Mario Reading
Translator and interpreter of the seer Nostradamus who wrote an Antichrist Trilogy of thrillers
MARIO READING, the writer who has died aged 63, was a noted translator and interpreter of the prophecies of Nostradamus; he also took the seer’s work as the inspiration for the Antichrist Trilogy, a series of bestselling thrillers written in the spirit, though mercifully not the style, of Dan Brown.
A student of medieval French, Reading published his own translations of all the surviving verses that Nostradamus (1503-66) had supposedly dictated to his secretary while, high on hallucinogenic nutmeg, he observed visions of the future in basins of ink-blackened water.
With characteristic bullishness Reading declared that he wanted to provide his readers with analysis more accurate than “the usual predigested pap promulgated by a plethora of not entirely disinterested eschatologists”.
But if his interpretations of Nostradamus’s opaque prophecies were less sensationalist than some, Reading knew how to put a newsworthy spin on them. He prefaced his first collection of translations, Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies of the Future (2006), with a warning to President Bush that the work indicated a world leader was due to be assassinated in the next couple of years.
Reading received welcome publicity when he told the British press that the CIA had insisted he omit this detail from the American edition of the book, so as not to give “nutters” any ideas. In subsequent editions he declared that the prophecy had in fact been referring to Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007.
He claimed that Nostradamus had foreseen everything from the execution of Charles I to the collapse of the Twin Towers (“In the roadway, hollow mountains / They will be seized, and plunged into the sewers”). The seer also apparently predicted that King Charles III will abdicate in 2022 owing to the unpopularity of his wife, and the throne will pass to Prince Harry.
Those dismayed by the idea of such a turn of events can take comfort in the fact that Reading confidently predicted (based on Nostradamus’s assertion that “The masculine woman will exert herself to the north / She will annoy nearly all of Europe and the rest of the world”) that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 presidential election.
According to Reading’s exegesis, Nostradamus also foresaw that England will leave the EU in 2060, causing a rift with Scotland; that a third Antichrist (the previous two having been identified as Napoleon and Hitler) will cause a global war in 2070; and that the world will end in 7074. When Reading’s publishers complained that his books were on the gloomy side, he anthologised some of Nostradamus’s more optimistic predictions in Nostradamus: The Good News (2007).
Reading’s tongue may have often been in his cheek, but he was alive to the numinous aspect of Nostradamus’s writings. He was a spiritual man, having had what he called “a direct experience of God” when he was suffering from cancer in the 1990s and had been given only weeks to live.
In a moving article for The Spectator in 2015, Reading described his decades of battling cancer. He was told he had the disease in his thirties following years of misdiagnosis during which he had endured terrible pain. “I nearly wept with relief. At last! I might be dying, but I finally knew what I was dying of.”
He was living in France at the time and although he was told the condition was terminal, his French doctors eventually cured him. But some years later, aged 47, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. He faced the years of abortive remissions and failure of new treatments with stoicism: “Most of the time the cancer and I have a pragmatic stand-off. It knows it will kill me. I know it will kill me. But it’s all a matter of time.”
Reading yearned to be a novelist and, with enormous dedication, devoted much of his time to this ambition, despite his poor health, the indifference of publishers, and the loss of much of his money in the Lloyd’s collapse. His first published novel, The Music Makers (2001), about a man who reassesses his life after suffering from cancer, attracted little attention.
A devotee of crime fiction, he eventually came up with the idea for the Antichrist Trilogy, in which Adam Sabir, a struggling writer, has to find and decipher Nostradamus’s lost prophecies in order to uncover the identity of the Third Antichrist and save the world. The three volumes – The Nostradamus Prophecies (2009), The Mayan Codex (2010) and The Third Antichrist (2011) – were big sellers worldwide.
The Templar Prophecy (2013), The Templar Inheritance (2015) and The Templar Succession (2016), a trilogy featuring an intrepid photojournalist who discovers he is descended from one of the Knights Templar, also sold well. Reading relished his success the more because it had come late and in the shadow of mortal illness.
Despite his ill health Reading, a burly, attractive man who talked frankly about his illnesses but never indulged in self-pity, gave the impression to those who met him of being as strong as an ox.
Mario Gilbert Priester-Reading was born on August 10 1953 in Bournemouth to an English father and German mother of noble descent. The family lived in Britain until Mario was eight and then moved to the South of France; later he recalled that Nostradamus was a totemic figure in the area, with a number of statues and monuments dedicated to him. The formative influence of this period was his father’s sybaritic lifestyle, which entailed many visits to the casinos of the Riviera and inspired in Mario a lifelong interest in worldly pleasures.
Although he regarded France as his home he was educated at various English schools including Rugby. An able linguist, he went to study Comparative Literature at the University of East Anglia under Angus Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury. But he gave up the course after two years when he was offered a berth in a cargo ship sailing to Africa.
He taught riding in Cape Town and hinted years later that he had fought in the Rhodesian Bush War. A legacy from his grandfather allowed him to spend his time travelling as he pleased and he went on to study dressage in Vienna and played polo in India, France and Dubai before going on to run a polo stables in Gloucestershire.
Later on he travelled to Mexico, where he married Claudia Fautsch Fernandez in 1995 and helped to run her coffee plantation. While living in Mexico he met a retired American soldier who told him a story about having been made to poison schoolchildren when he was in the Green Berets during the Vietnam War, and begged Reading to publicise it shortly before committing suicide.
Reading investigated and published an article on the topic in the Sunday Times in 2000; as a consequence, he claimed, the CIA later interfered with the publication of his books in America.
For the sake of better health care he returned with his wife to Britain, and settled in Wiltshire. He relished country sports and became a beater for the Fonthill shoot. He raised money to restore the local church by giving performances as Samuel Pepys.
He loved music and film, and was the author of the Dictionary of the Cinema (2001) and The Movie Companion (2006), as well as The Watkins Dictionary of Dreams (2007).
Mario Reading is survived by his wife and by a son from an earlier marriage.
Mario Reading, born August 10 1953, died January 29 2017