Prophesy is an interesting concept. It's supposed to be proto-scientific, as though prophets had a model of how things work, so they can predict how a system like history will unfold.

But I think prophesy is much more like the art of ranting against mainstream society. It's a neo-shamanic activity for mentally ill or "gifted," creative outsiders. Nietzsche was perhaps a secular prophet.

Scientific predictions can be falsified, whereas artistic visions can't be, and we shouldn't evaluate art as philistines, reducing poetry or transcendental metaphors to empirical models.

That would be the start of my take on it, anyway.