34 Horoscope Guideceased to have faith in its power. But his
army did carry those shields with a Chris-
tian symbol on them. Constantine may
have had just one vision in his lifetime,
though we’ll never know for sure. There
are of course reports of average individ-
uals who have a dream or other intuition
of something like an important event,
often a tragedy, that is about to happen,
but there are others who are more prop-
erly called visionaries in the sense that
they essentially live in a world built from
imagination that, yet, somehow connects
with reality. One of these is Nostrada-
mus. His prophetic quatrains, in which he
laid out his visions of what was to come,
were first published in 1555, and are still
read today.
Nostradamus was a physician, astrolo-
ger, and seer. He was born in St. Remy,
France, on December 14, 1503, mat-
ter-of-factly predicted his own death on
July 1, 1566, and was
found the next morning
to have died in his sleep.
The inscription on his
headstone says that he
had lived for 62 years,
6 months and 17 days,
which confirms the birth
date. By the way, there
is an unsupported state-
ment at the beginning of
the Wikipedia entry on
Nostradamus, which says
he was born “depend-
ing on the source, 14 or
21 December 1503.” In
a very thorough search
of the Internet the only
“source” we could find
for the second date was
the same phrase, repeated
verbatim, with no source
given. See astrodatabank.com’s source
notes on Nostradamus for a possibility.
Unlike Constantine, with his single
ecstatic experience, Nostradamus had a
method for producing his visions of the
future on a regular basis. He would sit
in his study late at night and stare into a
bowl of water, a process known as scry-
ing. At some point the movement of the
water would bring visions to his mind,
and he would write these down in qua-
trains. Nostradamus also used astrology
in his predictions, which were at first col-
lected in pamphlets, and later published
in a book called Centuries.
Nostradamus first published his pre-
dictions based on these visions in an
almanac in 1550, which caught the eye
of Catherine de Medici, the Queen of
France. She commissioned Nostradamus
to do the royal horoscopes of her seven