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      Preface to Cesar Nostradamus

       Table of Contents

      Greetings and happiness to Cesar Nostradamus my son,

      Your late arrival, Cesar Nostredame, my son, has caused me a great deal of time in constant nightly watches so that after my death you might be left a memorial of your father, revealing in writing that which the Divine Spirit has made known to me, through the revolutions of the stars, to the common benefit of mankind.

      Since it has pleased the immortal God that you should have appeared on this earth but recently, and your years cannot yet said to be coupled, your weak understanding is incapable of absorbing that which I must needs record of the future. Furthermore, it is impossible to leave you in writing that which would be obliterated by the wear and tear of time. Indeed, the hereditary gift of prophecy will go to the grave with me.

      Events of human origin are uncertain, but all is regulated and governed by the incalcuable power of God, inspiring us not through drunken fury, nor by frantic movement, but through the influences of the stars. Only those divinely inspired can predict particular things in a prophetic spirit.

      For a long time I have been making many predictions, far in advance, of events since come to pass, naming the particular locality. I acknowledge all to have been accomplished through divine power and inspiration. Predicted events, both happy and sad, have come to pass throughout the world with increasing promptness. However, because of the possibility of harm, both for the present and most of the future, I became willing to keep silent and refrain from putting them into writing.

      For kingdoms, governments, sects, and religions will make changes so complete, truly diameterically opposite, that if I came to reveal what will happen in the future, the great ones of the above kingdoms, sects, religions, and faiths would find it so little in accord with what their fancy would like to hear, that they would condemn that which future centuries will know and perceive to be true.

      As the true Saviour said, "Give not that which is holy unto dogs, nor cast your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet and turn and rend you." This has been the cause of my withholding my tougue from the profane, and my pen from paper.

      Later, because of the vulgar advent, I decided to give way and, by dark and cryptic sentences, tell of the causes of the future mutation of mankind; especially the most urgent ones, and the ones I perceived, and in a manner that would not upset their fragile sentiments. All had to be written under a cloudy figure, above all things prophetic.

      Thou hast hidden these things from the wise and the prudent, that is, from the powerful and from kings, and hast revealed them to the small and the weak. And to the Prophets. By means of the Immortal God, and his good Angels, they received the spirit of prophecy, by which they see distant things and foresee future events.

      For nothing can be accomplished without Him whose power and goodness to His creatures is so great that as long as these dwell in them, much as they may be exposed to other influences, on account of their good genius this prophetic heat and power approaches us. It approaches us like the rays of the sun, which cast their influence on bodies both elementary and non-elementary.

      As for ourselves, who are but human, we can discover nothing of the obscure secrets of God the Creator by our own unaided knowledge or by the bent of our ingenuity. "It is not for you to know times or hours, etc."

      However, now or in the future there may be persons to whom God the Creator, through fanciful impressions, wishes to reveal some secrets of the future, integrated with judicial astrology, in much the same manner that in the past a certain power and voluntary faculty came over them like a flame, causing them to judge human and divine inspirations alike.

      For of the divine works, those which are absolute God completes; those which are medial, the angels; and the third kind, the evil spirits.

      But my son, I speak to you here a bit too obscurely. Hidden prophecies come to one by the subtle spirit of fire, sometimes through the understanding being disturbed in contemplating the remotest of stars, while remaining alert. The pronouncements are taken down in writing, without fear, without taint of excess verbiage. But why? Because all these things proceeded from the divine power of the great eternal God, from whom all goodness flows.

      Furthermore, my son, though I have mentioned the name prophet, I do not wish to assume for myself a title so sublime for the present. For He who is called a prophet now was once called a seer.

      Strictly speaking, my son, a prophet is one who sees things remote from the natural knowledge of men. And it can happen that the prophet, by means of the perfect light of the prophecy appearing before him, thinks he sees things divine as well as human; but this cannot be, for the effects of future prediction extend far.

      For the incomprehensible secrets of God and their efficient virtue belong to a sphere very remote from human knowledge, deriving their immediate origin from the free will. They bring about the appearance of causes which of themselves could not attract enough attention to be known, neither by human augury, nor by any other hidden knowledge or virture comprised under the concavity of heaven, even from the present fact of all eternity, which comes in itself to embrace all time. But through some indivisable eternity and by means of epyleptic agitation: the causes are made known by celestial movements.

      Understand me well, my son. I do not say that the knowledge of this matter cannot yet impress itself upon your young mind, nor do I say that very distant events are not within the knowledge of reasoning man. If future events are merely the creation of the intellectual soul out of current events, they are not by any means too greatly hidden from him, nor, on the other hand, can they be said to be revealed at all.

      But the perfect knowledge of events cannot be acquired without divine

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