Raf Sanchez

Originally published on Counterknowledge.com

All is not roses in the world of Nostradamus “scholarship”. Writing on his blog, the President of the Nostradamus Society of America, Victor Baines, accuses Dr Michael Rathford, author of a new book entitled ‘The Nostradamus Code: World War III 2009-2012′, of being a charlatan.

At first this seems to be a case of the tarot reader calling the astrologist unscientific, or at least a predictable squabble between two merchants of counterknowledge in a market not big enough for both of them. But a closer look shows their fraudulence isn’t even in the same league.

Baines’ website is a fairly ramshackle affair, replete with badly punctuated blog posts that usually end in a plea to buy his book. He rarely sticks his head above the parapet, save to make the controversial prediction in January 2008 that a Democrat would win the White House (that he predicted it would be Hillary doesn’t stop him from giving himself a pat on the back). His work seems mainly to consist of watching history go by and then scurrying off to prove, retrospectively, that the 16th century Frenchman had already predicted it.

But for all that, Baines is at least transparent. His website includes an “about the author” section and he’s been regularly featured in the media, including the History Channel’s overwrought documentary on Nostradmus. In the wake of 9/11, he was actually quoted in an article helping to debunk the hoax emails claiming that Nostradamus had predicted the attacks.

Dr Rathford is quite a different story. Where Baines is content to pull together tenuous shreds to show Nostradamus predicted everything from Hitler to Desert Storm, Rathford claims to have “sifted this complex word puzzle searching for significant patterns and relationships. Almost immediately, he came up with the predictive model known as The Nostradamus Code”. The code, we are told, was cracked by “combining traditional analysis techniques with state of the art data mining algorithms,” apparently allowing Rathford “to search the equivalent of the entire library of congress in less than ten minutes”.

Rathford is now happy to share his prophesies with the rest of us in the aptly-titled ‘The Nostradamus Code: World War III 2009-2012′, available for a modest $14.99. In the sample chapter, Rathford confidently predicts a string of papal assassinations, as well as nuclear war in which a bomb “will land in the Mediterranean instead of the land, poisoning all the fish”.

The slickly designed Nostradamus Online claims that “Dr. Michael Rathford has studied the Quatrains of Nostradamus for over thirty years, both in an academic and professional environment”. Yet, despite this apparently lengthy career, there is no trace of Dr. Rathford’s academic associations or anything he has published. The title of doctor is also omitted from the front cover of the book, where the author is listed simply as Michael Rathford.

Multiple calls to the book’s New York-based publisher, Truth Revealed Publishing, all ended with a polite voice mail informing me that all the company’s representatives were currently busy speaking to customers. When I called another business in the same building as Truth Revealed, the manager I spoke to had never heard of the company nor seen any of its employees in the building.

This was apparently also the experience of the endearingly naïve sounding Horsemonkie88, who complained on Rip-Off Report that they bought the book expecting it to be “about 1.5 to 2 inches thick” but when it arrived it was less than “.5 inches thick”. If the book’s insufficient girth, and not its content, is the only reason Horsemonkie felt cheated, then allow me to recommend Victor Baines’ apparently excellent (and thick) Remembering the Future: The Prophecies of Nostradamus.

As for you, Mr. Baines, I wouldn’t worry too much about Rathford crowding you out of the market. It doesn’t sound like he, or his predictive models, exist.