Nostradamus actually wrote his famous prophecies as a series of vague, four-line poems called quatrains that intentionally avoided specific dates or names so he wouldn't get burned as a heretic.

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Nostradamus actually wrote his famous prophecies as a series of vague, four-line poems called quatrains that intentionally avoided specific dates or names so he wouldn't get burned as a heretic. Because he made his predictions as confusing as a modern software terms of service agreement, desperate believers have been able to project basically any historical event onto his writings for the last five centuries. If you vaguely mumble about fire from the sky and great leaders falling enough times, eventually a war or a meteor will prove you right. It turns out the greatest mystical power of the sixteenth century wasn't clairvoyance, but rather a masterful grasp of confirmation bias and the absolute refusal to commit to a hard deadline for the apocalypse