The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus

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Through it all, the mysterious creature known as the Mothman haunts the old dynamite testing range and a stranger named Indrid Cold taunts Keel with weird revelations. She would begin these predictions in small ways, noting minor occurrences that would happen locally before moving onto larger predictions with greater ramifications. All this being said, I found that many of the things that I liked best about The Mothman Prophecies had nothing to do with my own (skeptical) feelings about the paranormal. Keel writes with energy and verve, as when he describes the bizarre mindset that took hold around Point Pleasant during the “Mothman year” of 1966-67. Reporting a rumor that Woodrow Derenberger had been made pregnant by the extraterrestrials, Keel states that Freshly translated [and] stamped with the approval of the editors of the venerable Penguin Classics series . . . this new dual-language edition of The Prophecies,translated by the excellent Richard Sieburth, makes a case for Nostradamus as a poet of sweep and impact. . . . Never mind the Weather Channel. If the Penguin Classics people are telling me to be afraid, then I am prepared to be very afraid indeed.”— Dwight Garner, The New York Times None of this has to stop you from enjoying the book as a well-told series of unsettling anecdotes, which it is. I also don't discount the possibility that Keel intended at least some of it as a joke. At any rate, that is a part of the book that I appreciated- that Keel had a very dry and absurd sense of humor, which I think is evidenced in his choice of chapter titles. Below are my top eight. Possible writing exercise: choose your favorite as a prompt, and write for thirty minutes.

Donate? They must want me to donate my brilliant mind to science. I did’t know what the author would think, but at least I know that my own thoughts are sane. More pressing than any of the mysteries that John Keel investigates in this book, I was earlier this month confronted by one of my own: why did my friend P ____, a responsible family man with a job in the U.S. government (I probably shouldn't get any more specific than that), loan me The Mothman Prophecies in the first place? Did he mean it as a joke (as I originally thought), as a real recommendation, or was there something else going on? And did it have anything to do with the fact that, within a week, P ____ had been assigned to a remote consulate in the far east of Kazakhstan, and his social media accounts went dark? Another of Mother Shipton’s local prophecies included the destruction of Trinity Church which would “fall in the night, till the highest stone in the church be the lowest stone of the bridge”. Not long after this statement, a terrible storm fell upon Yorkshire, destroying the steeple of the Church and causing it to land upon the bridge.

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This claim did not make much sense at first, however when the water system was introduced, bringing water across the Ouse Bridge in pipes that reached a windmill, the prophecy did not seem so cryptic. Now, a lot of the book felt like jumping from one case to another with barely any links to the Mothman until later. For a book titled The Mothman Prophecies this isn't ideal, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. And yet – as I am reminded every time I visit the Point Pleasant area – there is something compelling about the Mothman story: The historian explains how the world is currently undergoing an enormous shift in consciousness, elaborating on how things had been generally understood (until now) to be: 1) In the beginning, people believed the world to be governed by the forces of divinity; everything could be explained as an act of a god or gods, 2) With increasing knowledge of the world, brought about by scientific inquiry, people turned to the men and women of science for an explanation of life and their world, and 3) Since the problem of how to find meaning in the world could not be solved by science, people chose to instead focus on efforts to improve their lives materially, subduing and plundering the earth for its natural resources, with a hyper-emphasis on controlling economic conditions and market fluctuations. What was now occurring, explained the historian, was that the baseness of our current conditions had begun to infect our souls as well. We had become restless and desperate, primed for another fundamental shift in consciousness so as to bring about the creation of a new, better world. Such accusations of witchcraft in early medieval Europe were not uncommon and often affected women, who for whatever reason, were living alone or were without family or friends.

Poor Agatha would die a few years later at the nunnery, never having been reunited with her daughter. Will cost of living emergencies, growing anger around environmental damage, and income inequality pave the way for serious civil unrest in 2023 and beyond? Given how things have been going, it wouldn't be a stretch to believe that things may get a whole lot worse. And, as with so many other things, Nostradamus seems to have seen this coming. But wait- if these ultraterrestrials didn't want us to know that they exist, why appear to us at all? And secondly, aren't we splitting hairs? If we know so little about ultraterrestrials, isn't it possible that they come from another planet anyway, and they're actually the extraterrestrials they seem to be? Let me give out a caveat: I don't think your enjoyment of this book hinges on believing a word of it. Kenneth Hite called Keel one of the premiere unappreciated horror writers of the 20th century, and this book is why. Treat it as fiction; I did, and I loved it. Still, no matter how you feel or what you think about it all, you might enjoy the book. Like many others I believe that people have seen "something" and I don't know what it is...unlike Mr. Keel, I can't put it all together and "come out where he did". I got a little bored with the read and was very ready for it to be over before it was, but some will enjoy it more. Read it for enjoyment or information whatever is your pleasure. I did.

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Her appearance and behaviour was said to have been strange and so attracted much ridicule from others in the town. First released in 2005, the book’s publisher Watkins claims that Mario’s interpretations of the cryptic ‘quatrains’ written by Nostradmus in the 1550s correctly predicted the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007 and the Credit Crunch in 2008.