Michel de Montaigne on prognostication

The following quotations are from Montaigne's Essays, specifically Chapter 11, "Of Prognostications."

And although there still remain among us certain methods of divination, by stars, by spirits, by ghosts, by dreams, and otherwise--a notable example of the senseless curiosity of our nature, occupying itself with future matters, as if it had not enough to do with digesting those at hand.

Montaigne then quotes Horace: As for those who understand the language of birds and learn more from the liver of a beast than from their own thought, they should be heard, rather than heeded.

Montaigne's next observations could be written today:

I see some who study and annotate their almanacs, and hold them up to us as authority about the things that are taking place. . . I think no better of them because I see them sometimes make a lucky hit. . . It may be added that no one keeps a record of their miscalculations, as they are of common occurrence and endless; and everyone ranks their true prognostics as remarkable, incredible, and prodigious.

I should greatly like to have beheld with my own eyes those two marvels--the book of Joachim, the Calabrian abbot who predicted all the Popes to come, their names and persons; and that of the Emperor Leo, who predicted the emperors and patriarchs of Greece. This I have seen with my own eyes, that, in times of public confusion, men amazed by what happens to them fall back, as into other forms of superstition, into seeking in the heavens the causes and past threatenings of their ill-fortune; and they are so strangely lucky at it in my time that they have convinced me that, inasmuch as it is an occupation for keen and idle minds, those who are trained to this subtle art of knotting and unknotting these signs would be capable of finding in any writings whatever they sought therein. But what above all helps them in this game is the obscure, ambiguous, and fantastic language of the prophetical jargon, to which those who use it give no clear sense, so that posterity may ascribe to it any meaning it pleases.

Interesting observations by Montaigne:

I think no better of them because I see them sometimes make a lucky hit. . . It may be added that no one keeps a record of their miscalculations, as they are of common occurrence and endless; and everyone ranks their true prognostics as remarkable, incredible, and prodigious.


and they are so strangely lucky at it in my time that they have convinced me that, inasmuch as it is an occupation for keen and idle minds, those who are trained to this subtle art of knotting and unknotting these signs would be capable of finding in any writings whatever they sought therein.

But what above all helps them in this game is the obscure, ambiguous, and fantastic language of the prophetical jargon, to which those who use it give no clear sense, so that posterity may ascribe to it any meaning it pleases.

Montaigne wrote this five centuries ago, Horace over two thousand years ago. I find it incomprehensible that the same minds are still with us, and with those believers come those who prey on them and profit from them.

I wonder how many are now claiming to have predicted the demise of Osama bin Laden.