Nostradamus (1503-66) is one of the most controversial writers of the Renaissance and one of the most widely read. Whatever his other accomplishments, he is best remembered as an enigmatic seer, the man who could foretell events, though he could not specify when in the future they would occur. Modern readers tend to view Nostradamus either as a relic from a superstitious age or as an inspired visionary. In this book Georges Dumézil, renowned scholar of myth and religion, takes Nostradamus very seriously indeed. Can one foresee the future, Dumézil asks, and fail to understand it?
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, commentators on Nostradamus found in the twentieth quatrain of Nostradamus's Century 9 a bundle of precise details that seemed to predict the arrest of Louis XVI as he fled the French Revolution. Other details in the quatrain remained unexplained. Why was the person described as "le moyne noir"? What did the second verse signify: "Deux parts, vaultorte, Herne, la pierre blanche"? What can scholarship contribute to the understanding of these puzzles?
Dumézil explores three possibilities: a philological and historical study of the text to clarify its enigmas by a deeper investigation of Louis XVI's unsuccessful flight to Varennes; a logical analysis, determining how Nostradamus would have interpreted a view of the eighteenth century from his vantage in the sixteenth; and, finally, a metaphysical inquiry into the status and process of prediction. Written in dialogue form, The Riddle of Nostradamus is one of Dumézil's most arresting works, challenging dogmas, even scholarly ones, and raising sharp questions about how much we want to know, and why. Shunning the usual forms of academic inquiry to probe the grey regions that stretch between knowledge and belief, the book not only studies, but exemplifies, the role of the riddle in discussing portentous events.
"This book by Georges Dumézil is about Dumézil -- about his scholarly methods and even about his life. It is a tour de force application of his methodology. As such, it amounts to a brilliant exercise in comparative method and reconstruction. It is easy to speak here of his methods; to speak of his life will be more difficult." -- from the Foreword, by Gregory Nagy
