The Steel Magnolia

As usually happens when I go on a text search through the quatrains of Nostradamus, I find interesting things that trigger my thoughts. In the case of the article about the proposed schism in the church and a pope at Avignon, after which the Muslims are supposed to invade, I had to get creative in my search. There was no term in all of the quatrains that was equivalent to “muslims” or “islam,” etc, so I tried “infidel” since that was the common term for Arabs during the time of Nostradamus. As I scanned the search results, the following caught my eye:

Quatrain 9,83

Sun twentieth of Taurus the earth will tremble very mightily,
It will ruin the great theater filled:
To darken and trouble air, sky and land,
Then the infidel will call upon God and saints.

I decided to check my ephemeris for when the Sun will be at 20 degrees of Taurus and noted that this year, it occurs on May 11. Funny that the number 11 keeps popping up in strange ways, such as September 11 and then March 11, both dates of so-called “terrorist attacks.”

It was strange that two big earthquakes happened on the day after Christmas and the day after Easter, something that was noted by many people and which they conspiratorially attributed to some super secret technological machinations of the Evil Bush Reich. I certainly think that if the Bush gang HAD such technology, they might very well use it, but I don’t think that they do. Even if they DID, hopefully there are at least enough brains between them to understand that setting off earthquakes can lead to nonlinear events even including one’s own destruction.

Having said that, there is still the fact that there were two serious earthquakes on the days immediately following the two “holiest” days of the Christian religion: Christmas and Easter, the “first birth” and the “second birth.” That is interesting to me.

Then, there is the number 11 that seems to be favored by the “evil terrorists,” who I suspect to be none other than the Bush Reich pulling the strings in the background. It’s a certainty that if you read Laura Knight-Jadczyk’s comments on the Pentagon Strike, you will be convinced that it was an Inside job.

Looking at the “prophecy” by Nostradamus, we notice these lines:

It will ruin the great theater filled:
To darken and trouble air, sky and land,

Referring again to the article about Fulcanelli and the Da Vinci Code by Laura Knight-Jadczyk, we note that there is a connection between Marguerite of Navarre and Queen Elizabeth I of England. One wonders if that also suggests a philosophical connection between the group that surrounded Marguerite and the group that surrounded Elizabeth which included Francis Bacon, long suspected to be the true author of the works of Shakespeare. In the play, As You Like It, we read:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:

Perhaps Nostradamus meant “Great Theater” in the same sense? The “Global Stage,” so to say.

This leads us to the issue of Supervolcanoes and Toba.

The Toba supervolcano is situated in the very same geologic region as the recent monster earthquake on the day after Christmas that killed hundreds of thousands in Indonesia and the Indian Ocean basin by the generated tsunami. This was followed by the second deadly earthquake, on the day after Easter. An Australian expert is now saying that these earthquakes may very well be precursors to the eruption of Toba, a supervolcano whose eruption would dwarf all previous catastrophes.

Professor Ray Cas of Monash University’s School of Geosciences (Australia) says the world’s biggest supervolcano at Lake Toba on Indonesia’s island of Sumatra sits on a faultline running down the middle of Sumatra where some seismologists say a third earthquake might strike following the killer quakes on December 26, 2004 and the more recent one in late March, this year. Both those quakes occurred along faultlines running just off Sumatra’s west coast and created seismological stresses which could, according to Dr. Cas, hasten an eruption of Toba. Toba’s “last eruption released 1,000 cubic kilometers (240 cubic miles) of ash and rock debris into the atmosphere, much of it as fine ash which blocked out solar radiation, kicking the world back into an ice age,” he says.

To get a handle on this, consider the following: Back in 1883 the volcano Krakatau (”Krakatoa”) in Indonesia exploded.

“The eruption was one of the most catastrophic natural disasters in recorded history. The effects were experienced on a global scale. Fine ashes from the eruption were carried by upper level winds as far away as New York City. The explosion was heard more than 3000 miles away. Volcanic dust blew into the upper atmosphere affecting incoming solar radiation and the earth’s weather for several years. A series of large tsunami waves generated by the main explosion, some reaching a height of nearly 40 meters (more than 120 feet) above sea level, killed more than 36,000 people in the coastal towns and villages along the Sunda Strait on Java and Sumatra islands. Tsunami waves were recorded or observed throughout the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the American West Coast, South America, and even as far away as the English Channel.”

On the newly devised scale of volcanic eruptions, a “Supervolcano” is a volcanic eruption of a magnitude of “8” on the Volcano Explosivity Index, meaning that more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of magma are erupted. Krakatoa was only a “6″.

But then, there is also the slumbering Supervolcano in Yellowstone National Park. It has been “sleeping” for about 640,000 years and is said to erupt about ever 600,000 years. So, it’s a bit overdue. Scientists have recently begun to sound the alarm, saying that the global risk posed by a supervolcanic eruption somewhere in the world is between five and ten times greater than the probability of earth being struck by a giant asteroid.

It’s easy to see that if Toba blows, it will definitely “darken and trouble air, sky and land.”

However, considering my previous post about the Pope and who the “infidels” might actually be, we wonder about the last line of this quatrain of Nostradamus:

Then the infidel will call upon God and saints.

The “saints,” in the terms Nostradamus would have used were “Christians.” It seems that he is indicating to us that the “infidels” are those who would call on the Saints, i.e. the Christian West.

All interesting to think about. And with the spate of recent earthquakes, we can suspect that something is up deep inside our planet, and even if George Bush and his neocons THINK that they “create reality,” they may be surprised to discover that Mother Earth has different plans.

Interesting article I read on the net this morning:

New pope will be assassinated: Scholar
Thursday, 07 April , 2005, 10:57
Bogota: The pope elected to succeed John Paul II will be assassinated and his death will spark a Muslim invasion of the West that will split the Roman Catholic church, according to an interpretation of Nostradamus’ prophecies by a leading Colombian author.

“The next pope elected will be subsequently murdered in central Italy. Then comes pope number 112, who will flee Rome because of an attack by Muslims,” Gonzalo Echeverri, a Colombian investigating judge and author of a book on Nostradamus told AFP.

According to Echeverri, the pope will base himself in Avignon, France and another pontiff will take control in Italy, splitting the Catholic church in two.

“There is a very clear prophecy that says the holy father will move to another place, even warning that the French pope will not be able to stay in Avignon due to the Muslim invasion and will flee again to Lyon, where he will be attacked, according to Nostradamus,” Echeverri said.

Avignon was a base for popes for much of the 14th century, another time of grave divisions in the Church and Europe.

Nostradamus was a 16th century scholar who made prophecies. His supporters say he predicted the French revolution, the rise of Hitler and the assassination of President John F Kennedy.

I started to think about this “prediction” and it really didn’t “feel right,” so to say. The likelihood of there being such an open split in the Catholic church, the possibility of a pope taking up residence in Avignon in this day and age, is so remote as to be laughable.

Since I don’t have this guy’s book and can’t find out exactly what quatrain he is talking about, and since I have a computerized text version of Nostradamu’s quatrains and a search program, I did a search to see if anything at all fit.

Nothing did.

I can only think that he is reading something into a quatrain that is very vague, and what it is, I don’t know.

When I first read this, I immediately thought of the contankerations surrounding Phillippe le Bel and his desire to eliminate the Templars and take all their goodies for himself. There is a pretty good synopsis of the events HERE.

We read here about a certain event that is quite astonishing and sounds exactly like what the Colombian author has described:

… [T]he French king Philip IV (the Fair) was getting impatient with the pope for not crowning him Emperor. He began taxing the clergy and withholding church revenues - despite an earlier papal bull that this was a grave offence.

In 1302, Boniface penned a Bull Unam Sanctam (‘one holy’) not just to Philip but to the whole church:

‘There is but one, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church outside of which there is no salvation …

‘We declare that it is wholly necessary for salvation for every creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff’.

A year later, Boniface was working on another Bull, this time to excommunicate Philip. What he didn’t know was that Nogaret had joined forces with Sciarra Colonna, relative of the sacked cardinals. In October that year (1303), their forces stormed into Anagni, the pope’s favourite retreat. The invaders began burning the main doors of the cathedral and slaughtered all who had not yet fled. They then advanced towards the palace, killing all (bishops included) along the way. The pope’s bodyguards surrendered.

Sciarra made his way to the huge audience chamber. There sat the pope, 86, alone except for a single cowering cardinal. He was attired in full regalia, including a gold cross in his hands. Initially awed, Sciarra strode slowly towards the Pontiff. “Resign”, he shouted and slapped him across the face, the chamber walls echoing with the sound.. Too proud to beg for mercy, Boniface lowered his head and intoned that he was ready to die. Sciarra hesitated and then raised his sword.

Just then Nogaret burst in and shouted at him that the pope was wanted in France to face a general council. Sciarra put back his sword but proceeded to strip the pope of his costly tiara and garments until he stood nearly naked, showing his body infested with lice. He was thrown into a dungeon, dark and dank. Meanwhile the people of the town got organised, drove away the invaders and rescued the pope.

Boniface was a changed man. The hunger and thirst in the dungeon, the darkness and isolation, the rats scampering over him had unhinged him. He kept himself locked in the Lateran for 5 weeks and there in solitude he died. His predecessor Celestine had foretold: “You leapt to the throne like a fox, you will rule like a lion, you will die like a dog.”

The next pope, Benedict XI, died of dysentery in 8 months. There was 11 months of wrangling between the French and other cardinals deciding on his successor. In the end, the Archbishop of Bordeaux was elected as Pope Clement V. King Philip of France had a French pope at last. Clement never set foot in Rome. In order not ‘to cause pain to our dear son, the King of France’, in 1309 he moved to Avignon, a small city in Provence which then belonged not to France but to the king of Naples.It was almost surrounded by papal territory. He agreed to be crowned at Lyon, absolved Philip and Nogaret of all wrong doing and even published a bull praising Philip for his hostile actions against Boniface. Clement created a large number of cardinals, most of them French, 5 being members of his own family. He died in 1314. It took two years to decide on his successor, John XXII.

The thing is, all of this happened BEFORE the time of Nostradamus and, since Nostradamus is supposed to be writing prophecies, that is, things that will happen in the future, “true believers” have to project such events forward in time.

But, what if Nostradamus was not ALWAYS writing about the future? What if Nostradamus was writing also about the past, that is, recording things for posterity so that people would know “what really happened?”

The reason I am suggesting this is because of an article I have already mentioned by Laura Knight-Jadczyk entitled “The True Identity of Fulcanelli and the Da Vinci Code.” In this article she mentions the following:

Another of Marguerite’s [of Navarre, wife of Henri d’Albret] associates and correspondents was Jules Cesar Scaliger who was a close friend and associate of Nostradamus. Nostradamus, as it happens, was born in Alet-le-Bains, in Foix lands. Nostradamus also attended school with Rabelais.

In 1525 Nostradamus settled in Agen, not far from Toulouse and Auch. In 1534, it is said he married a woman of “High Estate”, who gave him two children. This woman has never been identified, but considering his highly probable association with Marguerite of Navarre, it is likely that there was some connection there. It is said that, in 1538, his wife and children died of the plague. Around the same time, he had a falling out with Scaliger, and he was accused of heresy by the Inquisition…

The article focuses, in part, on a “history” recorded in Auch Cathedral. About Auch Cathedral, Knight-Jadczyk writes:

There is a very great mystery in the city of Auch. It consists of two masterpieces of Renaissance art preserved in St. Mary’s Cathedral - a cathedral dedicated to “The Black Virgin.

She then quotes a priest who has made Auch Cathedral his life’s study:

The artists of the Gothic Cathedrals would be none other than the Compagnons du devoir de liberté - The Companions Devoted to Liberty.

These companions have been able to give full initiative to their art, to the point of expressing in many places their initiations - of course, discreetly.

This remarkable set is not mere art! Like the windows, it contains thought, a message.

When we carefully observe the details, in the stalls, something immediately appears to our eyes: Demons and snakes, malevolent animals and monsters of all species swarm there. This invasion contributes to give to this whole a tragic aspect that also agrees very well with the profound movement of history that is narrated to us.

This tragic aspect is complementary and has to be put in relationship to the windows of Arnaud de Moles. The windows and stalls constitute a whole. The two masterpieces were designed at the same time. The same story is told. Its theme was proposed to the glaziers and the sculptors. This theme evokes the same reality: the reality of man in general.

One would almost think about Dante’s Inferno. But this obvious tragedy is not hell - it is the history of humanity on earth. Charity - empty handed - walks right before the monsters and demons, sustained by one same hope, going alone, but courageous, to face evil, the malevolent snake. At the end of the cycle, she becomes triumphant Strength. Her mission is accomplished because we see all malevolent snakes crushed under her feet or finally mastered in her hands.

Since this history is told and relived in retrospect, our artists knew in advance that this dramatic adventure had to bring us to Life.

What breadth! What perspective! that comes out of the thought of the woodwork of the choir of Auch. Some connoisseurs are not afraid to compare the extraordinary work of these stalls with the frescoes of Michelangelo. [Raymond Montané]

When I read “this history is told and relived in retrospect” and knew that the creators of this artwork were somehow connected to Leonardo Da Vinci and to Nostradamus, as well as the “father of Western Historical chronology,” Jules Cesar Scaliger, I realized that it must be so that Nostradamus not only made prophecies, but he recorded for us the “inside scoop” on events of the time, and the periods immediately preceding his own historical placement.

Thus, the issue of the schism of the Catholic Church and the Pope at Avignon MUST refer to the affair of Nogaret and Boniface VIII.

Boniface’s contest with Philip IV of France was the principal feature of his career. One suspects that what Nostradamus may have been trying to tell us (and I am still not sure of the quatrain that the esteemed Colombian writer refers to) was that Boniface was murdered so that Phillipe Le Bel could have his French pope, Clement V.

Now, the interesting thing about Boniface VIII is that he comes up in the Mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau. The alleged story about this renegade country priest says that he went to Paris and returned with reproductions of three paintings: The Shepherds of Arcadia by Poussin, The second is St. Anthony and St. Paul by Teniers, and the third was a painting of Pope St. Celestine V. For a look at these paintings, go HERE.

Supposedly, these paintings are clues to the solution of some mystery. Whether or not any of that is true as is told by the “Rennes-le-Chateau” cottage industry of mystery manufacturing, I can’t say. But in the present case, the connection IS interesting. The site with the paintings I have linked to tells us the following:

I would like to quote a very short biography written totally from the church’s perspective. First it should be noted that he ruled as Pope for less than a year which seemed to be a habit at this time in history so that in itself is not unique. ….

“On December 13th Celestine met the cardinals in the great hall of the palace. Clad in his pontificals he read them the decree of abdication, then stepped down and stripped himself of all papal imsignia. The “Great Refusal”, as Dante called it.

Celestine was kept in confinement by his successor Boniface VIII, lest he should become the tool of designing schemes and endanger the unity of the church, He died on May 19th, 1296. Pope Clement V cannonized him in. (This is, if one studies the record carfully, so much rubbish. How could he have possibly endangered the unity of the church. There appears to be much more to this story than the church would let on. There are reports that he was instrumental in helping the Templars and that is why he was carefully locked up untill his death. Sure would be interesting to get into The Vatican Archives and read some of what was really written during this time. I am sure it would be illuminating !)

The painting is entitled “Allegory of the Coronation of Celestine V” and is supposedly a French painting of the 16th century, however how they can date it to this period not knowing the artist is beyond me. There is no history of it as far as who owned it and how it came into being and furthermore I have yet to be able to see a rendition in colour. Very curious indeed. Personally I get the feeling that it is perhaps earlier than they say but then what do I know of art. It is, of course, housed in the Louvre.

It seems interesting that the description of the confrontation with Boniface VIII and Nogaret describes the Pope being stripped to the point that it was seen that his body was infested with lice, and then we have Celestine V stripping himself of all Papal insignia before being locked up by Boniface VIII. Then, along comes Clement V who does a big cover-up.

So, my guess is that this was a crucial point in history and Nostradamus may have been trying to tell us something that had nothing to do with an invasion of Muslims, but rather the take-over of the church by a gang of infidels of a different sort.

Just “another take.”