The riddle of Dumézil

This is a curious book with an even more curious foreword. Georges Dumézil was an important French scholar of comparative religion and mythology, for a while based in Sweden. He is most known for his analysis of the similarities between Norse mythology and Vedic religion. Dumézil, a self-described "Man of the Right", was also intensely controversial due to his past as a member of the fascist group Action Francaise.

"The Riddle of Nostradamus" contains "A Nostradamian Farce" (sic), written in the form of a dialogue between a youthful Dumézil, Monsieur Espopondie, Monsieur Lesculas and some other interlocutors. Apparently, all characters in the dialogue are based on real people. Thus, Espopondie is Dumézil's erstwhile scholarly mentor, Claude-Eugène Maitre, the Orientalist who "discovered" the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Lesculas is actually Pierre Gaxotte, a former secretary of Charles Maurras, the leader of Action Francaise. The Nostradamian dialogue has an appendix dealing with a very different subject matter, the last words of Socrates.

In the dialogue, Espopondie reaches the conclusion that the famed French seer Nostradamus really could predict the future. For instance, he predicted the arrest and execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette during the French revolution, the Northern war between Peter the Great and Swedish king Charles XII, and a few other events. The participants in the dialogue then discuss how prophecy is at all possible in a supposedly naturalist universe. One interlocutor reaches the conclusion that God actually exists, while other speculate about telepathy and other paranormal phenomena. It's not clear whether Dumézil is merely reporting the speculations of Maitre, or whether Maitre's alter ego Espopondie is really the mouth piece of Dumézil himself.

Nor is the foreword, written by one Gregory Nagy, very helpful. Quite the contrary. Nagy claims, without giving any examples, that the dialogue is really about far right politics, Freemasonry and homosexuality! He also quotes Michel Foucault, who likewise claimed that "The Riddle of Nostradamus" was about homosexuality. If so, both I and the two other reviewers missed it. Apparently, it's all "coded"...

Yeah, maybe. However, here's another plausible explanation: Dumézil's admirers simply can't stomach that the great scholar believed in the paranormal and researched the quatrains of Nostradamus (hardly a respectable academic subject). Indeed, maybe this hostility explains why Dumézil wrote about his Nostradamian studies in the form of a "farce"! It's easier to pretend that this revolutionary text is really about Action Francaise or homosexual subcultures. Note also that Foucault, that old postmodernist huckster, is quoted as an authority. These reactions to Dumézil's thesis might be the real "riddle". Or farce.

Despite being somewhat heavy at times, I recommend this work to all truth-seekers, since it seems to be one of the few non-sensationalist works on Nostradamus out there...