Where is nostradamus tomb

And also. A little history of Lichecourt castle. A little history of Manosque fortified gates. Manosque and the Guilhempierre gate: cholera and horseman on the roof.

Nicolas Flamel, the little bourgeois who became a legend. I like. Come here with me, in the chapel of Our-Lady… This simple flagstone is our grave! We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Is the story about Nostradamus predicting the day his tomb would be discovered true? The legend goes that had himself buried with a plaque engraved with a date and left a memento saying that whosoever held his skull would gain all the knowledge he had — then die. The legend goes on to say that during one of the wars his grave was discovered and dug up by three soldiers on the date written on the plaque.

As one lifted up the skull, his companions said that his eyes opened wide, then he was shot through the head with a bullet. I don't remember the date on the plaque, I believe it was May sometime, though the year would probably be much more useful.

Cecil already addressed Nostradamus in general in his column here. Your question is only one version of it. Some soldiers during the French Revolution broke into his tomb and one had a drink. Then he was shot. In one version I found, the legend is close to what you said — the soldier was shot immediately. The mayor acted quickly and explained to the soldiers that Nostradamus, in having predicted the French Revolution in supportive tones, should be considered a national hero. Those present collected the bones from the floor and helped to reinter the remains.

According to the legend, these revolutionary soldiers were ambushed by royalists while returning to their base in Marseilles. The soldier who had brazenly drunk from Nostradamus' skull was killed, quickly and violently, by a sniper's bullet. In Paris, for ten days following the storming of the Bastille on July 14, , visitors to the fortress filed past a table upon which was a copy of The Centuries opened to the page of Nostradamus' predictions describing the French Revolution "Common Advent of the People" , written over years earlier.

Another story line held that Nostredame had built a deep mausoleum in the church and filled it with books, a writing case, candles, ink, and paper. Fleeing worldly corruption and religious strife, he had secretly taken refuge there and bolted the doors shut behind him. The year marked his death to the world rather than his actual demise.

To deter interlopers, Nostredame cast a fatal curse on whoever dared to enter his vault. In , a French diplomat made a special two-day trip from Marseille to visit the crypt. To his disappointment, he found an ordinary tomb—and no trace of the fearsome inscriptions about which so much had been written.

The diplomat may have read stories about foolhardy visitors who had disregarded these warnings. According to the tale told at London dinner parties in the s, the prophet had made townspeople swear never to open his tomb.

Some of them broke this promise sixty years later, and they came upon an engraved brass plate on his breast. It scolded them and provided the exact date of their intrusion. Nostradamus had of course seen it coming. A widely disseminated version of this story held that two death row prisoners, who had been promised a pardon if they lifted the tombstone, died on the spot after doing so.

Seated on a bronze chair, the glaring prophet warned future interlopers that they would suffer the same fate. Perhaps Nostredame had never died. Or perhaps the intruders had survived long enough to retrieve new quatrains that he had composed underground. The legend was also a sales pitch. These various story lines surfaced in other myths and legends.

The seer who had predicted his own death? Simon Forman. The alchemist who had designed his tomb? Nicolas Flamel.

The prophet who rose from his grave? The astrologer who left new predictions near his tomb? This one surrounded the Scottish wizard Michael Scot. The Nostradamus phenomenon nonetheless stood out by tapping all of these folkloric or archetypal story lines while leaving a real tomb and an enticing epitaph behind.

It was once again about accumulation rather than invention—and about widespread celebrity. In , a leading Parisian newspaper ran a letter from a reader who had scoured the crypt and found a prophecy announcing eye-opening happenings for the year to come. Whether one believed such predictions or not, it was now all but impossible to hear the name of Nostradamus, and much less visit his tomb, without entertaining the notion that something mysterious lurked underground.

But it does not account for their behavior inside the church. Was it necessary to break the crypt open? Many contemporaries viewed this as a desecration—a charged form of violence that vilifies a person, religious rituals, and the sacredness of eternal rest. French revolutionaries desecrated countless tombs of princes, nobles, and clergymen, all of them symbols of a despicable regime and a corrupt society.

This violence grew endemic after the fall of the monarchy in The royal crypts in the Cathedral of Saint-Denis were defiled, and the bodies of past monarchs thrown into collective graves. Elsewhere, revolutionaries sacked mausoleums and decapitated recumbent effigies. In the town of Corbeil, near Paris, they took bones from church ossuaries, burned them on a public plaza, and then dumped the ashes into the Seine River. Desecration ultimately seeks distance from forces that are deemed reprehensible and threatening.

Fashioning a new revolutionary order required the destruction of the old and its deleterious influence. It was a form of purification. Too much may have been at stake in Salon to leave the tomb alone. In Provence, as politically divided a region as any in France, members of the National Guard took it upon themselves to protect the revolution. Sometimes, this entailed wrecking castles and churches. These were perilous times, and the guardsmen may have targeted a seer whom they associated with the counterrevolution.

By , this made sense. And yet the process was not perfectly linear. Isolated pamphlets and ephemeral publications deemed Nostradamus useful at a time in which battles raged and politics seeped into all aspects of life. Polemics could thus trump legitimacy. On the left, it was claimed that Nostredame had predicted the advent of a glorious, harmonious era, free from tyrants and public debt.

Quatrain 2. According to Nostradamus, they said, France should expect decapitated bodies, war against perverse ministries, and the death of the despot Louis XVI between and Whether interpreting quatrains or coining new predictions, these pamphleteers tapped a famous soothsayer who could unite virtuous citizens around a glorious future. Still, Nostradamus was moving toward the political right, along with prophetic language in general.

Disenchanted, anguished, and resentful, royalists found in his quatrains portrayals of an apocalyptic battle and a disastrous finish for the revolution. The populace had usurped an authority to which it had no right. Having achieved victory, the king and aristocrats paraded across a capital that ex-revolutionaries had swept clean, some of them dressed as monkeys.

A member of a prominent aristocratic family copied five quatrains on a sheet of paper then wrote commentaries that betrayed his fears and hopes. When the revolution grew more violent a year later, a Scottish countess asked her reverend to explain what Nostradamus had to say. A strict Presbyterian with a doctorate in theology and a command of nine languages, this reverend had recently been appointed president of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.

To quench his curiosity about the future, he interpreted quatrains. He now concluded that a sham trial and an execution awaited Louis XVI following his arrest. One of his friends a future president of Princeton wondered how the revolution would end. It is no wonder, therefore, that radicals equated Nostradamus with counterrevolutionary forces.

Some even disqualified rivals by linking them to this figure. At the same time, these guardsmen took their place in a long line of detractors who had vilified Nostradamus since the sixteenth century.

They sought to outline the boundaries of a prophetic universe, establish principles, and distinguish scientific truth from falsehoods or delusions. This continued throughout the seventeenth century. The eighteenth century, however, all but stopped picking on an incoherent sap who, though unable to predict the future, had either believed in his revelations or else penned them to make a living.

His behavior was risible, but so what? Why bother debating his prophetic status when the answer was obvious and the stakes insignificant? No institution or body of learning felt threatened to its core by the discredited knowledge for which he stood. The question, then, was no longer who Nostredame really was.

Instead, it became: How does a rational society respond to such inane predictions? The heart of the matter was public credulity and what contemporaries called superstition.

Clerics had long proscribed improper worship of the rightful God as well as magic and witchcraft. By the late seventeenth century, magistrates, doctors, and men of letters were insisting that feverish imagination combined with superstitious beliefs generated uncontrollable enthusiasm and passions. Mired in ignorance and poor judgment, superstition could lead people astray and undermine the social order.

This is why it was so important to free newly-empowered citizens from such beliefs. Nostradamus captured all of these dangers: imagination running wild before incomprehensible happenings, credulity before a voice from above, fear before dire pronouncements. The belief that people could predict the future was perilous for it left no room for political will.

Some eighteenth-century critics now used Nostradamus to deride the Renaissance as a confused, infantile era that believed in judicial astrology, soothsaying, and people burying themselves alive. How could it not have welcomed the deluded Nostredame and then made him famous?

This had continued under the Old Regime, but the revolution was mercifully ushering France into a new era. Modern citizens, they then added, hardly believed that Nostredame had been buried alive in his tomb. Relegating Nostradamus to a superstitious past made it possible to commend the present era for puncturing such inanities.