Okay, so I’m watching Scary Movie 3 on Comedy Central last night when an odd commercial comes on featuring all kinds of signs saying: “The end is coming,” and “the end of the world.” This catches my interest and I un-mute just in time to hear my own voice saying something about the “exact date of the Apocalypse.” Then the logo for Lost Book of Nostradamus, my new History Channel special, comes on; it is a promo spot, done especially for the comedy channel.
This morning, while channel surfing over breakfast, I found a whole three-minute piece on Fox & Friends, featuring one of my segments from the show as a teaser and an interview with my friend Victor Baines, who is also on the show. Who would have ever thought that I would make Fox News announcing the end of the world? Reality is stranger than any fiction. Trust me, you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried!
What started as a way to get the History Channel interested in making a follow up to my first Nostradamus special, Nostradamus: Five Hundred Years Later, has blossomed into a gargantuan enterprise, backed by the largest promotional blitz ever done by the History Channel. They even had an hour long Behind the Scenes on the TV Guide channel and a countdown clock on the History Channel itself. This show seems planned to take Nostradamus and the End of the World into the mainstream.
For the first hour, the show’s reenactments and forensic drama are mixed with a few nods to Nostradamus’ prophetic abilities, and lots of teasers that whatever the Lost Book turns out to be, it is going to be very important. The second hour moves deeper into the prophecies, and eventually concludes that the book wasn’t likely to have been created by Nostradamus, although it could have belonged to him. It could even have been one of his sources, one that helped him pinpoint our present time period as one to watch.
And here the show turns into the Vincent & Friends Apocalyptic Comedy Troupe, as Victor Baines and my former co-author Jay Weidner back me up as I interpret the crucial seven images in the series from the Lost Book as pointing to the events happening in the sky right now, culminating just five years from now in 2012. The connections between the imagery in the Lost Book and these celestial events are made even more apparent by the symbolism of a 13th century church front just a few feet away, around the corner, from Nostradamus’s door. I point all this out in the show, and the producers did a fine job of animating it, and it is quite convincing.
So, how did the core of our book, The Mysteries of the Great Cross at Hendaye: Alchemy and the End of Time (2003, Destiny Books) end up on television, with a huge media blitz behind it, in a special on Nostradamus?
That is actually a long and complicated story going back more than eight years to our first research trip for Mysteries. We stayed in the 18th century chateau built on the estate of Nostradamus’ brother Bertrand, and some sort of connection was made. The Balkan war insights came less than a month after we returned, and I got my start as an authority on Nostradamus. After the 2003 television show, where I actually did some of my talking head shots on the ground in France, my connection to the Maestro became even closer. But I had no idea what was coming next.
I had seen some of the images in the Lost Book in an earlier book by O. C. Ramotti, The Nostradamus Code. The images in that book were definitely intriguing, and the main reason to buy the book, but Ramotti’s interpretations left much to be desired. I find it far beyond belief that Nostradamus, when decoded, was actually writing in modern Italian. But still, those images were very strange!
Last spring, as the Lost Book was being examined forensically in Rome, I got to see for the first time the complete series of images and I knew very quickly that the core series not only depicted the center of our galaxy, but also was talking about the galactic alignment itself. Here was manuscript evidence, dating from at least the 16th century, that someone had known of the center of galaxy and even its spiral shape, long before modern astronomy discovered it in 1917.
That alone made the Lost Book of Nostradamus a truly unique discovery. Here was solid evidence that a main point of our argument in Mysteries, that an unknown group of initiates or believers had retained sophisticated knowledge concerning the “end of the world” galactic alignment at least since the Middle Ages, was in fact correct. A heretical and possibly chilaist group of initiates kept the knowledge, in the form of images that were eventually perhaps only semi-understandable. These images were treasures, copied and recopied, until finally they disappeared into the Vatican Library.
And now, I get to announce their true meaning and value on nation television!
I told you, you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried!
Vincent Bridges´ Legacy
