Pop Culture References of Wizard101: Polaris – Nostradonimus

Nostradonimus – Nostradamus
https://wiki.wizard101central.com/wiki/NPC:Nostradonimus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostradamus

Thank you to Ashley D. for this one.

Nostradonimus is a “Pingouin Prognosticator.” Wizards first encounter him during the quest The One Who Sees, while investigating what is happening to the Pingouins imprisoned in Urville Station.

Nostradonimus has foreseen the End of the Spiral and that your wizard wants to change their name. Not all of his predictions come true but he has foreseen that his son César is in danger of losing his Clementine.

Michel de Nostredame (December 1503 – July 1566), usually Latinised as Nostradamus, was a French astrologer, apothecary, physician, and reputed seer, who is best known for his book Les Prophéties (published in 1555), a collection of 942 poetic quatrains allegedly predicting future events.

Nostradamus’s father’s family had originally been Jewish, but had converted to Catholic Christianity a generation before Nostradamus was born. He studied at the University of Avignon, but was forced to leave after just over a year when the university closed due to an outbreak of the plague. He worked as an apothecary for several years before entering the University of Montpellier, hoping to earn a doctorate, but was almost immediately expelled after his work as an apothecary (a manual trade forbidden by university statutes) was discovered. He first married in 1531, but his wife and two children died in 1534 during another plague outbreak. He worked against the plague alongside other doctors before remarrying to Anne Ponsarde, with whom he had six children. He wrote an almanac for 1550 and, as a result of its success, continued writing them for future years as he began working as an astrologer for various wealthy patrons. Catherine de’ Medici became one of his foremost supporters. His Les Prophéties, published in 1555, relied heavily on historical and literary precedent, and initially received mixed reception. He suffered from severe gout toward the end of his life, which eventually developed into edema. He died on 1 or 2 July 1566. Many popular authors have retold apocryphal legends about his life.

In the years since the publication of his Les Prophéties, Nostradamus has attracted many supporters, who, along with some of the popular press, credit him with having accurately predicted many major world events. Academic sources reject the notion that Nostradamus had any genuine supernatural prophetic abilities and maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus’s quatrains are the result of (sometimes deliberate) misinterpretations or mistranslations. These academics also argue that Nostradamus’s predictions are characteristically vague, meaning they could be applied to virtually anything, and are useless for determining whether their author had any real prophetic powers.

Many of Nostradamus’s supporters believe his prophecies are genuine. Owing to the subjective nature of these interpretations, no two of them completely agree on what Nostradamus predicted, whether for the past or for the future. Many supporters do agree, for example, that he predicted the Great Fire of London, the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon and of Adolf Hitler, both world wars, and the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Popular authors frequently claim that he predicted whatever major event had just happened at the time of each of their books’ publication, such as the Apollo Moon landing in 1969, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.

The current list of all the (known) Polaris references can be found here.

Although I am well versed in Pop Culture references but I do not claim to have caught them all. Let me know your favorites in the comments and if I’ve missed one you caught, let me know so I can add it to the list.

Text for this article is excerpted from the linked wiki pages

Nostradonimus image is from Wizard101, and is copyright of KingsIsle Entertainment

Nostradamus images are borrowed from Wikipedia. They are in the public domain

Image usage qualifies as fair use under US copyright law.