John Hogue, a world authority on Nostradamus and the prophetic traditions of the world, was the guest on Tuesday night's show. "We are in the travail," said Hogue who believes our planet is at the end of a 27,000 year cycle of equinoxes. Nostradamus pinpointed the years 1999-2000 to be the start of great troubles, Hogue indicated. "The things we're about to do could set in place a war for 27 years," he said, basing this on some of the 16th century seer's renown quatrains.
In an interesting interpretation of the Nostradamus line "One-hundred powers, thirst, famine, when the comet will pass," Hogue suggested that the comet could actually be a reference to the recent Columbia shuttle tragedy, because of its streaming tail appearance. If this is an accurate reading, it could mean we are literally living in the time of the third Antichrist, which the rest of the quatrain refers to, Hogue conjectured. Mabus or the Antichrist could even be an amalgam of two people, such as Ossama bin Laden and Sadam Hussein he stated. But "the overthrow of the third Antichrist actually...gives birth to something ten times worse," said Hogue, namely a brutal and long war between the US and an Islamic coalition. Though the future may be dire, Hogue doesn't believe it is set in stone. "I look at time and history as a pathology that needs to be understood so it can be healed," he said.
Who is Mabus?
Nostradamus scholar John Hogue, has speculated on the identity of Mabus, the so-called third Antichrist that Nostradamus named in his quatrains. Here is one quatrain where Mabus is mentioned:
Mabus will soon die, then will come,
A horrible undoing of people and animals,
At once one will see vengeance,
One-hundred powers, thirst, famine, when the comet will pass
-Century 2, Quatrain 62
Hogue told After Dark that Nostradamus' apocalyptic visions could be his way of describing the after effects of a nuclear winter or the results of chemical or biological weapons.
Current speculation as to who Mabus is, has focused on mainly Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Hogue said that Nostradamus often couched the use of proper names in anagrams and word games. "Usama," Hogue says is the correct phonetic pronunciation of Osama and what Nostradamus may have done was dropped the redundant "a" and inserted a "b" which would then contain all the letters of Mabus. Similarly the name Saddam spelled backwards with the "d" reversed into ''b" yields another Mabus.
Going to Extremes
Bob Reiss, the author of The Coming Storm: Extreme Weather and Our Terrifying Future, joined George in the first hour of Tuesday's program. In an investigation into global warming, Reiss went to visit James Hansen of Columbia University. "If your predictions are right about global warming will anything down there (pointing out his Manhattan window to Broadway) look different in 10 years?" Reiss asked him. "Then he said 'there'll be more traffic'…'because the West Side Highway will be underwater'," Hansen told him, adding that there would also be a drought and the trees on the median strip would be dead.