John Hogue

In the late 1990s when I was in high school, John Hogue's huge block of a book Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies came out and it appealed to me in so many ways. The typeface, the footnotes, the etymologies, the translations facing the French original, and an author who seemed steeped in enough history to tease out all of these clues and show how Nostradamus may have been a prophet. It was light years ahead of the other books on Nostradamus or the TV shows then popular. (How many other bookish lads of my generation saw the Orson Welles hosted The Man Who Saw Tomorrow documentary some late night on TV?)

Still, even as a teen, a Christian, and a political conservative, I could note a profound sense of hatred and resentment emanating from the supposedly cosmic and faintly hippie-ish John Hogue. He denigrated Republicans (Reagan especially), he denigrated the United States, he denigrated Christianity (especially in it's conservative Evangelical or Roman Catholic varieties), he denigrated Western civilization, he denigrated modern technology (especially of the petroleum-operating kind). Later pronouncements by Hogue, who it turns out is an Osho devotee, made George W. Bush into Mabus, doomed the world to starvation, and Chicken Little-like warns us of sudden doom via climate change all starting in the first decade of the 2000s. A look at his writings on prophecy, be it via Nostradamus, other olden prophets, or his own astrologically-inclined prognostications, show a startling tendency to be wrong. July 1999 and the "great king of terror" comes to mind. Nostradamus really threw everyone for a loop there.

But, I digress in my introduction. To the book at hand: The Last Pope: The Decline and Fall of the Church of Rome: The Prophecies of St. Malachy for the New Millennium. Now the story goes, that Saint Malachy, a 12th-century archbishop of Armagh, made a whole slew of predictions about the Popes till the end of times in pithy little Latin mottoes that captured their essence. But, it just so happens the book of prophecy was first published in 1595 by Benedictine monk Arnold Wion. It is most assuredly a forgery by Wion. Firstly, the mottoes for the popes between 1143 and 1595 are mostly spot on. I say "mostly," because "St. Malachy," i.e. Wion, actually included a few Popes that the Catholic Church now deem Antipopes. Uh-oh. Doesn't say much for your prophetic skill there.

But, after 1595, there are thirty five mottoes. What of these? These supposedly take us from 1595 to the end of time. Now Hogue, and a whole bunch of writers before him, engage in a huge exercise of postdiction (as opposed to prediction): taking the mottoes and finding a way to interpret them to make them fit historical reality. For example (pp. 274-287): motto 108 is "Flos florum" or "Flower of flowers" and, lo and behold, the pope this matches up with is Pope Paul VI (1963-1978) who had three flowers (fleurs-de-lis) on his personal coat of arms. Bam! Malachy, or Wion, or some sixteenth century prophet writing as Malachy (Hogue hedges his bets a dozen times in the book) must have been a prophet. Of course, the mottoes are so superficial and open to interpretation, you could make every one fit every pope. Many are so forced as to be laughable, and many are so tenuous that it makes the word tenuous tenuous. A funny one, (pp. 226-227): motto 99 "Vir religiosus" or "A religious man." Wow. How can we make that one fit Pope Pius VIII (1829-1830)... how can we make a man in a religious denomination "a religious man...." Laughable.

This book was written in 1998, which brings us to the prediction part of the book. Pope John Paul II was on the papal throne in 1998, and he would be motto 110, "De labore solis" or "From the sun's labor." Karol Wojtyła, the future John Paul II, was born on the day of total solar eclipse, thus "From the sun's labor" Hogue says (p. 300 and elsewhere). Now, it was a solar eclipse that could not be seen in Poland, but, oh well. (Side note, the funeral of John Paul II would be held on April 8, 2005, the date of another solar eclipse [which couldn't be seen from Rome], which is kind of spooky. But pure coincidence.) Anyway, Hogue, correlating Malachy with his interpretations of Nostradamus, predicts that John Paul would die around 2000, after 27 years of the Third Antichrist's wars began in 1999 (p. 328), lasting till 2026. Hogue writes: "One thing is assured... his [John Paul II's] life candle is not expected to burn beyond the year 2000" (p. 330). Oops. Well, of course, we know now in 2020 that John Paul II lingered on until 2005.

What about Pope motto 111, "Gloria olivæ" or "From the glory of the olive"? Hogue thinks (pp. 330-349) he will rule from c. 2000 to c. 2020 (oops!) and preside over much disintegration of the Catholic Church, wars and rumors of wars, pestilences, over-farming, food shortages, riots, and climate change catastrophe. Oops. Hogue also makes a few educated guesses at which Cardinal this new Pope Gloria olivæ may be, and he gets those guesses all wrong. Though Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was mentioned several times in Hogue's section on John Paul II, he does not even mention his name in the section on Gloria olivæ. (Hogue does suggest Pope Gloria olivæ could be a Latin American, making him one off, since the next pope would be a Latin American.) Of course, Hogue predicts all of this hugely bad stuff that will happen (pp. 340-345): the world wars of the Third Antichrist, between 1999 and 2026, oil reserves drying up in 2010 (Nostradamus or Hogue never predicted fracking, I guess), and a "future holy war around 2006-2008. Unless I am mistaken, Pope Benedict XVI (2005-2013), the former Joseph Ratzinger, was German, a conservative, and, as far as I remember the years of his papacy, did not preside over any of the stuff Hogue predicted. Oops. (By the by, Hogue and other Malachyites try to connect Benedict XVI really tenuously to the motto "Gloria olivæ" without much success.)

Which brings us to the last pope "Malachy" listed, motto number 112, "Petrus Romanus" or "Peter the Roman" (pp. 349-367). This motto is surrounded by a whole paragraph of Latin, translated as: "In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit Peter the Roman, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations, and when these things are finished, the city of seven hills [i.e. Rome] will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people." Scary stuff. Here, again, Hogue gets all his predictions (from Nostradamus, Fátima, Joachim of Fiore, et al.) all wrong. Of course, he gets nowhere close to guessing that Pope Petrus Romanus would be a South American Argentine of Italian descent, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, a Jesuit, and take the papal name Francis after St. Francis of Assisi. (Hogue noted, p. 333, that "conclaves never choose a Jesuit as a pope," at least in the past.) Anyway, during Pope Petrus Romanus's, I mean Pope Francis's reign, Hogue tells us, the Roman Catholic Church is supposed to end, Rome will be blasted by nukes or something, and the whole Age of Pisces with it's nasty old "values of faith and surrender to paternal authority figures" (p. 348) will give way to the Age of Aquarius and peace and light and hippiedom and freedom (Hogue really means libertinism when he says "freedom") and birth control and abortion and Buddhist-like religions where everyone does what they want without all those pesky morals and stuff. Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Though he has some liberal tendencies, I haven't seen those signs from Pope Francis quite yet....

But, the most pronounced feature of this book of failed predictions and sloppy postdiction based on a forgery, is the rampant anti-Catholicism of the book, wrapped up in Hogue's general anti-Western civilization anything (except, I guess, making money selling books and stuff). Now, I am not a fan of the Roman Catholic Church, its history, its structure, its theology, its ritual, or its dogma. But Hogue is a Catholic-hater par excellence: from the acknowledgements where he bemoans his infant baptism in the Catholic Church (p. vi) to the last words in his epilogue: "Be not afraid of a world without popes or priests" (p. 372). The text drips with anti-Catholic bigotry, bias, crude jokes, misinterpretations, and conspiracy theories. You'd think, someone who says he was baptized Catholic and calls himself a "rogue scholar" would know that "original sin" is NOT sex (pp. 25, 236)—which is a common misconception of the uneducated, anti-religion liberal—but the state human beings are in because of the Fall, the disobedience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Look it up. (Also, Halley's Comet did not appear in 1912 [pp. 242-243], it appeared in 1910!) Numerous such errors in fact, interpretation, and history all make you wonder about the scholarship of the "rogue scholar."

Besides all this are Hogue's sometimes outlandish opinions about the past for his postdictions, and indictments of the Catholic Church and the West, etc. The most egregious example is on p. 263, where Hogue, like many liberal anti-Westerners, seems to have an idealistic liking for communism. I mean communism is just nice people sharing nice things, right? Anyway, on p. 262 he claims: "Events have shown that Hitler—not Stalin or world communism—to be the greatest threat all along. Most historians believe that if Hitler's 'crusade' against communism in Russia had been successful he could have won the war. All the Jews remaining in Eurasia would have died and Hitler would have proceeded with his planned depopulation of the Slavic race by 40 million." Wow. Now, first he never says who these "most historians" are. Second, Stalin killed at least 20 million, and his commie buddy Mao killed about 40 million. Communisim overall, and it continues to this day, has killed upwards of 100 million. Now, why Hogue doesn't play what if with Stalin like he does with Hitler I can't tell you. Stalin, had he been able to take over the world with communism, could have killed... I don't know.. a billion kulaks, priests, bourgeoisie, etc. Who knows? But Hogue's hippie-ish warming up to communism to slam Pope Pius XII and the Catholic Church in particular (and Christianity and Western democracies in general) is sickening. He has dozens of such opinions in the book.

To sum up, bad document, bad postdictions, bad predictions, and a bad anti-Catholic screed. Had I read this back in the late 1990s instead of his more tame, scholarly-looking Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies, I would have dismissed Hogue's "rogue scholarship" as a waste of my time. I have a bunch of his books (his bio of Nostradamus is pretty good), because I like to read Nostradamus stuff, but his pose as a "rogue scholar," hippie John the Baptist, and hater of the West cosmic prophet dude wearing a Nostradamus beret and beard, is grating, off-putting, and weird.… (más)

I've always been fascinated by the predictions made by Nostradamus, and so I thought it was time to find out more. Born in 1503 and dying in 1566, it was interesting to learn he had been a doctor and had treated 100s of patients with the plague.

I always imagined Nostradamus saw visions of the future, however after reading John Hogue's book 'Nostradamus - A Life and Myth', I learned that he used many ancient and forbidden texts, conjuring tools, astrology and burned herbs in a meditative state to 'see into the future'. Nostradamus wrote his predictions in form of quatrains and printed an almanac for the year ahead that was widely read amongst the educated in France and across Europe.

This was a great read and I recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about the life of Nostradamus. If you're hoping to read his all his quatrains though, you'll need to track down 'The Complete Prophecies' by John Hogue, which I might just have to do.… (más)