By Haddon Libby
As we approach yet another New Year, we have a chance to reflect on the passing year while looking forward to the challenges and opportunities that the new year may hold for each of us. If you are like me, the primary New Year resolution centers around increased exercise, eating a bit healthier and losing a few pounds.
This is also the time of year when psychics of all types make bold predictions for the New Year. While today’s batch of psychics are really a bunch of charlatans, one continues to grasp our attention more than five hundred years after his birth.
Michel de Nostradame aka Nostradamus was born in France in 1503 and lived for 63 years. Prior to writing 6,338 prophecies, Nostradame was schooled by his grandfather in several languages and attended university at the age of 14. Initially intent on a career in astrology, changed his field of study to medicine and found the cure for the plague. As you would expect, this caused him much celebrity.
At 52, Nostradame published The Prophecies. Each prophecy was written in a French poetry style of quatrains, or four line poems. As it was heresy and the work of the devil to make predictions of the future, Nostradame wrote in the hard to interpret code of his poems rather than risk death. Nostadame used his knowledge of astrology and the bible when writing his prophecies.
His poems were meant to provide insights into the fate of the world over the next 2,000 years. If you have not read the book, the world has a bleak ending. I personally interpret this to mean that we have until 3,560 AD or another 1,538 years to go.
One of his first predictions was that a monk that he met while travelling would become pope. That monk became Pope Sixtus V in 1585 or 19 years after Nostradame’s death.
Nostradame also predicted the death of France’s King Henri II in 1559 during a ceremonial jousting match and the French Revolution of 1789.
It is thought that “Pau, Nay, Loron” refers to Napoleon Bonaparte as the First Antichrist.
The second antichrist that he wrote of is thought to refer to Adolf Hitler due to a passage that talks of a person fitting Hitler’s description rising to power and doing bad things. A reference to Hister may refer to Hitler’s name or the ancient name of the Danube River where Adolf Hitler grew up.
Some believe that 9/11 was predicted when he wrote of a “New City” would suffer from “earthshaking fires from two high rocks”. Could this reference the downing of the World Trade Centers?
With this as a backdrop, what might be Nostradamus predictions for 2023?
According to The Sun UK, “seven months the Great War, people dead of evil-doing” could refer to an escalation of the Russia-Ukraine War into a Third World War. With China eyeing Taiwan, many are hopeful that this prophecy does not reflect the future of that conflict.
A reference to “light on Mars falling” may be made a reality by the currently Twitter-obsessed Elon Musk. Musk has predicted that he will send a manned aircraft to Mars this decade.
According to prophecy, Pope Francis will be the last true Pope. His successor will create a great scandal. Given all of the scandals that have rocked the Church in recent years, that new Pope must have a whopper in store for us.
If we look forward a few years, Italy should have an economic crisis like Greece. If rates continue to go higher, the war in Ukraine lingers and business activity slows, it is a near certainty that this prediction will come true.
‘* The Plague was caused by rats and the fleas on rats. When Pope Gregory IX ruled that cats were the Devil in Fur and a genocide of cats occurred, rat populations grew, people contracted the virus and millions died.
Haddon Libby is the Founder and Chief Investment Officer of Winslow Drake Investment Management. For more information on his services, please visit www.WinslowDrake.com.
