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21. Nostradamus, the most famous of all 16th century prophets. His political predictions are still in great vogue.
who had a strong mystical streak, summoned Nostradamus, and for 45 nights the two of them conducted spiritualist seances. Nostradamus managed to conjure up the angel Anael who showed Catherine the future of her children in a mirror. Her three sons, later to become kings of France, appeared first and paraded across the mirror, once for every year of their reign. Since none of them was destined to reign for long, the parade took up little time, but when Catherine's son-in-law, the King of Navarre, who later succeeded to the French throne as Henri IV of France, appeared in the mirror, he took £3 turns in it. Catherine was so frightened at this revelation that she desisted from pressing Nostradamus for any further glimpses of the future. Both Nostradamus and the angel Anael obliged and the
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mirror reverted to its former, more prosaic, role of ordinary looking glass. ^
Pascal's Wager
Though the 16th century was a particularly superstitious epoch, rational thought managed to make great strides in it. For the first time in history, men had begun to plumb the future by statistical methods and to act accordingly. While the life of the individual was recognised to depend on too many unpredictable factors for even the wisest of prophets to come to any reliable conclusions, the collective fate of hundreds or thousands of men was so regular that general predictions about it seemed quite possible.
Questions about the average life expectancy of man, the total number of spinsters or orphans in a town of a given size or the number of shipwrecks began to be asked, and the mere fact that they were asked was an entirely new and very courageous step, for it meant asking questions about the future without the aid of magicians and astrologers. It appeared that, if the death-rate had been fairly constant for some years, the same number of people would probably die in the next year, as well. True, one did not know which particular family was going to be affected, but, if only enough people clubbed together, they could at least make good some of the worst financial repercussions of an individual breadwinner's death. It was from such considerations that Insurance Societies were originally set up.
The first of these societies was established in Italy, though the idea was initially suggested by English merchants. It was in England, too, that Sir William Petty laid the foundations of statistical science in the second half of the 1 7th century. Stat- istics was a way of catching a glimpse of the future by methods that had been used before, but never deliberately or systematically.
The mathematical tools and the intellectual framework of this new art of prediction were provided by France. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) and Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) were the acknowledged masters of a calculus by which probabilities could be compounded from mathematical formulae. While * Jean Moura and Paul Louvet: La vie de Nostradamus (Paris 1930).
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"scientific" astrologers and magicians had always tried to predict future details with complete accuracy and had therefore committed the most colossal blunders, the new school based its predictions on the fact that between total certainty and total uncertainty there lay a vast range of possibilities, the prob- ability of each of which could be calculated with mathematical precision (Plates XI-XIII).
Probability calculations, far from being mere games with numbers, are a most useful science — even though they originated on the gaming tables. It all started when a fellow gambler, the Chevalier de Mere, asked Pascal how the stakes could be fairly redistributed among players when a game of dice was suddenly interrupted, i.e. how a given player's future chances of success in the game could be taken into account in the redistribution. Blaise Pascal, then thirty years old but already distinguished not only because of his mathematical papers but also because of his invention of the calculating machine and of the hydraulic press, tackled the problem with great zest, for he realised that its solution might have tremendous repercussions far beyond the gaming table. But since he was primarily dealing with a gambling question, he called his probability theory aleae geometriae — the geometry of the die.
Unaware that Galileo^ had studied the chances of winning in games of dice some 12 years, and Cardano some 100 years, earlier, Pascal thought that he had founded an entirely new branch of science. And in fact, though he was not the first to have appreciated the problem and to have attempted its solution, probability theory is commonly agreed to have begun with the letter to Pere Mersenne ( 1654), in which Pascal developed the ideas.
A few months later, Pascal withdrew from worldly life to devote himself entirely to religious studies. Still, his thoughts returned time and again to the concept of probability, so much so that he attempted to solve the most intricate religious problems by probability theory — and this despite his faith in miracles! In Pascal, rationalism competed strongly with an inner trend towards mysticism. Thus, when he was asked whether it was worth while working for eternal salvation, his reply^ was 1 Galileo: Sopra la significazione del giitoco dei dadi ( 1642). * Pascal: Pensees, Chapter 7 (published posthumously in 1670).
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that we must take a gamble for or against God. If we wager on God, our chances of success are greater than the risks we run, since, however small our chances of attaining eternal bliss, the reward is out of all proportion to the stakes. Thus no reason- able man would refuse to contract such a wager. ^
Pascal's wager with God strikes us as a piece of medieval scholasticism which never questions the premisses on which it is based. Two hundred years later, another French scholar, Ernest Renan, objected that no business man in his right senses would stake even a hundred francs to gain a million, if the chances were as small as those of attaining life hereafter. Be that as it may, probability, which had been quite alien to ancient and medieval methods of prophecy, was now on everyone's lips. "Chance" began to obsess all men; and the weighing up of future gains and losses with all the tricks of mathematics, became not only a favourite social game, but occupied the greatest minds of the time. Thus the Swiss mathematician Jacob Bemouilli^ set to per- fecting the mathematical method, and made it possible for prob- ability theory to play the very large part it does in modern astronomical, medical, technical, economic, and other scientific predictions.
Hypnosis
Naturally, the professional prophets were not slow in appro- priating the new techniques, and they began to calculate the most absurd phenomena with mathematical precision. The stars might lie, but numbers could never deceive. A new age of numerology had dawned, and was directing its main efforts at gambling predictions, and gambling, since the advent of state lotteries, had taken sway of ever-increasing multitudes. It was generally known that, if only a man lived long enough and never missed a single draw, he was bound one day to hit the jackpot, and to make more than good all the losses he had incurred. Still, this was rather a lengthy method of attaining
^ L6on Jantat: Le pari de Pascal in La Revue philosophique, Paris, March- April IPW; and Marcel Boll: L' exploitation du hasard (3rd ed., Paris 1955) p. 1 1 1 ff. 2 Jacob Bemouilli: Ars conjectandi (Basle 1713).
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riches, when the time of waiting could be cut short by prophetic selections of the winning lottery ticket. The ancient belief in lucky and unlucky numbers together with many other "recipes" was revived with enthusiasm.
Towards the end of the 18th century, the great magician Cagliostro set up number charts in which lucky numbers were associated with certain dreams. At that time, the French state lottery was using ninety numbers, and Cagliostro advised, for instance, that if you dreamt of asparagus you were bound to win with number 5. Dreams of priests, bathing, lions, and rain were favourably associated with the numbers 7, 31, 16 and 89 respec- tively, and so on^.
Dreams and all somnolent states were re-introduced into prophecy, the moment the German physician Anton Mesmer discovered, or rather rediscovered, hypnosis, for hypnosis had probably been known even in antiquity. The fact that, by means of hypnosis, others could be made to do one's bidding, was seized upon by many "prophets" to suggest visions to hypno- tised subjects, and women in particular, in the full knowledge that the clientele would rather listen to them than to the "magnetiser" himself.
The master of this art was Mesmer's pupil, the Marquis de Puysegur, whose claim to immortality is based on the fact that he was the discoverer of "artificial somnambulism" (1784). It had long been known that some people could walk in their sleep with unusual footsureness, and no one had given a better descrip- tion of their feats than Shakespeare himself in Act V of Macbeth, where the doctor observes that Lady Macbeth's antics are "beyond my practice".
Since Shakespeare's day, doctors had apparently perfected their "practice", for somnambulistic hallucinations and even prophecies could be artificially induced. The method was similar to that used in "incubation", the artificial creation of dreams practised in Greek temples — ^particularly in Epidaurus — but it had the advantage that the hypnotist, unlike the "incubator", kept the medium under his control.
One of the Marquis de Puysegur's prophetic mediums was a young girl from the Black Forest, who predicted all the horrors
^ Marcel Boll: L' Occultisme devant la Science (Srd ed., Paris 1951), p. 29 f.
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of the French Revolution well in advance. Baroness Henriette Louise d'Oberkirch, a friend of the German poets Goethe and Wieland, recorded in her Memoirs how, during a somnambulistic session in Strasbourg, the Black Forest girl with the help of the Marquis de Puysegur, managed to scare the daylight out of an old soldier.^ (In fact, the girl did no more than confirm and elaborate the well-known prophecies of Cazotte, but her "somnambulistic revelations" obviously had a very much greater effect than the philosopher Cazotte ever managed to produce by himself. )
Clairvoyance and hypnotic prophecies remained the fashion until well into the 19th century. Though the universities and academies condemned all spiritualistic phenomena as sheer black magic, mystics like Kierkegaard and even such critical minds as Schopenhauer continued to believe in them. As always, spiritualism took three forms: communion with the dead, i.e. the temporary resurrection of the past; telepathy, i.e. bridging distances; and divination, i.e. bridging time. Particularly com- petent mediums were masters of all three branches of the art, while others, less skilled, specialised in two or even only one branch.
The decline of divination
However, from the middle of the 19th century onwards, the third branch of spiritualism, i.e. divination, which was previously the most highly esteemed, fell into a decline. Prophets and prophetesses became rarer, and above all they lost social status. It was a bad sign, indeed, that the despised Gypsies were increasingly taking over the function of fortune-telling. While prophets had once been respected men and women, their craft had fallen into the hands of ragged old women and tramps, whose customers had to keep an eye on their valuables while consulting them. Moreover, the methods of prophecy reverted to what had always been considered the lowest forms: palmistry, crystal-gazing, fortune-telling from cards or from tea-leaves. The new practitioners — ^women almost without exception — drew the vast majority of their clientele from the lower middle ^ Memoires de la Baronne d'Oberkirch (London 1852) Vol. III.
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classes, and what few customers from the higher strata of society they attracted, stole to them in dead secret, and pretended to even their closest friends that the whole business was far beneath them.
The situation resembled that of the late Greek period, when Plutarch had complained of the decline of the oracle, and that of the late Renaissance when astrology had fallen on evil days. Pseudo- sciences were no longer needed to predict the future, for there were too many new discoveries in all the real sciences to leave much room for idle speculation (Plate XIV). True, Darwin's theory of evolution and Herbert Spencer's applications of that theory to sociology told the individual little about his own particular future, or that of his children. But nevertheless they cast a collective horoscope for humanity as a whole, and a very favourable one, too. Despite all dangers and setbacks, every- thing was getting better, the world was becoming more and more perfect, so that even the individual was bound to profit in the long run. The idea of progress had vanquished the profes- sional pessimists, and when the year 1881 approached, no one rushed into the cellars or fell down on his knees, despite the fact that, 500 years earlier. Mother Shipton had proclaimed that the end of the world would come at that date.^ People had begun to laugh at the superstition of earlier ages.
At the turn of the century in 1900, it looked very much as if Finis could be written to all the magical, mystical, and imag- inary prophetic methods that had obsessed even the most intelligent minds for 5000 years. A new age, in which all things, past, present and future, would be based on the voice of reason alone seemed to have dawned. The French encyclopedia Nouveau Larousse Illustre had this to say about astrology in 1898: "It has hardly any adherents other than swindlers who play on public credulity, and even these are fast disappearing." The author of this mistaken belief was, however, careful to add: "From time to time a resurgence of mysticism or of diletantism may well produce a revival of astrology, of all kinds of magic, and of spiritualism."
Our recent past and even the present, fully confirm Larousse's observations. ^ W. H. Harrison: Mother Shipton Investigated (London 1881 ).