Mother Shipton (1488? – 1561)
Nostradamus (1503 – 1566)
Edgar Cayce (1877 – 1945)
Mother Shipton (1488? – 1561) |
Nostradamus (1503 – 1566) |
Edgar Cayce (1877 – 1945) |
 Jeane Dixon (1904 – 1997) |
 Criswell (1907 – 1982) |
 Baba Vanga (1911 – 1996) |
Surviving religious literature from antiquity is full of prophecies of various kinds, and those that were successful were inserted into the copied and recopied manuscripts after the events prophesied. In the era of Greek and Roman classical antiquity, scrolls of prophecies of supposedly forthcoming events were fairly widely circulated. Every wealthy Roman had one or more such scrolls in his library. Among the most famous were the Sibylline Books. A little-known book published in the 1500s, the Mirabilis Liber, collected and selected prophecies from as far back as the 9th Century... and there was an even less well-known such collection called The Liber Mirabilis! The first of these collections was the main inspiration and source for the predictions published by Nostradamus in a yearly almanac. In general, such predictions were originally written in a deliberately obscure way, with no actual names or dates or very specific locations mentioned. Here is an actual example:
When reprinted in later years, it was customary (in fact, mandatory) to "interpret" somewhat randomly selected predictions, by rewriting them to refer more clearly to actual past events. However, by the 20th Century, prophets had learned that one secret is to base your forecasts on things that are already happening, assuming they will continue to happen. The big secret, which most prophets working in the mid-1950s became aware of, is that you can make many hundreds of nonsensical predictions, and when one, by remote chance, actually describes a real event, you can center all your publicity on that one superficially successful sort-of hit, totally ignoring all the hundreds of failures. You keep your own score, and it's always 100%. A character known as The Amazing Criswell actually parodied such prophets, publishing a regular newspaper column in which he deliberately made the wildest and most preposterous predictions he could think up. He had followers who somehow never caught on to what he was doing. However, the important transition figure is Edgar Cayce. In the early 20th Century (while his official profession was portrait photography) he moonlighted as an all-around seer and psychic. He loosely based his feats on those of an earlier figure, Andrew Jackson Davis. Working by mail, Cayce gave quack distant-diagnoses of diseases and ailments, answered a variety of questions about the supernatural, and made predictions of the future. His gimmick was that all answers were supposedly given while he was "in a trance," lying down on a sofa. A stenographer would read the questions received in the mail and record Cayce's babbled answers, which were then typed up and mailed to the questioner. Cayce's medical advice depended heavily on the standard varieties of hillbilly medical quackery of the day, and his prophecies (mostly absurd) were inspired by the voluminous writings produced by the mystical cult of Theosophy. Remarkably, as the so-called New Age movement took shape in the late 1960s, Cayce became the main spiritual authority figure the movement depended upon.
 The famous prophets of the Old Testament never existed at all, which makes them the very best kind of prophet. Later writers suffered no limitations from historical records or from anything else, and could invent successful prophecies to beat the band. Only Mother Shipton in more recent centuries has this same advantage. However, even though the 20th Century Baba Vanga did exist, most of her circulating prophecies were invented by others. |
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The famous Oracle at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi actually existed; on a given day, whatever priestess was playing that role would "go into a trance" and answer questions from visitors. The answers tended to be highly ambiguous, and delivered in a hysterical burst that was (deliberately) hard to understand. If the visitor seemed unsatisfied, a bystanding priest or priestess would interpret the answer in a bit more detail. The Oracle operated before the 8th Century BCE and was gone by around the 4th Century CE. 1200 years is a long time to maintain a tradition, indicating how popular it was.
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 Michaelangelo depicts the Cumaean Sibyl as an ancient woman. |
The Cumaean Sibyl was a similar priestess to be found at the Temple of Apollo in Cumae, a Greek colony near Naples, Italy. While such priestesses probably did exist at some ancient time, a later and probably entirely invented collection of prophecies called the Sibylline Books are what the reputation of this institution depends upon. Every important ancient Roman had supposed copies of these scrolls. In Roman mythology, the Sibyl was an immortal woman who, instead of aging, shriveled in size, and was eventually kept in a very small jar! A customer would have had to put his ear to the mouth of the jar to hear her words. At first, there appears to have been only a single sibyl, the priestess at Delphi. By the fourth century BC, there appear to have been at least three more, Phrygian, Erythraean, and Hellespontine. By the first century BC, there were at least ten sibyls, located in Greece, Italy, the Levant, and Asia Minor. To the classical Romans, the only true sibyl was the one at Cumaea, since that temple was located in Italy, so close to Rome itself.
If you've never heard of him, it is thought possible that he is the originator and founder of one of the very earliest monotheistic religions. Almost nothing reliably factual is known about him, including the actual time in which he lived. His fame was revived by a famous work of 19th Century philosophical fiction, which in turn inspired a famous tone poem by Richard Strauss, which in turn was made famous by director Stanley Kubrick when he used the opening of the piece as the theme for his film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
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At the turn of the last century, that is, circa
1990 -2000, a big craze in pseudoscience and prophecy was
finding secret prophetic codes in
various Holy Books. The idea, popularized by Jewish
fundamentalists, used the Torah, and
looked for equidistant letter sequences spelling out brief
descriptions of past events, with the names of the
individuals involved sought separately but close to the
descriptive passage! A number of best-selling books were
written using this basis... expanding the idea to produce
actual predictions of future events, not just events long
past. Computer scientists and mathematicians pointed out
instantly that such "messages" can be found in any
book whatsoever, with WAR AND PEACE and MOBY DICK being
particularly popular as examples! Of course, since holy books
were hand copied for thousands of
years, and even a single copying error would destroy such
codes, gods need to find a much better way if
they want to impress us. [There are no two surviving
copies of any ancient manuscript which do not exhibit
thousands of discrepancies when compared.]