Vlaicu Ionescu

The Epistle to Henry Second and the Centuries as deadly weapons against materialism

To demonstrate the importance of the Nostradamian phenomenon in the fight against scientist ideologies I have to begin by underlying the significance of the Epistle to Henry II.  My work on this text was published two years ago, in 1999, in Romania.[1]
Finding a solution for the Epistle, this important Nostradamian text, never clarified in its totality, was for me an old dream. The intricacy of its structure and its numerous riddles took me a lifetime of study and meditation.  If my other works on Nostradamus wanted to be above all a demonstration of the reality of the prophetic phenomenon, the decoding of the Epistle is perhaps the crowning point of that demonstration.
I always try to show the importance of the entire Nostradamian opus for modern man, which explains why I spent my whole life deciphering such abstruse, esoteric, and controversial work.
From my youth, I was disturbed by the fact that, in the face of the progress of the physical and biological sciences, where certain reductionist tendencies had become very attractive, modern man was no longer satisfied with philosophical systems and theories or with abstract demonstrations.  He was asking for concrete proofs, which could resist skeptical rationalism and the pervasive materialism that was reigning and still reigns in the academic milieu, especially here in America.
On the other hand, in spite of this progress, the sciences cannot continue to be divided; they must seek unity.  They must find an adequate cosmological and even metaphysical unifying conception.  Unfortunately, the sciences in their hubris as conquerors of nature had lost contact with philosophical thinking.  Consequently, it was to be expected that experimental science, combined with a superficial and naïve philosophy, would fall into the crisis they face today, where physical scientists are desperately looking for a theoretical solution to the contradictions, incertitude, and paradoxes of the latest findings in quantum physics.
But something worse happened as a result of this discrepancy between science and philosophy.  A new popular pseudo-science appears as “scientism”, an aggressive ideology based on dogmatic skepticism, having as a main thesis the materialist and atheist conceptions, belonging as much to Marxist cultures as to the prevailing skepticism of the American intelligentsia.
We must remember, for instance, that traditional philosophy stipulated four kinds of causalities.  They have been excellently explained by Schopenhauer[2] in his work “On the quadruple root of the sufficient reason principle”.

Those four “reasons” were:
1 – “Ratio fiendi”, which binds the cause to the effect as a necessary succession in time.  It is the causality of the manifested world.
2 – “Ratio cognoscenti”, which is used in the logical syllogism and which binds the premise to the consequence.  Any logical demonstration or proof is based on this reason.
3 – “Ratio agendi”, used for the motivation of our actions.  It binds our goals to our free actions.
4 – “Ratio essendi” which connects, in a vertical way, any manifested existence to a transcendent condition, to an essence beyond time.

Reductionist science and Scientism have reduced two of these four reasons.  In fact, materialism denies finality (ratio agendi) as much in the fields of cosmology and biology, as in psychology.  As for ratio essendi a causality surpassing the dimension of time by a vertical descent, conditioning from above the horizontal manifestation, this reason is directly thrown out as one of the old superstitious, anachronistic opinions, unworthy of a “rational” mind.
Seeing all of this, I realized that the “coup de grâce” against materialism and its derived social doctrines should be found in two sources: one from the lower level or the experimental domain, another from a higher level, from a visionary experience of the beyond, but rigorously verified.
Among the latter, the prophetic phenomenon is the most overwhelming, on the condition that it is well proved. Again, since modern man is no longer satisfied with philosophical theories or with sacred scriptures, which demand faith, he wants indisputable concrete proofs.
From the start, the skeptic demands authenticity in a prophetic text. Unfortunately, those of the Bible are known only through later copies, often interpolated. They have religious value but not as proofs of the true fulfillment of their predictions. The only text whose authenticity was never contested is the prophetical work of Nostradamus. This is the reason why I dedicated my whole life to studying and deciphering it.
I had a double goal. First, to show with an appropriate scientific method that all history, from the 16th century to our time, was correctly predicted. Secondly, to determine, based on the Nostradamian text, some future events that history would confirm with precision at the time indicated.
My first goal was accomplished and recognized by French scholars right after the publication of my first work, Le Message de Nostradamus sur l’Ère Prolétaire, in 1976.[3]
As for the accuracy of my predictions for the future, my first successful strike was with President Nixon, to whom I wrote a letter showing that, according to certain quatrains, he would win a second mandate, but that this one would be shortened by a big scandal and that he would be the one to finish the Vietnam War.
The second accomplishment consisted in deciphering texts regarding the history of Communism. I was the only exegete who took seriously the assertion of the prophet that he would extend his predictions on what he named “le Commun Advenement” (Communist Revolution)[4].
I decided that my first book would be dedicated to the communist phenomenon. The abundance of Nostradamian texts about that subject made that book of 1976 longer than 800 pages.
The last chapters decode perhaps the most important prophecy of our era: the precise duration of the Soviet Empire and the date of its fall. I even had the courage to title the last chapter: “1991, the year of the fall of the Soviet Regime, after 73 years and 7 months”. The following chapter is entitled “The astral configuration of June 1991”, and indeed, the victory of Yeltsin occurred in the election of June 12, 1991, after 73 years and 7 months!
Published in 1976, a year after the Helsinki Conference, the prediction appeared not only daring and incredible, contradicting the opinions of all the specialists, but directly absurd, since by the Helsinki Conference, the West recognized sine die the legitimacy of the Soviet Regime.
So strong was my confidence in my interpretation and in the accuracy of this prophecy, that I kept it in my new book of 1987, Nostradamus – L’Histoire Secrète du Monde.[5]
In 1990, Professor Tadao Takemoto, director of the Institute of European Cultures of Tsukuba University, Japan, seeing that what I indicated about the fall of the Soviet Empire for 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, unification of Germany and the Romanian Revolution, were correctly fulfilled, asked permission to translate significant parts of my books. The book was scheduled to appear before June 1991, in order to have the suspense of waiting for the second prediction: the fall of the Soviet Regime itself, predicted for June 1991.
The first of the two books translated by Professor Takemoto was published in March 1991 in Tokyo.[6] The book became a best seller, and a team from Fuji Television came to New York where they began three documentaries. They took me and my wife to Tokyo, where we finished the documentaries, which were broadcast on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th of April 1991.
The success was beyond expectations: many interviews with the press and, above all, a lecture at the prestigious Tsukuba University. 
What also created a sensation among the Japanese people were the predictions of the Pearl Harbor attack, the war between America and Japan, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Providence willed that, at the time, Gorbachev was visiting Japan to negotiate a loan. On television, I made at the time an incredible prediction: “Don’t bother with negotiations with this gentleman. He will lose power before September!”
Two predictions were then verified by the Japanese: the fall of the Soviet Regime in June and the fall of Gorbachev on the occasion of the putsch in August 1991. Thousands of telephone calls were received by the publisher of my book and by Tokyo Television. My dating of the two events was a double bull’s-eye.

As you can see in my books, the fall of Communism in Russia was predicted not only by the extraordinary text of the Epistle, but by several quatrains in the Centuries as well. Among them, quatrain I-16 predicts the putsch and, remarkably, does so through planetary positions in conjunction with the star Vega.
In the Epistle, where the more dramatic events are mentioned, the text that speaks about the Soviets indicates the overthrow of the communist institutions and the restoration of the Orthodox Church, which was accomplished indeed by Yeltsin several years ago, when he installed Orthodoxy as the state religion. It shows also how Yeltsin would change the title of the state and a quite astonishing detail: how the statues of the man with pointing hand (which is Lenin) would be taken down.

Here is a quatrain among those already published in my book of 1976, relating to the fall of the Soviet Regime, without my realizing at the time that it indicates even the name of Boris Yeltsin:

III-95

The law of Morus will be seen crumbling
Facing another much more seductive,
Boristhenes will be the first to fail   
Through gifts and tongue another being more attractive. 

  In clear translation:
The doctrine of Thomas Morus[7], the communist utopia, will be seen as falling, facing another, capitalism, much more seductive. Boristhenes, the Latin name of Dnieper, symbolizing Russia, will be the first country to fall, since the other doctrine, capitalism, will be more attractive by financial help and by its philosophy (langues=tongues).
As you see, here Russia is indicated by the river Dnieper. In 1976, I didn’t realize why the prophet used the Latin name of this river and not the Russian or the French. After the event, I immediately realized that the reason was to suggest, by the same word, the man who caused the Soviet Regime to fall. By a clear anagram, “Boristhenes” can be read: “Boris tenens”, which means: maintaining Boris.

By reading my decoding of the Epistle, you will have many surprises: even some about this city of New York, where we live, which he names the “little Mesopotamia”, since Manhattan is indeed between waters (meso-potamos).
But I will limit myself to quoting only what I called the fundamental text of the Epistle, which predicts with extraordinary precision and clarity the social mutation produced by the Soviet Revolution and the enormity of the crimes it committed, a text where the exact duration of this regime is also indicated.

“Et précédera devant une éclipse solaire le plus obscur et le plus ténébreux, qui soit été depuis la création du monde jusqu’à la mort et passion de Jésus-Christ, et de là jusques ici.
« Et ce sera au mois d’Octobre que quelque grande translation sera faite, et telle que l’on cuidera la pesanteur de la terre avoir perdu son naturel mouvement, et être abîmée en perpétuelles ténèbres, seront précédents au temps vernal et s’en ensuivant, après d’extrêmes changements, permutations de regnes, par grand tremblement de terre, 
« avec pullulation de la neuve Babylone, fille misérable, augmentée par l’abomination, du premier holocauste, et ne tiendra tant seulement que septante trios ans, sept mois”.[8].

With some explanations, here is our translation:

“And it will be an interval of time, the most obscure and dark that has been seen since the creation of the world to the death and passion of Jesus Christ, and from then to these days, the beginning and the end of this time preceding a total eclipse of the Sun”
(And indeed, the ephemerids show a total eclipse for December 14, 1917, a month after the Revolution and another total eclipse on July 11, 1991, a month after the fall of Communism through the elections of 12 June 1991.)

We translate further:

“And it will be in the month of October that a great social mutation (translation) will be made; and it will be such that one will think the gravity of the earth has lost its natural movement and has been plunged into the abyss of perpetual darkness. In March (au temps vernal), would have been preceding events (allusion to the March Revolution, when the Kerenski government overthrew the Dynasty). Thereafter will follow extreme changes, reversal of realms and governments (permutation de regnes), passing through a great war (the First World War).
“And it will be the spreading (pullulation) of the new Babylon, miserable daughter of the first one (the French Revolution), with her holocaust, but this one being much more enlarged by her abominations. And she will reign only 73 years and 7 months”.

Here is then how the Great October, the marvelous red October, proudly celebrated during seven decades beyond the Iron Curtain, is clearly described and predicted four centuries before. We should keep the lucid and fateful phrase “Et ce sera au mois d’Octobre que quelque translation sera faite” in our minds as a memento mori, as a perpetual warning. This expression should remind us of the most blasphemous and bloody heresy of all times, but also of the most extraordinary prophecy of our era.
But let us return to the importance of the prophetic phenomenon as the strongest agent against materialist ideology and the doctrines derived from it.
As we underlined before, the undeniable and incontrovertible proof of prophetic truth, can be made by such solutions of texts related to the future, that future events will verify. And the most dramatic accomplished prediction was this dating of the fall of the Soviet Regime, which I just presented. This was a shock of great impact, especially upon the French media. The French writer Marie-Therese de Brosses, specialist in esoteric literature and reporter for Paris-Match, came to New York and worked with me on a book in interview form, “Les Dernières Victoires de Nostradamus” (The Last Victories of Nostradamus).[9]

Other interviews were published in Paris-Match and other popular magazines. Atlantis, the periodical of Traditional Studies[10], elected me as honorary member and Marie-Therese was called to speak to all the television stations in the country. Our book became a bestseller and a team from the Nostradamus Museum of Salon[11] came to New York to make a documentary film, similar to those made by the Japanese.
The mouths of the skeptics were in this way silenced and prophetic truth was finally demonstrated, constituting the blow from above given to scientism and materialism. We demonstrated the efficacy of that “ratio essendi”, that transcendent, supertemporal, supernal causality, descending on a vertical line from beyond our dimension of time.
But, as we suggested at the beginning of this article, a blow was given to dogmatic skepticism on the horizontal line too, through new discoveries in quantum physics.
We have no time here to mention all the debates around the paradoxes of the quantum world, from Niels Bohr[12], who denied a quantum reality and was satisfied with a mathematical image, and Einstein[13], who didn’t want to abandon the existence of a hidden reality. He couldn’t conceive that simple abstractions could lead to concrete results as by magic, without a more profound reality.
Finally, what solved this long debate was the theorem of interconnection demonstrated in 1964 by John Stewart Bell[14]. This theorem shows that reciprocal action of two photons is simultaneous and cannot be explained by the speed of light or by a super-luminal speed. This theorem shattered the belief that there are only “local” entities, situated in a relativist space-time sphere, which cannot communicate quicker than the speed of light. The theorem of Bell demonstrates that the “local” condition is not only unnecessary but directly impossible. This was a revolution in scientific thinking. The great physicist of Berkeley, Henry Stapp[15] has named this theorem of Bell “the most profound discovery in science”. 
The physicist Wolfgang Smith[16], in his excellent book The Quantum Enigma: Finding the Hidden Key (1995), shows that the remarkable fact from the Bell theorem is that the science of physics has declared its own limitation, its own incapacity to work with deeper levels of cosmic reality.  
But not only quantum physics has opened the doors to other levels of reality. With the theory in modern Cosmology of some “singularities”, as the so-called Big Bang, we arrive nolens volens at the “creation” of time itself, which means that we must abandon the exclusivity of “ratio fiendi”, the time bound horizontal causality, and admit also the “ratio essendi”, a vertical, above time, causality. A “singularity” such as the Big Bang is a singularity just because it is not an event in time. Here “ratio fiendi” has no sense, since TIME was created with the universe in an untimely manner.
We must consequently conclude that through both microcosmic and macrocosmic research, we arrive at the necessary postulate of a super-temporal reality. We can finally say that materialism is crumbling, stricken as much from above as from below. This is done both by the latest research in physics, and by the prophetic phenomenon, i.e. by the travel of our spirit in a super-temporal world, an intermediary reality, where history is written or programmed before becoming manifested.
The fact that historical events are captured by our spirit, or transmitted by higher entities from a transcendent world, where, if time existed, it must be different from ours, these are ontological aspects that could never be explained by a science dominated by scientism, materialist reductionism or dogmatic skepticism, which deny the “ratio essendi” and limit themselves to a linear, horizontal causality.
But what is worth mentioning is the fact that Nostradamus challenges modern science in its own field. He has thrown in its face the glove for a duel, in which, from the height of his vision, he knew very well that he would be the winner. The proof of this victory is in the many scientific and technical predictions he made, that are indeed spectacular.
He described in his quatrains: the steam engine, the locomotive, the automobile, electricity, photography, the telegraph, the submarine, the periscope, the airplane, aerial bombardments, the tank, cosmic travel, the space station, artificial satellites, the space shuttle, the moon landing, nuclear constitution of the atom, the nuclear explosion, space and nuclear accidents, the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Chernobyl disaster, etc.
But this was not enough. As a climax of his prophetic power, he determined by planetary positions the dates of the official discoveries of the three new planets: Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto[17], showing also, among others, what names they would be given and the astrological qualities that would be attributed to each of them.
My demonstration of these extraordinary discoveries of the prophet was published in Atlantis in 1983. The most recent issue of this periodical of traditional studies, No. 404, 2001[18], contains an article explaining my solutions to the three quatrains. The author, Dr. Patrice Guinard, made a thesis on this subject at the University of Sorbonne in Paris and, in this number of Atlantis, you can see a brief presentation of this thesis, in which he demonstrates the correctness of my demonstration.

*

Returning to the Epistle to Henry the Second.  I have to underline that this text is unique in the Nostradamian opus. It serves as a preface to the last group of Centuries, published two years after the death of the prophet. It is a pendant or a counterpart to the Preface to the first Centuries, dedicated to his son Caesar Nostradamus, but in reality, to all his spiritual sons.
The difference is that the Epistle is the only prose text that also contains prophecies, beside dates pertaining to his cyclology and to the nature of the prophetic phenomenon.  Not only is the Epistle the only Nostradamian prophetic text in prose, but it constitutes the spinal cord of the prophecies, pointing out in chronological order (a hidden order, it is true) the most important events of what we named the Proletarian Era. For indeed, the prophetic fresco of the Epistle begins with the French Revolution, not with the 16th Century, as the quatrains do. It continues with the following centuries, when the Great Monarch will appear and then two Antichrists, resuming in a different manner the tribulations caused by the three Antichrists of the 20th Century.
I should like to point out here a fact that escaped all authors to date. I am referring to the categorical distinction we should make between the text of the Epistle and other prose texts published by Nostradamus in his Almanacs and in his horoscopes or his medical and literary works. The latter are the work of the physician or the astrologer, which means of the man Nostradamus. The former is the result of a transcendent communication. Speaking about the inspiration coming from the Holy Ghost the prophet recognizes himself to be only the channel of transmission of the prophetic message (Epistle par. 30 and 31)[19]. He confesses that, in his visionary moments, when he was approached by the divine (“Le Divin près s’assied”) under the aspect of a little flame (“flamme exigue”) of celestial beauty (“Splendeur divine”), as he relates in the two introductory quatrains[20], he had to be attentive “even to the pronunciations” of the words: “meme qu’aux pronunciations” as he states in Préface par. 18.[21]
What is implied is that there are constructions of a superhuman intelligence and that some words or expressions that not even the man Nostradamus could understand, and because they could contain anagrams and enigmas, they have to be correctly written. Otherwise, we, the interpreters of today, could not find the right solutions.
You will ask perhaps why no interpreter before me succeeded in discovering the prophetic tapestry of the Epistle in its entirety, with chronological continuity and logic, as I hope to have decoded in my book published to date only in Romania. I will mention only two reasons, but essential ones.  One is of analytical order: the solving of all the enigmas. For this, an adequate method, verified throughout my entire life, was necessary. The second is of synthetical order and concerns the structure. I was the first to realize that the prophetic passages have been dislocated from their chronological order. The same thing happened with the quatrains, which also are not in chronological order. The difficulty was then to find the logical connections between phrases and put them in a new order, having continuity and unity in the whole construction.
Finally, let me repeat that the prophetic phenomenon is different from all other psychic phenomena, such as intuition, clairvoyance, E.S.P. (extra-sensory perception), telepathy, medium channeling, etc. The former is of super-human, transcendent origin, never fails and covers large intervals of history. The others are human and are limited to a few events and to a probabilistic success, being always subjectively tainted by culture, religion, or education.
In Nostradamus we find the two modalities combined. This is the reason that we have from him two categories of texts, different both in content and in form. On one side, the quatrains of the Centuries and the Epistle, which is their vertebral column, on the other, the Almanacs, the horoscopes and his medical and literary works.
The prophetic texts are sacred scriptures, given their transcendent origin, and are full of ingenious enigmas, symbols, figures of speech, and changes in the syntactic order, and are especially full of convergent amphibologies, using terms with meanings on several levels.
These are the documents that respond to the demands of modern man, who wants concrete proofs of the existence of superior worlds, proofs that can resist all skepticism and the ideology of scientism from the academic medium.
The Nostradamian opus gives us the proof from above. The prophet came to restore our vertical connections and our vertical position in life.

I hope that my words will have brought forth in the reader a clean and detached curiosity about the Nostradamian phenomenon, far from cheap sensationalism and from the apocalypsomania, which a mushrooming number of books has proliferated here. They have only compromised through incompetence one of the greatest prodigies of our culture.

Vlaicu Ionescu
December 2001

[An earlier version “Nostradamus and Contemporary Scientism" was published in Geocosmic Journal, Summer 2002, NCGR, USA, pg. 46-49.

A version was read at a Conference in San Marino, 2002.]

NOTES:

[1] Vlaicu Ionescu, Nostradamus, Epistola către Henric II, (Nostradamus - Epistle to Henry II), 1999, Ed. Evex, Bucharest, Romania.
[2] Arthur Schopenhauer (German: 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. Book of his early youth: On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, 1813. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, (expanded in 1844)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer
[3] Vlaicu Ionescu, Le Message de Nostradamus sur l'Ère Prolétaire [MNEP] (The Message of Nostradamus on the Proletarian Era), 1976, Dervy-Livres, Paris, France.
[4] Préface par. 11. Préface to Michel Nostradamus, Les Propheties, edition Benoist Rigaud, 1568; quoted in MNEP pg. 399 
[5] Vlaicu Ionescu, Nostradamus—L'Histoire Secrète du Monde [NHSM] (Nostradamus—The Secret History of the World),1986, Éditions du Félin, Paris, France
[6] Vlaicu Ionescu, Nostradamus Message I, 1991, Kadokawa Shoten Publishing Co., Tokyo, Japan.
[7] Sir Thomas More (7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), venerated in the Catholic Church as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, judge, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He also served Henry VIII as Lord High Chancellor of England from October 1529 to May 1532. He wrote Utopia, published in 1516, which describes the political system of an imaginary island state. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_More
[8]Michel Nostradamus – Les Propheties, edition Benoist Rigaud, 1568 - includes the Epistle to Henry Second before the last three Centuries. Par. 45, 46, and 47 of Nostradamus’s Epistle. 
[9] Marie-Therese de Brosses and Vlaicu Ionescu, Les Dernières Victoires de Nostradamus [DVN] (The Last Victories of Nostradamus), 1993, Éditions Filipacchi, Paris, France,
[10] Revue Atlantis, Archéologie Scientifique et Traditionnelle.
https://www.association-atlantis.org/revue
[11]  Maison de Nostradamus, Musée Nostradamus ou la Maison d’un humaniste de la Renaissance.
https://www.salondeprovence.fr/bouger-et-decouvrir/culture/maison-de-nostradamus/
[12] Niels Henrik David Bohr (Danish; 7 October 1885 – 18 November 1962) was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. Bohr was also a philosopher and a promoter of scientific research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niels_Bohr
[13] Albert Einstein (German; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory of relativity, but he also made important contributions to the development of the theory of quantum mechanics. Relativity and quantum mechanics are together the two pillars of modern physics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein#cite_note-LnLVo-10
[14] John Stewart Bell FRS (28 July 1928 – 1 October 1990) was a physicist from Northern Ireland and the originator of Bell's theorem, an important theorem in quantum physics regarding hidden variable theories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Stewart_Bell
[15] Henry Pierce Stapp (born March 23, 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American mathematical physicist, known for his work in quantum mechanics, particularly the development of axiomatic S-matrix theory, the proofs of strong nonlocality properties, and the place of free will in the "orthodox" quantum mechanics of John von Neumann.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Stapp
[16] Wolfgang Smith (born February 18, 1930) is a mathematician, physicist, philosopher of science, metaphysician, Roman Catholic, and member of the Traditionalist School. He has written extensively in the field of differential geometry, as a critic of scientism and as a proponent of a new interpretation of quantum mechanics that draws heavily from medieval ontology and realism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Smith
[17] Vlaicu Ionescu, “Nostradamus et les planètes trans-saturniennes", 1983 (Nostradamus and the Trans-Saturnian Planets), "Atlantis Nº 325", Paris. Quatrain VIII-69—dicovery of Uranus; quatrain IV-33—discovery of Neptune; quatrain I-84—discovery of Pluto.
[18] Dr. Patrice Guinard, “Nostradamus connaissait-il les planètes trans-saturniennes?” Atlantis Nº 404, 2001, Paris, pg. 63.
[19]  Vlaicu Ionescu, Nostradamus, Epistola catre Henric II, pg.62
[20] Interpretation of quatrain I-1 and I-2 in MNEP, pg. 181
[21] MNEP, pg.195