The Mask Of Nostradamus
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The Mask Of Nostradamus
''The Mask of Nostradamus: The Prophecies of the World's Most Famous Seer'' is a 1990 book by magician and Scientific skepticism, skeptic James Randi. Randi provides an overview of the life and work of Nostradamus, a 16th-century French physician and astrologer who, in a series of quatrains in ''Les Prophéties'', allegedly predicted several major historical events. Randi argues that Nostradamus was actually an exceptionally poor prognosticator who used vague and ambiguous language to give an illusion of authenticity. Randi further describes the widespread use of poor scholarship, mistranslations, and reference to forged prophecies by Nostradamus’s believers, and describes dubious methods that believers have used to obtain meaning from Nostradamus’s prophecies. Randi also provides an overview of the popularity and pseudoscientific nature of astrology, a technique that Nostradamus used to prepare prophecies, as well as providing an overview of other prophets and their methods. ...
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James Randi
James Randi (born Randall James Hamilton Zwinge; August 7, 1928 – October 20, 2020) was a Canadian-American stage magician, author and scientific skeptic who extensively challenged paranormal and pseudoscientific claims. Rodrigues 2010p. 271/ref> He was the co-founder of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), and founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF). Randi began his career as a magician under the stage name The Amazing Randi and later chose to devote most of his time to investigating paranormal, occult, and supernatural claims, which he collectively called "woo-woo". Randi retired from practicing magic at age 60, and from his foundation at 87. Although often referred to as a "debunker", Randi said he disliked the term's connotations and preferred to describe himself as an "investigator". He wrote about paranormal phenomena, skepticism, and the history of magic. He was a frequent guest on ''The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson'', famously expo ...
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Jeane Dixon
Jeane Dixon (January 5, 1904 – January 25, 1997) was one of the best-known American psychics and astrologers of the twentieth century, owing to her prediction of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, her syndicated newspaper astrology column, some well-publicized predictions, and a best-selling biography. Early life Dixon was born Lydia Emma Pinckert, one of 10 siblings born to Richard Franz Pinckert, a native of Gräfenhainichen, Wittenberg (district), Wittenberg, Saxony-Anhalt, and his wife, Luise Johanne Emma ( Graefe), both Roman Catholics. Dixon was born in Medford, Wisconsin, but raised in Missouri and California. Her birth date was often reported as 1918, and Dixon would proffer this date to reporters,Greene, David St. Albin, "The Untold Story ... of Jeane Dixon", ''National Observer (United States), National Observer'', October 27, 1972.Clauson-Wicker, Su. "Offbeat Attractions", ''Roanoke Times & World News'' (Roanoke, Virginia), April 17, 2005, "Displays lea ...
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Mother Shipton
Ursula Southeil ( 1488 – 1561; also variously spelt as Ursula Southill, Ursula Soothtell or Ursula Sontheil), popularly known as Mother Shipton, is said to have been an English soothsayer and prophetess. She has sometimes been described as a witch and is associated with folklore involving the origin of the Rollright Stones of Oxfordshire, reportedly a king and his men transformed to stone after failing her test. William Camden reported an account of this in a rhyming version in 1610. The first known edition of her prophecies was printed in 1641, eighty years after her reported death. This timing suggests that what was published was a legendary or mythical account. It contained numerous mainly regional predictions and only two prophetic verses.''Mother Shipton's Prophecies'' (Mann, 1989) One of the most notable editions of her prophecies was published in 1684. It gave her birthplace as Knaresborough, Yorkshire, in a cave now known as Mother Shipton's Cave. The book reputed S ...
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Cosimo Ruggeri
Cosimo Ruggeri, in France called Côme Ruggieri (died 28 March 1615), was an Italian astrologer, favorite, and influential adviser of the queen regent of France, Catherine de Medici. He was the subject of many legends in the folklore of Catherine de Medici, and reputed as a master of the occult, black magic, and witchcraft during his lifetime. Life Cosimo Ruggeri's presence at the French royal court is first attested in 1571. He was a part of the entourage of the Tuscan ambassador to France, Petrucci; known for his scholarly knowledge, he was a tutor of the Italian language to Elisabeth of Austria, Queen of France. After claims of being able to predict the future through his knowledge in astrology, he was no longer well seen by Elisabeth, but reported to have become be a favorite of the queen mother, who asked him of advice in matters of state because of his alleged ability to predict the future, and is said to have came to exert influence over her with his alleged occult know ...
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John Dee
John Dee (13 July 1527 – 1608 or 1609) was an English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, teacher, occultist, and alchemist. He was the court astronomer for, and advisor to, Elizabeth I, and spent much of his time on alchemy, divination, and Hermetic philosophy. As an antiquarian, he had one of the largest libraries in England at the time. As a political advisor, he advocated the foundation of English colonies in the New World to form a "British Empire", a term he is credited with coining. Dee eventually left Elizabeth's service and went on a quest for additional knowledge in the deeper realms of the occult and supernatural. He aligned himself with several individuals who may have been charlatans, travelled through Europe and was accused of spying for the English crown. Upon his return to England, he found his home and library vandalised. He eventually returned to the Queen's service, but was turned away when she was succeeded by James I. He died in poverty in London ...
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Louis De Wohl
Louis de Wohl (earlier Ludwig von Wohl, born Lajos Theodor Gaspar Adolf Wohl) was a German-born Catholicism, Catholic author, and had served as an astrology, astrologer notable for his work with MI5 from England during World War II. Sixteen of his popular pre-war novels were the basis of movies. His later novels are literary Hagiography, hagiographies of notable Roman Catholic saints and of different periods of the Bible. Life Wohl was born in Berlin to a poor Catholic family, with a Hungarians, Hungarian father and Austrians, Austrian mother of Jews, Jewish descent. When he was only 17 years old, his mother pushed him into an apprenticeship to a banker, from which he was dismissed in 1924, at the age of 21. In 1935, he emigration, emigrated to England due to his objections to the Nazi regime. Some sources claim that he there had a wife named Alexandra, who fled to Santiago, Chile, where she claimed to be a Romanians, Romanian princess and was known as "La Baronessa." Wohl worke ...
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Rudolf Hess
Rudolf Walter Richard Hess (Heß in German; 26 April 1894 – 17 August 1987) was a German politician and a leading member of the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Appointed Deputy Führer to Adolf Hitler in 1933, Hess held that position until 1941, when he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate the United Kingdom's exit from the Second World War. He was taken prisoner and eventually convicted of crimes against peace. He was still serving his life sentence at the time of his suicide in 1987. Hess enlisted as an infantryman in the Imperial German Army at the outbreak of World War I. He was wounded several times during the war and was awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd Class, in 1915. Shortly before the war ended, Hess enrolled to train as an aviator, but he saw no action in that role. He left the armed forces in December 1918 with the rank of . In 1919, Hess enrolled in the University of Munich, where he studied geopolitics under Karl Haushofer, a proponent of the concept ...
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Karl Ernst Krafft
Karl Ernst Krafft (10 May 1900 – 8 January 1945) was a Swiss astrologer, born in Basel. He worked on the fields of astrology and graphology., Retrieved 2013-5-30. Astrology career After studying in the University of Basel and Geneva, he graduated with a degree in mathematics. For the best part of ten years he worked on a massive book entitled ''Traits of Astro-Biology''. This expounded his own theory of "Typocosmy": the prediction of the future based on the study of an individual's personality, or type. By the early 1930s, when Adolf Hitler had come to power, Krafft enjoyed a unique status among occultists and prophets in Germany. The National Socialists, later to become his patrons, at first posed a threat to him. Occultists, like Freemasons, were among those harassed and vilified by most National Socialists. While the Nazi state persecuted astrologers, Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler consulted them. Krafft moved into the orbit of the National Socialist elite in November 1939 ...
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Nazi Party
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor, the German Workers' Party (; DAP), existed from 1919 to 1920. The Nazi Party emerged from the Extremism, extremist German nationalism, German nationalist, racism, racist and populism, populist paramilitary culture, which fought against the communism, communist uprisings in post–World War I Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into nationalism. Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti–big business, anti-bourgeoisie, bourgeois, and anti-capitalism, anti-capitalist rhetoric. This was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders, and in the 1930s, the party's main focus shifted to Antisemitism, antisemitic and Criticism of ...
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Joan Quigley
Joan Ceciel Quigley (April 10, 1927 – October 21, 2014), of San Francisco, California was an astrologer best known for her astrological advice to the Reagan White House in the 1980s. Quigley was born in Kansas City, Missouri. She was called on by First Lady Nancy Reagan in 1981 after John Hinckley's attempted assassination of the president, and stayed on as the White House astrologer in secret until being outed in 1988 by ousted former chief of staff Donald Regan. Relationship with Nancy Reagan Joan Quigley first met Nancy Reagan in the 1970s on ''The Merv Griffin Show''. After Ronald Reagan became president, and after the attempt on his life on March 30, 1981, Nancy asked Quigley if she could have foreseen, and possibly prevented, the assassination attempt. Quigley answered affirmatively, saying that she could have done so had she been looking at the time (and been part of the White House staff). After that point, Nancy Reagan enlisted Quigley's astrological advice on a ...
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Presidency Of Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan's tenure as the 40th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 1981, and ended on January 20, 1989. Reagan, a Republican from California, took office following a landslide victory over Democratic incumbent President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election. Four years later, in the 1984 election, he defeated Democrat former vice president Walter Mondale to win re-election in a larger landslide. Reagan was succeeded by his vice president, George H. W. Bush. Reagan's 1980 election resulted from a dramatic conservative shift to the right in American politics, including a loss of confidence in liberal, New Deal, and Great Society programs and priorities that had dominated the national agenda since the 1930s. Domestically, the Reagan administration enacted a major tax cut, sought to cut non-military spending, and eliminated federal regulations. The administration's economic policies, known as "Reaganomics", were insp ...
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Pseudoscience
Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that claim to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method. Pseudoscience is often characterized by contradictory, exaggerated or falsifiability, unfalsifiable claims; reliance on confirmation bias rather than rigorous attempts at refutation; lack of openness to Peer review, evaluation by other experts; absence of systematic practices when developing Hypothesis, hypotheses; and continued adherence long after the pseudoscientific hypotheses have been experimentally discredited. The demarcation problem, demarcation between science and pseudoscience has scientific, philosophical, and political implications. Philosophers debate the nature of science and the general criteria for drawing the line between scientific theory, scientific theories and pseudoscientific beliefs, but there is general agreement on examples such as ancient astronauts, climate change denial, dowsing, evolution denial, ...
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