Nostradamus Linked to the Kabbalah - Footnotes

The following are additional notes from my first interview with Morten St. George on the Kabbalah theme. For their technical nature, they were left out of an earlier, limited distribution of "Nostradamus Linked to the Kabbalah." However, I now see that they provide useful information, so I am appending them to the full distribution of this article.

i) St. George theorizes that the chariot originally delivered a total of one hundred revelations. He further surmises that, following indications in the first sentence of co-delivered book Sefer Yetzirah, the early cabalists isolated thirty two of those revelations and designated them as "paths of wisdom." In the Paris edition modifications, exactly thirty-two stanzas follow the same pattern of verse re-ordering. Thus, out of the original one hundred revelations of the Revelations of Elijah, St. George believes that Nostradamus published the thirty-two paths of wisdom plus an additional ten revelations.

ii) St. George is convinced that the purpose of the Paris alterations was to provide a scheme for locating the real revelations within Nostradamus' book. However, out of the thirty-nine Paris alterations, St. George claims that only the first replacement and the last replacement correspond to a real revelation. Consequently, to locate the remaining revelations, St. George believes one must learn how to steer a course to them, possibly via maneuvers around or through circles or spheres. To date, St. George has not been successful in doing this.

iii) All four of the Paris editions of the late sixteenth century are still extant and all four are available in public libraries. Two of them can be found in the Library of the British Museum, in London, and their textual variants were personally recorded by St. George. The other two are in libraries in France. A bibliographic report on the variants in France did not mention the first modification, the one and only modification in Nostradamus' second group of one hundred stanzas, and St. George does not know if that was an oversight on part of the bibliographer or if there are slight differences beyond the three additional stanzas of the French versions.

iv) Diverse, brief descriptions of the Thirty-Two Paths of Wisdom are still extant, each constituting a synopsis of the essence of a Nostradamus stanza. St. George says it is "fun and games" linking up the descriptions with their corresponding revelations. He also told me that some of the best English-language descriptions of the paths are to be found in books written by Christian investigators of the Kabbalah.

v) For people wishing to learn about the Kabbalah, St. George recommends Gershom Scholem's Origins of the Kabbalah to become quickly familiar with the theme. This book includes rare references to the Revelations of Elijah. St. George says to read carefully, looking for tie-ins with the revelations. For example, when Scholem notes that medieval cabalists appended "the surname of the prophet" to their name, you need only look to the first verse of revelation II-28 for an explanation; there you will find "the surname of the prophet." Look, in particular, for instances where Scholem expresses surprise or shock, such as when he notes with exclamation point that the Bahir refers to the Moon goddess. Indeed, the Moon goddess is unlikely to have played a role in Judaism in any epoch, but for an explanation you need only drop down one verse in II-28, where you will find Diana, the Moon goddess!

vi) St. George recalls that the first sign he encountered of a connection between Nostradamus and Isaac Luria came from a passage in Hayyim Vital's Sefer ha-Hezyonot, which conveys a date in 1566 on the Jewish calendar. In this passage, someone is unable to stop grieving and weeping. The Jewish date converts to the date of Nostradamus' death. However, St. George does not believe that the Lurianic Kabbalah would be particularly helpful for maneuvering around the spheres.

vii) One hundred and two years after the death of Nostradamus, a Dutch printer by the name of Jean Jansson published an original manuscript of Nostradamus' Epistle, the first publication ever of this manuscript. St. George knows that it was an original manuscript because it contained textual variants that only Nostradamus himself could have created. The same Dutch printer also published, in Hebrew and Latin, the book of creation Sefer Yetzirah, to which he appended a description of the thirty-two paths of wisdom. The description of the twenty-eighth path, however, was omitted. Consequently, St. George believes Nostradamus' book may contain only thirty-one of the thirty-two paths. According to St. George, the missing path would have been a dated revelation concerning the death of Nostradamus' king, Henry II of France, which for certain reasons, Nostradamus could not publish and may have replaced with another revelation.