Prophezeiungen : Alter Aberglaube oder neue Wahrheit?

"Prophezeiungen" by Max Kemmerich is a scientific study written in the early 20th century. It contends that genuine prophecy—particularly precognition—exists and can be established as knowledge rather than belief by combining rigorously vetted historical cases with probability theory. Framed as a challenge to Enlightenment overreach and materialist dogma, it promises a sober, critical examination of famous prophecies and modern premonitions to argue for a real faculty of “temporal far-seeing.” The opening of this work lays out a manifesto: the author, once a skeptic, now seeks to prove the reality of precognition, not to chronicle all prophecies or boost fortune-tellers. He urges disciplined doubt, insists facts override theory, anticipates scorn, and explains his method—amassing verifiable cases and testing them against chance via the calculus of probability—while distancing himself from church dogma, occultism, and debates on free will. He describes how historical encounters (e.g., imperial horoscopes and presentiments) drew him into the inquiry and why he publishes for a broad audience to prevent scholarly neglect. The first chapter then begins with non-religious examples: cautiously treating biblical material, it highlights specific Jewish prophecies about exile, dispersion, and return; dismisses late New Testament timelines; questions hagiographic sources; and turns to antiquity—showing that not all oracles were equivocal (citing Thucydides on the plague and the Pythia’s trance), recounting omens around Caesar’s death, and introducing well-attested “true dreams” from modern witnesses and himself to foreground veridical premonitions as the central phenomenon to be demonstrated. (This is an automatically generated summary.)