"St. Malachy and the Prophecy of the Popes" / OCCULT READS PRESENTS: "Apocalypse Not: A History Of The End Of Time"
November 3
St. Malachy and the Prophecy of the Popes
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On the night of November 2, 1148, at
the Abbey of Clairvaux
in France, a sick Irish archbishop died in the arms of Bernard, the most famous abbot
in Europe. Bernard loved him and wrote a long, affectionate
biography of the man, full of reforms, journeys, and miracles. It contains no
list of future popes. Four hundred and forty-seven years later, in 1595, a list
of 112 cryptic Latin phrases appeared in print under the dead archbishop's
name, said to describe every pope from his own day until the end of the world.
The archbishop was St. Malachy, his feast day is today, and
the list has had a much stranger afterlife than he did…
Máel Máedóc Ua Morgair, known in Latin as “Malachy,” was born in Armagh in 1094 and became its archbishop in 1132. He was a reformer, remembered above all for helping bring the Roman liturgy into Ireland. A journey to Rome in 1139 to petition for the pallia, the woolen bands that symbolized an archbishop’s authority, took him through Clairvaux and began his friendship with Bernard, and a second journey in 1148, undertaken for the same purpose, ended when he fell ill at Clairvaux and died on All Souls’ Day. He was canonized in 1190, the first native-born Irish saint formally recognized by Rome. His feast falls on November 3rd, reportedly so that it would not collide with the commemoration of the dead the day before, which is why a man later cast as the prophet of the end of the world is remembered the morning after the Church prays for everyone who has already died.
The prophecy itself
is a list of 112 short Latin mottoes, beginning with Celestine II, elected in
1143, each supposedly describing a pope in order, and ending with a longer
passage about a final pontiff called Peter the Roman, who will feed his sheep
amid many tribulations, after which the city of seven hills will be destroyed
and the dread Judge will judge his people. The Benedictine Arnold Wion first printed it
in 1595 in a history of his order, noting that it had not, to his knowledge,
been published before. The story attached to it holds that Malachy handed the
vision to Pope Innocent II during that 1139 visit to Rome and that it then lay
forgotten in the archives for centuries. Bernard, who wrote Malachy’s biography
and carefully recorded his miracles, never mentions it.
The evidence for forgery lies in the pattern of the hits. The mottoes for popes up to about 1590 fit remarkably well, matching birthplaces, family names, coats of arms, and pre-papal titles. The first, Ex castro Tiberis, “from a castle on the Tiber,” suits Celestine II, who was born in Città di Castello. After 1590, the fit collapses into strain. Clement XIII is called Rosa Umbriae, “the rose of Umbria,” though he had no connection to Umbria, and Clement XIV is labeled Ursus velox, “the swift bear,” though he was by all accounts slow and indecisive. Wion’s text also tracks a 1557 history of the popes by Onofrio Panvinio closely enough to repeat Panvinio's errors, which suggests the list was built from that book. Catholic reference works themselves call the prophecy a sixteenth-century forgery. A small minority of defenders still argue for its authenticity, and the historians’ verdict on the document does not touch the saint's own reputation.
Even the popular debunking story
turns out to be tidier than the evidence. The usual explanation, associated
with the Jesuit Claude-François
Menestrier, is that the list was concocted for the 1590 conclave to
boost Cardinal Girolamo Simoncelli
of Orvieto. The motto assigned to the pope after Urban VII is Ex
antiquitate Urbis, “from the old city,” and Orvieto's Latin name, Urbs
Vetus, means exactly that. Simoncelli was not elected—but a
reference to the prophecy in a 1587 letter predates that conclave and
complicates the neat campaign-pamphlet theory. The consensus that the document
is a forgery is strong. Who wrote it, when, and why is murkier than most
retellings admit…
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All of which came back into the headlines in 2025. On the usual count, Benedict XVI corresponds to the second-to-last motto, Gloria olivae, “the glory of the olive,” which, on that count, made his successor the fated Peter the Roman. Enthusiasts made the case for Francis, the Argentine son of Italian immigrants, by pointing out that the father of St. Francis of Assisi was named Pietro. Francis died on April 21, 2025. On May 8, the conclave elected Robert Prevost, Leo XIV, the first American-born pope, and Rome remained standing. The response was predictable. Some interpreters now read the final passage as a separate sentence implying more popes before Peter the Roman, and at least one has proposed revising the list to leave room for two more after Leo. A prophecy that survives its own failed ending by recounting is behaving exactly as the genre always has.
As Modern Occultist noted on
October 11th, John XXIII opened Vatican II
by dismissing the prophets of doom, and the Malachy list is among
the best known of the prophecies of doom that have trailed the papacy ever
since. The saint himself is far better remembered for what Bernard recorded: a
reformer whose last journey was a mission to win Rome's recognition for the
Irish church, and who died along the way. No end of the world was required.
Peter the Roman is running late, and the odds are very good that he is not
coming.
Apocalypse Not: A History Of
The End Of Time
By
John Michael Greer | Aeon Books
Today, in honor of a prophecy that
keeps outliving its own ending, we’re recommending a book about the habit of
mind that keeps producing prophecies like it.
John Michael Greer’s Apocalypse
Not: A History of the End of Time, first published in 2011 and now
available in a revised second edition from Aeon Books, traces what Greer calls
the apocalypse meme, the set of false beliefs that leads people to pile their
hopes and fears on the imminent end of everything. Its six chapters run from
the meme's earliest roots through the crucible of ancient Judaism, the long
Christian wait for the Antichrist, the waning of theology, and the secular and
pseudo-scientific end-times of the modern era, closing with a chapter titled “The
End That Wasn't.”
What makes it a fitting companion to
today’s post is Greer’s insistence that the pattern, not any particular prophet
or date, is the thing that repeats. His section on Nostradamus, a
sixteenth-century figure from the same era as the forgery this post describes,
makes the case in miniature: quatrains so obscure and so free of inconvenient
dates that every generation of would-be interpreters can find itself in them,
while the few dated predictions Nostradamus actually made have fared no better
than usual. That is very close to what we see with the Malachy list, where the
pre-publication hits are retrodiction and the later ones are stretched to fit.
Greer does not discuss Malachy’s list
itself, so readers hoping for a treatment of the Prophecy of the Popes won’t
find one here—but for readers who finished today’s post wondering why a failed
prophecy gets recalculated instead of retired, Greer’s book is the most well
thought-out and direct answer we have.
(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and your "Daily Occult Review" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today’s many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we’ll bring the best stories and latest trends to today’s own modern occultists everywhere.)
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