How Did He Do It?
Nostradamus did leave a few clues as to how he achieved the trance state where he claimed to get his prophecies. To get into a trance, Nostradamus would start by preparing for a divination session.
He would start by being alone. Above all else, he could not afford to be distracted. This would deter him from the trance and ultimately render any effort useless. He wanted to stay focused, so he quieted his mind, threw away any thoughts, and focused on only one thing, the divination session. By his side, he lit a single candle, and since it was dark, the only things in his vision were the candle, water, and a brass tripod. In all these sessions, he maintained a serious composure, and treated each of them as being holy. He performed these rituals at night and tried to separate himself from the rest of the world as much as he could, letting go of all daily worries because he realized the future of the world was infinitely more important than the struggles of everyday life.
Being a prophet was his purpose, and he practiced this to the absolute extreme.
Through his meditations, Nostradamus was able to achieve a state where his consciousness was separated from his body, as evident in the change of prose from his active voice to a more passive third-person voice. It was like he was looking at himself from another angle, and through this angle he recorded what he saw and used the material for his quatrains. In this sense, Nostradamus wasn’t experiencing the events through his own eyes, but rather, through the memories of someone who had already lived them. This alleviated the pressure that Nostradamus would hold if he were to say all the predictions were his own, and although there isn’t any evidence as to what exactly happened in these divination sessions besides Nostradamus’ own word, this is the only conclusion that is presented to us.
Why the Mystery?
With his great power of being a prophet, Nostradamus also realized the burden he carried. He knew the information he wielded was immensely powerful and could potentially hurt people if it was too blunt. On the contrary, being too vague would render his power utterly useless, as he felt it was his job to inform the public about what he learned. So, he wrote the quatrains in a manner that the common man wouldn’t be able to understand completely but would still be able to comprehend the basic lessons they embody.
Only people of similar knowledge levels were able to fully understand and utilize Nostradamus’ unveiled mysteries. Although the intent behind his writings was to help mankind, the puzzling features they were riddled with made it a challenge to meet that goal.
Among the elements that comprised Nostradamus’ prophecies was astrology. As a lifelong learner of the subject, celestial bodies played a huge role in his predictions. As previously mentioned, he used the configuration of the stars and planets with respect to the Earth to map out how history would play out. Birthdays, angles, degrees, time stamps, and other numerical quantities were used by Nostradamus to see what forces were affecting events and how they would impact the future. He believed that these factors heavily influenced an individual, and a person’s birthday played a key role in determining how their life would unfold.
Of course, these methods when seen by the average person would label Nostradamus as insane, but no matter what the public thought of him, he persisted in what he believed to be his life’s mission. His quatrains concealed the mysteries of his prophecies underneath several layers of metaphor, symbolism, and numerical data. To this day, nobody has cracked the code to his thought process, but these clues can help you develop your own unique understanding of the world we live in.