Editing Nostradamus (section)

=== Occultism ===
After another visit to Italy, Nostradamus began to move away from medicine and toward the "occult". Following popular trends, he wrote an [[almanac]] for 1550, for the first time in print Latinising his name to Nostradamus. He was so encouraged by the almanac's success that he decided to write one or more annually. Taken together, they are known to have contained at least 6,338 prophecies,{{sfn|Lemesurier|2010|pp=23–25}}{{sfn|Chevignard|1999}} as well as at least eleven annual calendars, all of them starting on 1 January and not, as is sometimes supposed, in March. It was mainly in response to the almanacs that the nobility and other prominent people from far away soon started asking for horoscopes and "psychic" advice from him, though he generally expected his clients to supply the birth charts on which these would be based, rather than calculating them himself as a professional astrologer would have done. When obliged to attempt this himself on the basis of the published tables of the day, he frequently made errors and failed to adjust the figures for his clients' place or time of birth.{{sfn|Lemesurier|2010|pp=59–64}}{{sfn|Brind'Amour|1993|pp=326–399}}{{efn|Refer to the analysis of these charts by Brind'Amour, 1993, and compare Gruber's comprehensive critique of Nostradamus's horoscope for Crown Prince Rudolph Maximilian.}}{{sfn|Gruber|2003}}

He then began his project of writing a book of one thousand mainly French quatrains, which constitute the largely undated prophecies for which he is most famous today. Feeling vulnerable to opposition on religious grounds,{{sfn|Lemesurier|2003|p=125}} he devised a method of obscuring his meaning by using "[[Virgil]]ianised" syntax, word games and a mixture of other languages such as [[Ancient Greek|Greek]], Italian, [[Latin]], and [[Provençal dialect|Provençal]].{{sfn|Lemesurier|2003|pp=99–100}} For technical reasons connected with their publication in three instalments  (the publisher of the third and last instalment seems to have been unwilling to start it in the middle of a "Century," or book of 100 verses), the last fifty-eight quatrains of the seventh "Century" have not survived in any extant edition.

[[File:Nostradamus CI 1.jpg|thumb|Century I, Quatrain 1 in the 1555 Lyon Bonhomme edition]]

The quatrains, published in a book titled ''Les Prophéties'' (The Prophecies), received a mixed reaction when they were published. Some people thought Nostradamus was a servant of evil, a fake, or insane, while many of the elite evidently thought otherwise. [[Catherine de' Medici]], wife of King [[Henry II of France]], was one of Nostradamus's greatest admirers. After reading his almanacs for 1555, which hinted at unnamed threats to the royal family, she summoned him to Paris to explain them and to draw up horoscopes for her children. At the time, he feared that he would be beheaded,{{sfn|Leroy|1993|p=83}} but by the time of his death in 1566, Queen Catherine had made him Counselor and Physician-in-Ordinary to her son, the young King [[Charles IX of France]].

Some accounts of Nostradamus's life state that he was afraid of being persecuted for [[Christian heresy|heresy]] by the [[Inquisition]], but neither [[prophecy]] nor [[astrology]] fell in this bracket, and he would have been in danger only if he had practised [[magic (paranormal)|magic]] to support them. In 1538 he came into conflict with the Church in Agen after an Inquisitor visited the area looking for [[Anti-Catholicism|anti-Catholic]] views.<ref name="Wilson2014">{{cite book |last = Wilson |first = Ian |title = Nostradamus: The Man Behind the Prophecies |url = https://books.google.com/books?id=jqvcAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT62 |date = 1 April 2014 |publisher = St. Martin's Press |isbn = 978-1-4668-6737-6 |pages = 62 ff }}</ref> His brief imprisonment at Marignane in late 1561 was because he had violated a recent royal decree by publishing his 1562 almanac without the prior permission of a bishop.{{sfn|Lemesurier|2003|p=124}}