comes to 2025, we're seeing this more than ever. After all, how often are we seeing poorly-created AI images that trick people on Facebook into thinking it's the real deal? E
ven Nostradamus has his own AI version, making it feel like things really have come full circle.