Original subtitles

Throughout the ages,

there have been whispers of those

who see beyond the veil of time,

visions of doom,

warnings from the unknown, and messages from the divine.

In 16th century France,

astrologer Nostradamus pens cryptic verses

in a book that will haunt generations.

In the shadowy forests of Central Europe,

a castle attracts visitors drawn to its dark history,

and for one, a night spent within its walls

conjures up hellish visions of the future.

In medieval Italy,

a holy man's incurable wounds

are blamed on heavenly visions,

but are merely a precursor to prophecies

of a darker future for Christianity.

What lies behind these visions?

Is there a rational answer,

or have spiritual forces beyond our understanding

given these people the gift of prophecy?

September 11th, 2001,

hijacked planes crash into New York City's Twin Towers,

sending them collapsing.

Chaos unfolds, lives are lost,

and the world is forever changed.

People are desperate for answers,

and some people find those answers in the writings

of the 16th century French mystic Nostradamus.

Nostradamus has fascinated people for centuries,

and in our own time, he is seen as having prophesied

the Great Fire of London in 1666,

the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte,

the Second World War, even the assassination of JFK,

and, coming right up to the present day, 9/11.

All of this prophesied by Nostradamus,

He's almost become a shorthand for fortune-telling

in general.

People are always looking for the ways in which

they can come into catastrophe,

and when you have someone who is using divination

to predict catastrophe,

people have a tendency to pay attention.

Is there something in his writings

that is really true, that really does see into the future?

It has been said

Nostradamus is the most quoted Frenchman in history,

but where did he come from,

how much of his cryptic prophecies come to pass,

and how much is merely legend?

Nostradamus, or Michel de Nostredame,

was born in 1503 in Saint-Remy-de-Provence.

He was the son of Reyniere de Saint-Remy

and her husband, Jaume de Nostredame,

a grain dealer and part-time notary.

While Nostradamus family has Jewish roots,

his grandfather, Guy Gassonet,

converts the family to Catholicism.

This mix of Jewish and Catholic traditions

becomes central to Nostradamus's worldview.

As a child,

Nostradamus shows an unusually high level of intelligence.

He begins to learn Latin, Greek and Hebrew,

and it's believed

that his grandfather taught the young Nostradamus

much of the kind of Jewish mysticism

that we find in the Kabbalah in astrology.

When Nostradamus is a young man,

he goes to the University of Montpellier

to study to become a physician,

but he becomes very frustrated

with the academic lecture-heavy approach of the university,

because he really wants a more hands-on form of training.

Undeterred,

Nostradamus spends most of the 1520s

traveling across Southern France,

continuing his medical studies on his own.

By the end of the decade,

he returns to Montpellier to earn his medical degree.

He's coming into a world

which is in the throes of a health crisis.

Since the Black Death in the 14th century,

Europe has experienced wave after wave of epidemics.

In fact, in Provence, in the south of France,

there were a staggering 43 years of epidemics

between 1451 and 1550.

While most run from the plague,

Nostradamus rushes toward infected areas

in order to practice his trade as a healer.

Nostradamus becomes a plague doctor,

and he's going to be very busy at this time

across Provence, in Southern France,

and Northern Italy

where he travels around trying to heal people of the plague.

Now, to paint a picture, nobody can stop it.

Nobody knows how to stop it,

and it lays waste: villages, towns, cities.

This seems like a judgment from God.

It is something out of control.

Nostradamus attributes phenomena like the plague

to a combination of religious events and outcomes,

astrological placements, and cutting-edge medical knowledge.

One of his ideas

is that it's the position of planetary bodies

in the sky

that create the conditions for pestilence

to drop from the air into the atmosphere

that human beings are breathing.

The people of Southern France

see Nostradamus as a dedicated healer,

but when tragedy strikes close to home,

his search for answers awakens the unusual talents

the world will remember him for.

By a cruel twist of fate,

the plague takes his own wife and two children,

and this really knocks him back.

It makes him reconsider the path to true knowledge,

and he starts to go down a more mystical route.

He's departing, if you want, from conventional science

into something much broader,

much more esoteric, even dabbling with the occult.

As Nostradamus embraces mystical traditions,

he seemingly awakens a remarkable gift,

and his first known prophecy is about to come true.

One of the legends told about Nostradamus

is that he comes upon this group of Franciscan friars,

and after studying them, he points to one of their number,

a man named Felice Peretti,

and he tells the man that he will become the future Pope.

Of course, in 1585,

Felice Peretti did indeed become Pope Sixtus V,

fulfilling that prophecy.

Is this unusual? Yes.

And we don't have a lot of Franciscan popes,

but you do have to wonder as well

whether there was current knowledge at the time

that he would've been one of the likely successors

because of his influence.

After decades of travel,

Nostradamus moves back to Salon-de-Provence.

It is during this period of stability

that Nostradamus cements his legacy

as one of history's greatest seers.

In his mid-40s, he's still a practicing physician,

but he does have these other interests

that he's devoting time and energy to.

In particular, he's interested in astrology

and in practices of prognostication.

In European history at that time,

the astrological stuff is not seen as fringy as it is now.

People knew, for example,

that the heavenly bodies affected tides,

and they naturally thought, well, there's some sort of force

that connects them to things that happen on the Earth,

and maybe the same way it affects a tide, it can affect us.

By the early 16th century,

astrology was widely practiced throughout Europe.

By now, a common practice taught in universities,

blending ancient traditions with new observational methods,

tracking the various planets

and other celestial bodies in the skies above.

Astrologers, such as Nostradamus at the time,

would've been using technology such as an astrolabe,

which would enable them to calculate the precise positions

of a planet at any given time.

The astrolabe is a handheld model

of the sky itself.

Users point its rotating arm towards a celestial body,

such as the sun or another star,

to measure its altitude above the horizon.

Then, by referencing the map on the instrument's face,

this measurement could reveal the day, time,

and direction of their specific coordinates.

But Nostradamus is not only using the position of the stars

to make his predictions,

his practice of hydromancy induces visions of the future.

One of the methods that Nostradamus

used to see the future

was something that we call scrying.

One form in that, for example,

is looking into crystal balls,

but what Nostradamus did is

he would look into a bowl of water,

and by concentrating deeply on this object,

he would begin to see pictures, visions

of what was going to happen in the future.

And this was an immensely popular form,

essentially, of fortune-telling.

In 1555,

Nostradamus publishes "Les Propheties,"

or "The Prophecies,"

a collection of his major long-term predictions.

Worried about potential religious persecution,

he uses quatrains.

A quatrain is a short, condensed form of poetry.

He also mixes in other languages like Greek, Italian,

and Provencal, a dialect from Southern France,

to obscure their meanings.

We're at the very beginning

of what will be the witchcraft trials of the next century,

but at this time there is a kind of sweet spot

where somebody like Nostradamus can operate

without fear of being burnt to death.

By the mid 1550s,

Nostradamus' reputation has grown so much

that he's invited to the French royal court in 1556

by the queen mother of France, Catherine de' Medici.

Catherine de' Medici

is one of the most fascinating characters

of 16th-century France.

She was a Medici,

so she's a member of the most powerful family in Europe.

At the time, the Medici owned the great banks

based in Florence.

She married Henry II and they had several children together.

She hears about Nostradamus, what's not to like?

Catherine de' Medici wants to know the future,

so she invites Nostradamus to court.

Nowadays, many people might think

that it's odd or quirky that Catherine de' Medici

would have hired an astrologer,

but actually this is a fairly common practice

among political leaders at this moment in time.

Catherine de' Medici invites Nostradamus

to provide a horoscope for her three children,

and he makes a chilling prediction:

that all three will ascend the throne.

This means that at least two of them would die.

This is a prediction with a sting in its tail.

Ultimately, this would come to pass.

But Nostradamus's most chilling prediction

revolves around Catherine's husband, Henry II.

So Henry II frequently would ask

for predictions from astrologers

about upcoming battles and tournaments,

but usually his courtiers would only share with him

favorable things.

However, several astrologers warned him

on the eve of his 40th birthday

about the possibility of a head injury.

Concerned, Catherine de' Medici

sent a message to Nostradamus to ask if this was true,

and he confirmed the warning.

Alarmed, she made it her mission to keep Henry safe,

and she managed to do so until 1559.

When Henry II is hosting a tournament

to celebrate a new peace treaty with Spain,

he's tragically killed in a freak accident jousting.

A lance went through his eye,

and Nostradamus predicted more or less

something similar to that.

In the wake of the tragedy,

members of the court immediately claim

that Nostradamus predicted the event in his 1559 almanac,

citing the verse, "The great one to be no more."

Later, people also link the king's death to quatrain 1.35

from "Les Propheties."

This quatrain will become

one of Nostradamus' most famous prophecies:

The young lion will overcome the older one

in a field of combat in a single fight.

He will pierce his eyes in their golden cage.

Two wounds in one, then he dies a cruel death.

What actually happens is

that a younger knight called Montgomery,

whose sigil is a lion, kills the king of France Henry,

whose sigil also features a lion, in a joust.

It's an accident during the joust

where basically the lance hits the helmet

and a shaft of wood, a splinter of wood,

goes through the visor and into the king's head,

and he languishes for a while before dying in agony.

All of this appears to make the prediction of Nostradamus

come true.

A lot of the horoscopes are written in such a way

that they suggest things that feel kind of concrete,

but there's always a vagueness to it.

And when we kind of read a horoscope,

we have something called confirmation bias,

which means if we believe that's true,

we wanna look for the evidence that supports it

and we negate the evidence that doesn't.

And so we start to kind of see a message in there

that's more personal what's really delivered.

And 10 people can look at the same horoscope and say,

"That's me."

Regardless of the clarity of the predictions,

or the possibility of coincidence,

after the death of Henry II,

Nostradamus' reputation as a seer of the future only grows

and so does his power within France.

In the wake of this tragedy,

she puts a lot of confidence in him.

She needs somebody to lean on right now,

he's that person.

Nostradamus is so important to Catherine

that one Spanish diplomat reports

that she actually places him in the same category

as the gospel writers.

I mean, at these times in Europe,

the rulers were waging war all the time.

There was all sorts of political machinations going on

of different people trying to accomplish different things.

And so if there's an individual

who can somehow interpret the stars

and give you information about something

that's a week away or a month away or a year away,

nobody wanted to be without that voice.

While his fame grows,

his life is coming to its natural end.

Nostradamus passes away on July 2nd

on the Feast of the Visitation of Notre-Dame,

Notre-Dame, his namesake,

which has led some people to suggest

that even in his death

there is some sort of connection to the divine,

some sort of meaning

that we can try to ascertain.

Nostradamus his laid to rest,

at his request, at Saint-Laurent,

a 13th-century church in Salon-de-Provence

in the south of France,

but even in his death,

his legacy as a prophet of doom only begins to grow.

Why?

Because it is a century of conflict, of darkness, of horror.

There are wars, there are revolutions.

The king of England is beheaded.

There's the great Plague of London,

the Great Fire of London.

There's the Thirty Years' War.

And through all of this, people turn to Nostradamus

to see what's going to happen next.

And one of the most harrowing events

linked to Nostradamus's predictions

was the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Fire sweeps through London

and nearly destroys the entire city.

And after the blaze, people turn to Nostradamus for answers

and they find them.

The blood of the just

will commit a fault at London,

burnt through lightning of twenty threes the six,

the ancient lady will fall from her high place,

several of the same sect will be killed.

He makes a reference to the ancient lady

who will fall from her high place,

and that's certainly how it felt to the people of London,

that their city, their sacred city,

had been consumed in flames.

Well over 200 years

after the prophet of doom's death,

he's still widely read in Europe,

especially in his native France,

but it is the events of the French Revolution

that will take his reputation to new heights,

and not just because of his predictions.

In 1789, the French Revolution explodes onto the scene,

and once again,

Nostradamus' predictions are at the forefront.

By this point in time,

his quatrains have ingratiated themselves

into French culture.

Both sides in the revolution point to Nostradamus

for predictions, for solace, for answers to what's going on.

But not everyone in Revolutionary France

celebrates Nostradamus.

The French Revolution becomes much more radical

than it had been before.

Groups like the Jacobins begin to dismantle what they see

as the vestiges of old France,

and Nostradamus becomes one of their targets.

A group of revolutionary soldiers deliberately went,

unearthed his bones, scattered them,

and desecrated his space

as a sign that they rejected his authority.

And then what happens?

Well, the story runs is that they are all dead the next day.

Now whether or not this story is true or not,

it kind of feeds into a growing myth

that surrounds Nostradamus,

that he is this magician, this prophesier

operating from the grave,

that he has magical powers, that he can inflict curses,

and it really does kind of build up his profile

as this rather supernatural figure.

As the French Revolution comes to an end,

another of Nostradamus' great predictions

seemingly comes to pass.

In 1799, Napoleon made his way to Paris,

and it's at this point that he ends the Revolution.

The French were very aware

of the prognostications of Nostradamus,

believed that this event was predicted in quatrain 1.60.

Near Italy, an emperor shall be born

who shall cost the empire a pretty pence.

Now, people have looked

at the birth of Napoleon Bonaparte in Corsica,

and his subsequent rise to becoming emperor of France.

And then of course,

the fact he expanded the empire massively,

but then it collapsed in on itself

with terrible consequences.

They've looked at that as being proof

that Nostradamus predicted the rise and fall of Napoleon.

And Napoleon will not be the last dictator

that people claim Nostradamus predicts will rise.

In the 1930s, as Hitler and the Nazi party rise to power,

many people point to quatrain 2.24

as evidence that Nostradamus had predicted it all along.

Beasts wild with hunger shall swim the rivers.

Most of the hosts shall move against Ister.

He'll have the great one dragged in iron cage

when the child the German Rhine surveys.

It should be noted that Ister is spelt Hister

in the early modern French,

which most scholars believe refers to the Danube River.

Now, Hitler was born in a town called Braunau am Inn,

which was on the river Inn, a tributary of the Danube River.

So this little known quatrain,

which nobody was talking about before,

now will forever be associated with Hitler.

While Nostradamus' predictions

about the rise of Hitler are startling,

what is equally horrifying

is how the Nazis would weaponize the seer's predictions

during the war.

The Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels,

alights on Nostradamus and his writings

as a way to prove that the Third Reich will succeed.

In March of 1940,

Joseph Goebbels commissions a pamphlet

which predicts the fall of France and Great Britain.

He has 83,000 copies of this pamphlet printed.

This is Nostradamus as a weapon of war.

But propaganda can only go so far.

And by 1945, the Nazis are the ones facing an apocalypse.

When Berlin is finally taken by the Allies,

they will find an old weathered copy

of Nostradamus's prophecies

among the books in Hitler's library.

As the world enters the unease of the Cold War era,

Nostradamus's great work continues to ring true

to many readers across the planet.

People are still finding supposed revelations

coming out of Nostradamus's work.

For example, quatrain 1.26 is interpreted

by many in the 1960s

as having predicted the assassinations of JFK and RFK.

And as the 20th century

turns to the 21st century,

Nostradamus's work will find a brand new import

with the people

as the events of September 11th, 2001 shock the planet.

But to those who read Nostradamus,

the events of this harrowing day was foretold

in the 16th century.

At 45 degrees, the sky will burn.

Fire to approach the great new city.

In an instant, a great scattered flame will leap up.

The fact that a 16th century astrologer's predictions

are still being used to explain modern-day events

shows that he's still regarded

as someone who had special access to knowledge,

whether it's spiritual in nature or other.

For centuries,

people looked to Nostradamus's words,

seeking answers, guidance, or even warnings of the future.

But was he truly a prophet

or simply a master of poetic ambiguity?

You can understand how cynics, how skeptics say

we are trying to basically straight jacket the facts

into this very flowery, weird language.

But of course, it gives Nostradamus enormous wiggle room

in our time for all sorts of things to be attributed to him.

Nostradamus predicts the end of the world in 3797,

and while some of his predictions have come true,

others haven't.

So it bears asking,

what makes this one the one that we should take seriously?

While Nostradamus uses the heavens

to chart humanity's path forward,

others are plagued by predictions of the future

from the darkest depths of hell.

It is the Second World War.

The Nazis have taken control

of what is now the nation of Czechia,

but buried deep in the primordial forests,

they'll establish a secret base in a place most foreboding:

Houska Castle,

the fortress with a reputation so malicious and sinister,

many believe it lies over the gateway to hell.

Houska Castle is a forbidding gothic castle

seemingly in the middle of nowhere,

and one theory is that it wasn't so much built

to repel invaders, an enemy from without,

but to deal with an enemy from within,

that there's something inside the castle

that had to be contained.

So the question is,

why were the Nazis so interested in this castle?

The early gothic castle

likely dates back to the reign of King Wenceslaus I

in the first in the first half of the 1200s.

Legend has it that before Houska Castle is built,

there is a bottomless pit

that locals believe may be a gateway to hell.

Supposedly home to evil creatures and winged demons,

the sights dark happenings

may even predate the local rise of Christianity.

You have this legend of pre-Christian human sacrifices.

On top of that, in the Christian period,

you have the idea of the castle and a gateway to hell.

You've then got occultist stories

and romantic writers from the 19th century

seeing scary visions,

all the way through to the Nazis.

So this is a castle that has been caked

in layers and layers of fear and legend,

making it a very foreboding place indeed.

The more people start to believe this,

the more I think we all start to feel it's something real.

One of the most terrifying legends

surrounding the site

dates back to before these stone walls were built.

The local baron gets fed up of the villagers

incessantly going on about devils and demons in this pit.

According to the legend,

many prisoners carrying a death sentence

were offered a pardon

if they were willing to be lowered down into the hole.

But many refused

because they were afraid of what was down there.

But some prisoners do agree to the terms,

and as the first volunteer is lowered into the pit,

a sense of intense dread grips them.

Within seconds,

terrified screams echo from the darkness below.

After a while, he's then hauled back up again,

and everybody is horrified at the site,

because this young criminal's hair has turned snow white.

He has become an old man in terror.

The legends surrounding Houska Castle

seem to be straight from a hellish nightmare.

There are reports of half-human half-animal creatures

crawling out of it.

There are reports of black-winged demon-like creatures.

This is a site that fills the people who go to it

with intense dread.

There has been a history of terrible things happening.

I think that creates an energy

that pulls negativity towards it.

According to local tradition,

authorities decided to build Houska Castle

to trap whatever evil resides in the pit within its walls.

Locals believe that the evil emanating from this pit

could only be defeated by the grace of God.

So according to the story,

King Wenceslaus I built Houska Castle

directly over top of this pit

and put the chapel of the castle right over the pit.

The chapel itself was dedicated to the Archangel Michael,

who, of course, is famous for leading God's armies

against Lucifer and his fallen angels.

But there are other scenes

written on the walls of Houska Castle

that baffle experts to their true meaning.

There are these images

depicting these centaur-like creatures,

half-human half-horse,

that are aiming bows and arrows at humans.

The centaur creature

holds the bow in his left hand,

a trusted sign of the time of its connection to Satan.

In Christian folklore,

there is something about favoring the left

as opposed to the right

that carries some signification of evil.

This belief is carried in the language

that we continue to use today.

The word sinister derives from the Latin word

for on the left.

Houska Castle's already alarming reputation

grows when in the 17th century

an infamous mercenary takes up residence.

Oronto was a Swedish mercenary

during the Thirty Years' War.

He engaged in black magic practices

in a way which was selfish

and about personal aggrandizement.

By all accounts,

Oronto is in search of immortality,

and he will do whatever it takes to acquire this power,

be it blood magic or human sacrifice.

But what draws Oronto to Houska Castle

for his demonic works?

There's like this layered history of a lot of negativity,

a lot of folklore, a lot of stories

around terrible things that have happened.

I think that people approach the place like that.

You go and you actually try to activate its negativity.

This Swedish mercenary, who's journeyed from afar,

is attracted to this castle,

and he believes that it's a place

where he can conduct alchemical experiments

to find the secret of eternal life,

shows that the reputation of this castle was well-known.

But Oronto's reign of terror

will be short-lived.

There's a notable irony in this story,

because in his search for immortality

and in the hatred and antagonism

that he had generated amongst the locals,

he's shot and killed by one of them.

So the irony there being his search for immortality

leads very swiftly to his death.

As the centuries progress,

Houska Castle falls into disrepair

and dark clouds swirl about the castle

and its demonic reputation.

Then in 1836, the foreboding castle plays host

to a young poet,

an evening that cements its infamous reputation.

In the early 19th century,

there is this Czech poet named Macha,

and he is part of this burgeoning literary movement

in Europe known as Romanticism.

This is a cultural movement

that is associated with a desire to return

to kinds of natural settings that have been untainted

by the taming hand of industrialization

and the spreading of cities

into countryside and wild spaces.

They're kind of trying to reach back

into what they imagine the past was like.

So they play with what perceive to be ancient beliefs

and old mythologies,

and they look for magical spaces.

And somewhere like Houska Castle,

with its gothic appearance,

is something that appeals enormously.

So Macha stays at Houska Castle,

and while he's there,

he has a vision, a kind of dream vision.

Macha expresses these visions

in a letter to a friend, English poet Edward Hindle.

Within the pages of his letter,

he describes a dream, or rather, a hellish vision

that he had while he slept

within the walls of Houska Castle.

He reports as having traveled forward in time:

he finds himself in this thoroughly mechanized,

industrialized city.

It's dirty, it's noisy,

and for him, it's an absolute dystopian nightmare.

It's a vision of hell.

Regardless of the veracity of Macha's visions,

the young poet dies shortly after his visit to the castle.

This only builds on the castle's already vile reputation

with the locals,

but the infamy of Houska Castle continues to grow

in the 20th century.

According to legend, Heinrich Himmler,

who did indeed have an obsession with the occult,

went to Houska Castle

and used it as a place to conduct dark rituals

for his inner SS circle.

Locals report hearing strange sounds and seeing

lights.

Rumors swirl

that several high ranking Nazi officials

are conducting dark rituals,

allegedly attempting to harness the powers of hell itself.

When they left, they destroyed all evidence

of whatever it is that occurred there.

So it remains one of these mysteries.

Houska Castle stands to this day

as a baffling enigma

that both tantalizes and terrorizes potential visitors,

a hotspot for tourists visiting Czechia

looking to experience its dark energies.

While Houska Castle inspires the terror of hell,

there are places where the divine hands of the heavens

touch humanity in miraculous ways.

In the heart of Italy, nearly eight centuries ago,

an extraordinary event unfolds

that continues to captivate believers and skeptics alike,

the stigmata of Saint Francis of Assisi,

a miraculous occurrence

that inspires awe, devotion, and ongoing debate.

In 1224 on Mount Verna,

Francis of Assisi is praying

when he sees visions of angels

bearing the scars, the stigmata of Christ appear.

And after this vision, he sees on himself the stigmata,

the signs of Jesus Christ, on his own hands and feet.

Francis might have been the first recorded

example of the stigmata.

This is a novel phenomenon.

We don't have any examples earlier than that.

The stigmata of Saint Francis

is one of the most powerful images in Christian iconography.

To Saint Francis and his followers,

this is a clear sign that he has been selected by God

to save the Church from corruption.

Francis of Assisi,

likely born in 1181 to a wealthy merchant family,

grows up in a world shaped by war, famine, and poverty.

Much of what we know about Francis' early life

come from biographies written by his followers,

which follow a hagiographic tradition.

Francis is described in these biographies

as a fun-loving man in his youth,

someone who liked to sing, liked to dance,

someone who you could almost associate

with the troubadour tradition.

The troubadour tradition

was essentially a form of traveling entertainment.

Troubadour were story-tellers,

they were musicians,

and they performed at courts across Europe.

But a chance encounter

with a man suffering from leprosy

will forever change Francis's life.

Now, traditionally, people would stay away from lepers

for fear of catching leprosy,

and that was Francis's initial instinct.

But something in him changed, shifted,

and he approached the leper.

He seemed to be overcome with an inner passion,

and he went over to the man and he embraced him.

This shocking incident is a turning point for Francis

because it sets him on the path towards a spiritual life.

In his testament, Francis writes,

"When I was in sin,

the sight of lepers nauseated me beyond measure.

But then God himself led me into their company,

and I had pity on them.

When I had once become acquainted with them,

what had previously nauseated me

became a source of physical consolation for me.

After that, I did not wait long before leaving the world."

He is seeing someone who is opposite himself.

So he comes from great privilege,

and he's engaging with someone who doesn't have that.

He comes from security,

and he's engaging with someone who doesn't have that.

In the aftermath of that moment,

God speaks to him and asks him to rebuild his church.

Francis's life takes on a whole new mission.

Soon after his experience with the leper,

Francis dresses in humble clothes

and attempts to give his family fortune

to the Church and the poor.

This turn to piety troubled his wealthy father.

While his father might think it's madness,

what's happened is that he's in the process of developing

a model of a new Christian life for himself

that emphasized the imitation of Christ himself.

Christ was a poor man, a wandering preacher.

He said that poverty

was the natural state of the good Christian.

His father drags him into the Church court

and brings him before the bishop

to complain about what his son is doing.

Shockingly, before the bishop,

Francis strips off all of his clothes

and hands them to his father, saying,

"Before you were my father on earth,

henceforth our father art in heaven."

For people who knew Francis before the conversion,

they're wondering, "Has he gone truly mad

or has he really been touched by God?"

Francis dedicates his life

to serving the poor and the Church.

His work makes him famous,

and by 1210, he gathers enough followers

to create his own monastic order, the Franciscans.

The Franciscans are committed to poverty, service,

and finding God through good works.

The Franciscans were neither monk nor priest.

They were something in between.

Rather than sealing themselves off from the world

the way monks, traditional monks would,

they lived amongst the people.

Francis, through his own new model of ministry,

was essentially rejecting the opulence

of the Church at the time.

At the time in which he lived,

the Catholic Church had reached arguably

its apogee of power.

In the years that follow, Francis is credited

with doing all sorts of miraculous things.

He supposedly talks to animals, he heals the sick.

These are all very much tropes of the hagiographic system.

Hagiography is the telling of saints' lives,

and Francis's life story, his vita,

follows that same tradition which is hundreds of years old.

While the documented miracles

and works of Saint Francis are many,

it is the events of 1224

that will forever mark him and his order

with the deeper mysteries of the Christian faith.

While on Mount Verna,

Francis sees the vision of a six-winged seraph

carrying the crucified Jesus.

And at that moment,

he experiences such an intense amount of pain

looking down and seeing the wounds of Christ,

the stigmata, on his own body.

The stigmata, for Francis, is a personal prophecy.

It's a sign for him that he has been chosen by God

to build God's church on earth.

Yet despite the awe surrounding this event,

some doubt the authenticity of the stigmata,

Although there are detractors at the time

who suggest that it was all for publicity, in essence,

to elevate his brand new order,

or at the very least that people

are experiencing some form of psychosomatic symptoms.

For Francis, it is a powerful, reflective moment

of his own connection to the divine.

Whether seen as a miraculous event or not,

the stigmata of Saint Francis

holds deep prophetic significance.

Prophecy is also a key feature of Saint Francis's story.

Two years off the receiving the stigmata,

and on his deathbed, Francis calls around his followers

and he shares his prophecy

that the darker forces at play

would seek to divide and trouble the Christian community.

Now, did any of these come true?

Well, in the early 16th century,

the Christian community was bloodily divided

between Protestants and Catholics,

and that played out in a series of battles and wars.

So you could say yes, indeed,

his prophecies did materialize.

Are his predictions still influential?

For some people, yes.

They see in Francis a prophet,

a harbinger of spiritual renewal,

and they're looking for signs in his words

that it's time for a new age.

There's a certain degree of irony in this,

because Francis in his own time was a rebel himself.

His new mendicant order of Franciscans

was nothing that the Christian world had ever seen before,

and he flirted right on the edge

of what might have been considered heretical.

The fact that Francis then becomes

still a standard bearer of orthodoxy

is interesting to say the least.

Eight centuries later,

pilgrims still climb the rugged path to Mount La Verna,

seeking a connection to this extraordinary account

of when divine mystery touched human flesh.

From the stigmata of Saint Francis

to the cryptic quatrains of Nostradamus

and the haunting visions of Macha,

these historical accounts

have captivated minds across centuries.

Whether these men were in fact touched

by other worldly insights,

or simply channeled the imagination into compelling tales,

their legacies stoke our lingering doubts

and most profound wonders

about what might exist beyond the veil of perception.