Psalmanazar’s nonsense impressed the Bishop of London, who sent the young man to Oxford University to teach his mock language to seminarians. The seminarians were preparing to sail to Formosa as missionaries, so Psalmanazar translated the catechism into “Formosan.” When distinguished linguists examined the document, they declared that Psalmanazar’s nonsense was a real language; they reasoned that such a young man could not have made it up.
A Jesuit who had recently returned from traveling in Asia happened into one of Psalmanazar’s lectures and challenged the impostor. Psalmanazar denounced the priest as a liar and quickly turned the audience on the priest. Psalmanazar fooled the public for a decade until someone exposed him. Impostors attract followers who have low self-esteem. Seeing an impostor exude boundless self-confidence makes his followers forget their own insecurity for a while. Hence, exposing an impostor doesn’t immediately change his followers’ minds. Instead, followers vent their anger on the person who reveals the truth. An impostor’s fans must be left alone until they dream themselves out.
Sometimes impostors pass themselves off as members of professions that the public tends to glamorize, such as medical doctors or attorneys. When they do, they use mock professional jargon to create an illusion. Only an expert can distinguish an impostor’s nonsense from actual professional terminology.
Bogus Prophecies
Nonsense has been used for bogus prophecies and fortune telling. While there are true psychics in this world, people’s eagerness to read meaning into nonsense is a prime factor in the success of bogus fortunetellers. Hence, nonsense and prophecy have always gone hand in hand. For instance, unintelligible nonsense was the stock-in-trade of the ancient Greek oracle at Delphi. A prophetess sat on a bronze tripod that stood over a hole in the floor of a subterranean chamber. Ethylene gas rose through the hole, escaping from fissures deep in the earth beneath the oracle, and filled the chamber.
Oracle seekers stood outside the chamber and addressed their questions to the god Apollo. The prophetess, who was the presumed mouthpiece of Apollo, heard the questions and then inhaled ethylene. When she did, she drifted into a mildly intoxicated, trancelike state.
Ethylene is a hydrocarbon gas that was once commonly used for anesthesia. Inhaling it makes people jabber in incoherent nonsense. Hence, the prophetesses at Delphi uttered meaningless, unintelligible verbiage in response to petitioners’ questions.
Resident expert interpreters were stationed outside the chamber. They listened intently, trying their best to make sense of what Apollo was saying, and then they reworked the prophetess’s meaningless nonsense into semi-intelligible verses known as enigmas, or riddles. The enigmas left petitioners wondering what they meant. Hence, Delphi oracles became a watchword for obscurity. Nevertheless, the oracle was a major force in history, and it directly influenced decisions that shaped Western civilization. Evidently it is important to understand the role of nonsense in prophecy.
The typology of nonsense helps explain the prophecies of some renowned seers. We have identified and described multiple types of deliberate nonsense. Therefore, we can now identify those types, even when they occur in prophetic writings, which are purportedly meaningful and intelligible. This technique reveals the truth about one of the most famous fortune-tellers of history: Nostradamus.
Some claimed that Nostradamus’s prophecies were nonsense, even during his lifetime. That is still a standard criticism of Nostradamus’s writings, although until now, there has been no rational method to definitively prove it. The typology of nonsense provides such a method. Specifically, analysis of the selections below demonstrates that Nostradamus’s writings used categorical nonsense, nonsense names, non-referential pronouns, figurative nonsense, non-junctive nonsense, and numerative nonsense, all indicated in italics.
Categorical nonsense:
The divine word will give to the substance,
Including heaven, earth, gold hidden in the mystic milk65
Nonsense name:
The Religion of the name of the seas will win out
Against the sect of the son of “Adaluncatif”66
“Samarobryn” one hundred leagues from the hemisphere67
A just one will be sent back again into exile,
Through pestilence to the confines of “Nonseggle”68
Non-referential pronoun:
They will live without law exempt from politics.69
To near the Lake of Geneva will it be conducted,
By the foreign maiden wishing to betray the city.70
Figurative nonsense and non-junctive nonsense:
His replay to the red one will cause him to be misled,
The King withdrawing to the Frog and the Eagle.71
Numerative nonsense:
The blood of the just will commit a fault at London,
Burnt through lightning of twenty threes the six72
Of Paris bridge, Lyons wall Montpellier,
After six hundreds and seven score three pairs.73
Non-junctive nonsense:
The stubborn, lamented sect will be afraid
Of the two wounded by A and A.74
The mental effect of these verses is like that of other nonsense writings we have studied. They stimulate a flow of odd mental images, half-formed ideas, and fragmentary chains of thought. Such nonsense verses taunt the mind. Hence, Nostradamus’s prophecies inspired volume upon volume of learned interpretations, yet Nostradamians seldom agree in their interpretations of particular prophecies.
One Nostradamian maintained that the nonsense name “Samorobryn” referred to Sam R. O’Brien, an American space station astronaut of the 1970s. Other commentators were intrigued with “supelman,” another of Nostradamus’s nonsense names. Apparently, they conjectured that it might refer to Superman, the cartoon character.
Nostradamus wrote other prophecies that are intelligible but vague. Such prophecies are abstract formulas that invite readers to use their own imagination to fill in the blanks.
These vague prophecies are so nonspecific that they are bound to come true eventually. The two prophecies below are examples:
Two royal brothers will wage war so fiercely
That between them the war will be so mortal
That both will occupy the strong places:
Their great quarrel will fill realm and life.75
Some of those most lettered in the celestial facts
Will be condemned by illiterate princes:
Punished by Edict, hunted, like criminals,
And put to death wherever they will be found.76
This is a highly effective method for writing tantalizing prophecies, for when a vague but meaningful prophecy comes true, it lends credibility to the nonsensical prophecies. Apparent confirmation of a vague prophecy drives Nostradamians to work harder to uncover the “true meaning” of the unintelligible prophecies.