It hasn't been a good millennium for prophets.
In ancient times seers and diviners of one kind and another had the ear of the populace whom they awed, mystified, incited or simply scared the pants off. All kinds of 'evidence' was called upon by these negotiators with the fates to justify their prognostications.
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, warned against being too adventurous on the ides of March, seeks an opinion from his augurers. They slaughter a beast — as you do — and examine its innards. This process, known as haruspication, leads them to conclude Caesar should 'not ... stir forth to-day/Plucking the entrails of an offering forth/They could not find a heart within the beast.' Bad news.
Even worse comes from his wife, Calphurnia, who reports that overnight 'A lioness hath whelped in the streets/And graves have yawned and yielded up their dead.'
Caesar has already been warned by a soothsayer to 'Beware the ides of March' and when, on the very day, he encounters this gloomy fellow on the steps of the Capitol, he rather smugly points out, 'The ides of March are come', to which the soothsayer, with the eerie prescience and mordant wit common to his kind, replies, 'Aye, Caesar, but not gone.'
Meanwhile, Cassius is persuading Brutus of exactly the opposite. To hell with all the signs: 'The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves that we are underlings.'
Shakespeare, as we know, played pretty fast and loose with myth and legend, but his portrait of your better class of superstitious Roman is persuasive. Caesar was mad not to be influenced by such explicit omens,
Explicitness, however, is what subsequent prophets lacked. 'The young red black one will seize the hierarchy/The traitors will act on a day of drizzle,' warns Nostradamus, with what may be dire prediction or a weather forecast.
'Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows ... but there is that which remains,' proclaims Aleister Crowley obscurely. A member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he received in later life a mystical message called The Book of the Law and proclaimed a new and splendidly convenient principle for the whole of humankind: 'Do what thou wilt.'
Yorkshire's Mother Shipton, whose conception allegedly resulted from her mother's union with a demon, was more helpful when she predicted in 1641, 'Carriages without horses shall