The Georgia Guidestones

Sometimes the strange and interesting monuments of the world are not the ancient ones.  In fact, some of them are very modern.  One of these sites is that of the Georgia Guidestones, a large, stone monument carved with instructions on how to run the world once the apocalypse has come and gone.  Located in Elbert County, Georgia, they’re almost like a set of ten commandments of the next age.

The Guidestones have a brief and mysterious history.  There where commissioned one day in June of 1979 by an anonymous person calling himself by the pseudonym R.C. Christian. The following year in March, they were raised. Other than that, and a little information placed nearby the stones, not much else is known.

There are four stones to the site along with a central capstone.  The structure is nearly 20 feet tall and each of the stones is carved on both the front and back.  The carving for each side of each stone is the same - an inscription detailing ten rules to live by.  The only difference is that each side is in a different language.  Languages represented on the stones are Arabic, Chinese, English, Hebrew, Hindi, Russian, Spanish and Swahili.

The rules, as explained in the English version, are as follows:

• Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

• Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.

• Unite humanity with a living new language.

• Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.

• Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.

• Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.

• Avoid petty laws and useless officials.

• Balance personal rights with social duties.

• Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.

• Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

There’s also an accompanying stone that explains a bit about the Guidestones.  It tells what languages were used and some basic facts about the stones, such as their dimensions and when they were raised.

One aspect of the stones is that they were built with many astronomical principles in mind.  There’s a hole that the North Star can be seen through no matter the time of year, the stones are aligned with the equinoxes and solstices, and they follow a number of other celestial patterns popular in monument-building throughout the ages.

Due to these stones not being thousands of years old, they have tended to raise the hackles of many conspiracy theorists.  There are many crazy religious folks that believe the stones were set up by Satanists or by the Rosicrucians, an entity dedicated to the New World Order.  For this reason, the Guidestones have been vandalized with Christian messages on several occasions.

Whether they survive to guide future humans post-apocalypse remains to be seen.  Or rather, we’ll probably never know.  For now, the Georgia Guidestones are a strange little bit of America that makes an interesting stop if you happen to be on your way through the region. 

Georgia Guidestones photo courtesy of AmpCoder via Wikicommons