Or maybe not. Let's go back and apply a little intellectual honesty. What earthly (or unearthly) justification could Nostradamus have had for describing New York City (which did not yet even exist) as "the City of God?" Why did the Great Seer feel compelled to refer to the future World Trade Center towers as "two brothers" instead of using a more apt word like "buildings" or "monuments" (or even, egad, "towers")? Granted, the word "fortress" isn't an unreasonable descriptor for the Pentagon, but by what stretch of the imagination would it have been accurate to stipulate that "the great leader" (and is that
really the phrase M. Nostradamus would have used to describe the future U.S.A.?) would "succumb" to the destruction of two buildings?
Faux Nostradamus
Anyway, quibbling over individual words is futile, given that
Nostradamus didn't even write this passage. Michel de Nostredame died in 1566, nearly a hundred years before the date given in the email (1654). The quatrain is nowhere to be found in his entire published oeuvre. In a word, it's a hoax.
More precisely, its
attribution to Nostradamus is a hoax. The passage was lifted from a Web page (long since deleted from the server that originally hosted it) containing an essay written by college student Neil Marshall in 1996 entitled "
Nostradamus: A Critical Analysis." In the essay itself, Marshall admits
inventing the quatrain for the purpose of demonstrating — quite ironically, in light of the way it was subsequently misused — how a Nostradamus-like verse can be so cryptically couched as to lend itself to whatever interpretation one wishes to make.
Interestingly, a variant of this faux prophecy turned up in the soc.culture.palestine newsgroup only one day after 9/11 under the heading "They followed his prediction." It went like this:
In the City of God there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by Chaos, while the fortress endures, the great leader will succumb' 'The third big war will begin when the big city is burning'
- Nostradamus 1654
...on the 11 day of the 9 month that... two metal birds would crash into two tall statues... in the new city... and the world will end soon after"
"From the book of Nostradamus"