DOLORES CANNON is a past-life regression therapist who channels messages from Nostradamus, the 16th-century French prophet and astrologer. She was in Hong Kong a couple of weeks ago giving lectures and workshops, which was convenient timing because I had an urgent question to ask her. Nostradamus predicted the world will end this month, July 1999, so let's forget about the millennium: is there any point in planning anything for the second half of the year? 'Every time I give a lecture people bring up that prediction,' said Cannon, with a sigh. 'In more than a thousand quatrains, Nostradamus only gives an exact date in two. One was about the Black Plague, the other is the famous one about July 1999, the seventh month of 1999. It says the King of Terror will return from the skies and people think a comet will come and hit the earth, but I've been telling everyone it refers to war. I was thinking it might refer to Kosovo. It's a very traumatic prediction.' And thunder, truly, smote the filthy air over Causeway Bay. It was a suitably sulphurous morning to be discussing such matters but comfort could be taken from the fact that the door of the Reflections bookshop in Jardine's Bazaar, where we sat, bore a sticker which proclaimed 'Protected By Angels'. Also, Cannon is such a reassuring, maternal presence (she is 68 and has four children, 11 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren), with her enfolding, buttery Arkansas accent, it was difficult to feel a hideous chill enter the soul - unless you count the room's air-conditioning which, naturally, was ferocious. 'I'll soon go back to a past life as an Eskimo,' grumbled Cannon at one point which showed a sense of humour.
Not that there are too many laughs in her job. People get twitchy about the grim tidings she passes on. 'When they're angry I say, I didn't predict this, I'm the reporter. If you knew about these things would you sit on it or feel obligated to tell people? Especially as Nostradamus says mankind can change the future. That's where I come in.' Thirty years ago, Cannon and her husband, Johnny, who was in the United States Navy, became interested in hypnosis. One day, a doctor on their base in Texas asked them to relax a woman who had an eating disorder. 'And she went back to another lifetime in 1920s' Chicago, it was totally unexpected. She went through five different lifetimes. Wow! We thought this was an exciting way to learn about history.' Then Johnny was paralysed in an accident 'and a lot of people said that was a punishment because we were fooling around with something we shouldn't'.
The family moved to Arkansas because it was cheap. Johnny understandably lost all interest in such experiments but his wife kept going, practising on family and friends. She delved into eight of her own past lives ('I was at the burning of the library at Alexandria, people think I'm trying to recapture all that knowledge now') and then in 1986, she encountered Nostradamus. 'I did a past-life regression with a woman who was one of his students in France and she suddenly said, 'He wants to speak to you.' I was startled - you're talking to that person in that life, not to people at the scene - but she started repeating what he was saying. He said he was looking for a link to the future, his prophesies were not being correctly interpreted.' It seemed to me a bit rum that the great seer should select as his disciple a woman from Arkansas who doesn't speak French. How did they communicate? 'In English. He said, 'Okay, I will be patient if you butcher the language.' He said our vibrations were compatible, like on a radio station.' Actually, she makes him sound rather irascible (he worked himself up into a tantrum, for instance, over the previous Nostradamus expert, Erika Cheetham, who apparently got everything wrong - 'He'd say to me, 'Where is her intellect?' ') but together they whizzed through the symbols and anagrams of the quatrains at the superhuman rate of 30 an hour.
'He said I should concentrate on the next 20 years from the 1980s, that it was a very important time period. The main thing is the possibility of World War III and he talks about the three Antichrists - Napoleon, Hitler and the one who is to come.' Is the third one born yet? 'Yes. He was born on February 4, 1962 in Jerusalem but he's not Jewish, he's Arabic. His name is the anagram RAYPOZ.' Cannon produced Volume II of her book Conversations With Nostradamus and turned to a picture of a man entitled, somewhat prosaically: 'A drawing of the Antichrist created from a Police Department composite kit.' I peered at it for a while but didn't feel I'd pick him out of a line-up. Later that day, I asked my esteemed cyber colleague Steven Lewis to do a birthday match on the Internet and he came up with the country singer Clint Black which, when you think about it, is a pretty sinister sort of name. Even more spooky, however, is the fact that Dan Quayle was also born on February 4 15 years earlier - and 1 plus 5 is 6 which, as everyone knows, is a diabolical digit.
'Okay, you wanted to know about the end of the world,' Cannon went on, chattily. 'There's a possibility of an earth shift, tectonic plates moving, continents rising and splitting apart.' I suppose a geologist wouldn't disagree with this prognosis - it's all a matter of degree - but it sounded pretty impressive. 'The thing I have to tell people is that you can change the future, Nostradamus gave us the worst-case scenarios. The future is not set in stone.' But what about the Antichrist? 'We have to get through his time, it has to balance out the time of Christ, and then there will be a thousand years of peace, a wonderful time we can't imagine. I believe in mankind. Mankind is a survivor.' I was still concerned about this July business though. Couldn't Cannon (and how horribly apt her name suddenly sounded; 'Dolores', meaning sorrows, attached to an instrument of war) warn Bill Clinton, a fellow citizen of Arkansas, after all, about Kosovo which Nostradamus refers to as 'the grey area of Europe'? Cannon merely rolled her eyes in a worrying fashion as if to say too late. Dear oh dear ... But then I asked her what she planned to do on her first trip to Hong Kong. And, no word of a lie, she replied she was starting her Christmas shopping the following day.
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