The Georgia Guidestones America's Enigmatic Stonehenge #shorts

We’re all familiar with the concept of some sort of apocalypse happening. In recent pop culture, there have been many, many zombie apocalypses and humanity has always seemed to make it through at the other end. Not wanting to jinx anything, we’ve also had very recent run-ins with highly contagious diseases but again, so far the majority of the population has survived. But what would happen if there was an event so monumental and civilization as we know it took such a hit, that the very foundations of our society would have to be rebuilt almost from scratch?

Would you know what to do if this happened? Would anyone? Well, luckily, there are a set of granite stones in a field in Elberton, Georgia, USA that have all the tips you need for how to rebuild society following an apocalyptic event. Wait…what?

The Mystery

Elberton, Georgia is known as the “granite capital of the world”. This is because there’s tons and tons of granite there but also because the granite found there is finer grained and higher quality than the crappy old granite found everywhere else. So if you’re looking to build a monument out of something that will last, Elberton might be the place to go.

In 1979, none other than the President of the Elberton Granite Finishing Corporation himself, Joe H Fendley Sr, was contacted by a mysterious stranger. This stranger was a well put together man who said that he represented a group of fellow Americans all of whom wished to remain anonymous. This group wanted to leave an enduring message for future generations and wanted to use Elberton both as the source of granite for this project and as the actual site for the monument.

Sensing a potential nutter in his immediate proximity, Fendley gave a ridiculously high quote for the project, assuming that would end the matter. The stranger surprised him by agreeing to the amount and Fendley’s colleague Wyatt Martin ended up being nominated as the intermediary agent between this anonymous group and the people actually constructing the piece for them. The stranger gave his name as R.C.

Christian at the time, which was a pseudonym and even if Wyatt Martin did ever know his real name or who he was, he has publicly sworn that he would never divulge it, even under pain of death. After handing over a scale model and finalizing the details of the monument, R.C. Christian swept out of town, never to be seen again.

By the following year, the monument was ready to be unveiled and on the 22nd of March 1980, the public got their first official view of the mysterious project.

Here’s what they saw. Four large rectangular granite slabs were angled around a narrower, central granite column. This central column had a slit like a letter box carved into it, through which a small round hole could be seen.

A rectangular capstone sat on top of all five upright pieces. A little way off from the monument was another granite slab set into the ground. So what was the big deal?

Just sounds like a load of old granite. Well, the group behind the stones wanted them to function not only as guidelines for future generations but also as a calendar and clock. There were inscriptions all over the slabs, sandblasted in letters 4 inches (10 cm) high.

The capstone was inscribed with the same message in four ancient languages, one on each side. The four main stones carried inscriptions on both sides, the same message repeated in eight different languages. And what do these meticulously inscribed letters say?

Around each edge of the capstone is a message in Babylonian Cuneiform, Classical Greek, Sanskrit and Egyptian Hieroglyphics. This message translates to: “Let these be guidestones to an age of reason”. Pretty grandiose.

And the messages on the four main stones were a set of ten — I hesitate to call them “rules”, let’s call them guidelines — in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese and Russian. These guidelines are inscribed as follows:

1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
10. Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

Not to worry, we shall be coming back to these later. The granite slab set into the ground is a useful explanation tablet, giving the date the stones were erected and a guide to the languages used. It also explains the astronomical uses for the guidestones, saying that the oblique-cut hole in the central column “indicates celestial pole” which appears to mean that you can always see the North Star through it.

The letterbox-like slot is for tracking the sun and the monument is orientated so that the sun will shine through a slit in the capstone at noon each day. From above, the guidestones are set in an “X” shape, apparently following the annual journey of the moon.

It also handily gives the physical data for the monument so no-one had to bother getting their measuring sticks out to know that the overall height is 19 feet, 3 inches (5.87 metres), the total weight is 237,746 pounds (107,839 kilos) and that the whole thing is made up of 951 cubic feet (26.9 cubic metres) of granite. The weight of each of the big slabs is over 20 tons. There are also other measurements but I couldn’t be bothered converting all those numbers and you can easily look it up for yourself. The tablet only gave the imperial measurements, by the way, not the metric ones.

Also, the tablet has an inscription relating to a time capsule buried six feet below it but the parts showing when it was buried and when it should be dug up are blank so maybe they didn’t get around to doing it. Or maybe it was someone in the group’s idea but other people thought it was a bit lame to welcome civilization back with a copy of the Daily Elberton Rag, a scrambled up Rubik’s Cube and a cassette tape of “My Sharona”.

The other inscription on this highly detailed explanatory tablet states that the sponsors are “a small group of Americans who seek the age of reason” and the author is engraved as “R.C. Christian” and underneath in brackets: “(a pseudonyn)”. Yes, agonizingly on a permanent memorial to the rebuilding of humankind, there’s a spelling mistake.

According to the specifications set by the mysterious R.C. Christian, the monument was to be in a remoteish area, not near any touristy sites. He wanted it to be left in a natural state and accessible to all, so no fences or historic site paraphernalia were put up around it. From the moment it was unveiled, people started having opinions about it with local priests declaring it as a symbol of the occult and others wondering if there were hidden meanings behind the messages.

So in the decades since they were erected, have we found out any more about these mysterious stones that have been referred to as America’s Stonehenge? Could the inscriptions maybe hold hidden, darker meanings? Why did the anonymous group think these guidelines would even be necessary? Is there devilry afoot? Let’s find out.

Reading the Stones

On the face of it, the messages on the Guidestones seem pretty straightforward and the sponsor group declared that people should totally take them at face value and not to try and read into them any more than what they said. However, there was so much speculation about what they might mean that the anonymous group, probably heaving a deep sigh, had to publish a list of “explanatory precepts” in order that their message for the future wasn’t twisted or misinterpreted in any way. We’ll go into just what these guidelines are supposed to mean in greater detail in a minute but first I think we should talk about just why these guidestones were created.

The group behind the stones obviously had fears for the future and wanted to ensure that, should anything happen, there was a list of points on how to do it right the next time. According to R.C. Christian, the stones and messages had been 20 years in the planning, meaning that worries about future world wars and nuclear annihilation were probably the motives that kickstarted the idea for the monument.

The group was worried about an event so large that civilization would have to be rebuilt from the ground up and nuclear war definitely fits into that category. Another reason for the stones’ placement in Elberton was that it was off the beaten track and likely to survive a missile strike due to being pretty much in the middle of nowhere. All that granite under the ground would also make it a more stable place to build a long-lasting monument in case of a natural disaster.

So this group of like-minded and presumably rich Americans decided to bestow their wisdom upon the poor people who were left scrambling to rebuild society after the world ended. So let’s get back to those messages and the explanations given for them. Some of them are very specific with others being a bit more vague so it seems likely that some or all were written by different people.

Maybe everyone in the group got to have their own guideline passed down forever and that’s why they seem a bit inconsistent. Here are the guidelines again, followed by their “explanatory precepts”.

Guideline 1: Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.

Explanation: “Means the entire human race at its climax level for permanent balance with nature.”

Ok, here we go. We all know that the planet is groaning under the weight of humans and we’re really cocking up the place as far as living with nature goes but 500 million people? Even in 1980 the population was nudging 4 and a half billion so R.C.

Christian’s group was expecting one hell of a cull. According to worldometers.info, the world population hasn’t been as low as 500 million since the 1600s so who knows why they decided on this number. While there is no denying that a mass extinction event of humans would be great for the planet, this guideline seems a bit strict.

And really, who’s going to be checking on how many people there are when 95% of the human race has just been snuffed out? What happens if the population accidentally pops over the line? Is there going to be an annual cull?

When taken with the subsequent messages on the stones, this piece of advice starts to take on a darker tone.

Guideline 2: Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity

Explanation: “Without going into details as yet undiscovered, this means humanity should apply reason and knowledge to guiding its own reproduction. ‘Fitness’ could be translated as ‘health’. ‘Diversity’ could be translated as ‘variety’.”

Well, thanks for the lesson on how to use a thesaurus, anonymous American person. And way to dodge a bullet by adding “diversity” to the guideline. Although the explanation sort of narrows this down with the word “variety”.

“Diversity” implies trying to broaden the genetic pool as much as possible by reproducing with other races. “Variety” to my mind means, for example, different hair colour within the same racial group. Also, if humanity’s taken such a hit that it’s been reduced to practically nothing, it’s probably pretty slim pickings out there for who you might want to start repopulating the planet with.

Yes, we seem to be edging around the murky world of eugenics here and it definitely bears pointing out that during the inception of this granite monument, forced sterilisations of people deemed mentally unfit were being carried out all over the United States and minorities such as Native Americans were still being sterilized against their will well into the 1970s. And this guideline was written after the Second World War and all that Hitler’s obsession with a master race entailed so it’s hard to take anything like this as an innocent statement. I don’t really care what the guideline says or even what the explanation means, there is no way that this isn’t a very loaded message.

It also seems that you should only reproduce to give birth to increasingly superior specimens and not for any other reason like, I don’t know, wanting to have children with a partner you love. Man, the future sounds bleak.

Guideline 3: Unite humanity with a living new language.

Explanation: “A ‘living’ language grows and changes with advancing knowledge. A ‘new’ language will be developed ‘de novo’ — and need not necessarily be adapted from any languages now in existence.”

Phew, at least this one is a little less contentious. Ok, so we’ve got a bunch of people living all over the place, speaking different languages. What is one to do?

Well, refer to the guidestones and just make up a whole new language that somehow everyone will be able to learn. Sounds HARD. And it’s been tried before with Esperanto and that never really took off.

I think if humanity’s down to the bare bones, people are just going to stay where they are and continue using the same language they already know. If a stranger turns up, what usually happens? They learn the language of the people they now live with.

And it’s not like languages will be wiped off the map, I’m sure there’ll be some people left with knowledge of more than one. And we have Google Translate! But I suppose it would make sense for everyone left to be able to communicate so a new language seems smart.

How it would be started though and how to work out all the grammar etc., well, I’ll leave that for the future survivor people. Emojis, anyone?

Guideline 4: Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.

Explanation: “‘Faith’ here may be used in a religious sense. Too often people are ruled by blind faith even when it may be contrary to reason. Reason must be tempered with compassion here — but must prevail.”

So everyone just has to calm down and be reasonable. I don’t really have a problem with this one although some people’s interpretation of what they think is reasonable is going to be the exact opposite of other people’s. This particular guideline with its emphasis on “reason” is one of the central tenets of this group’s beliefs which we’ll explore in more detail later on.

Guideline 5: Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.

Explanation: “Courts must consider justice as well as law”.

Doesn’t that explanation make it sound like the courts can just do whatever they want? People who have been wronged generally want justice over and above everything else, so it sounds like courts in the future will have carte blanche to dole out whatever punishments they want, regardless of the law. It also seems that in the future post-apocalyptic world, nations have remained and are still going to get into arguments with other nations. Yay.

And hang on, who is going to be protecting these nations and overseeing how fair these laws are? An uber-nation or UN type entity? How many people do you need in the world to be able to have this sort of global system? And sure, who doesn’t want fair laws and just courts?

On paper, or granite, this seems like a good idea. In practice though, who knows what people will come up with.

Guideline 6: Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.

Explanation: “Individual nations must be free to develop their own destinies at home as their own people wish — but cannot abuse their neighbours.”

Wait, wait, wait. I thought the immediate concern after an apocalyptic event would be to get the place up and running again. Would all the tiny amount of people want to stay within the limits of their own pre-existing nations? Would countries even really exist anymore?

Surely some populations would be almost totally annihilated. But the survivors have got to keep it all local, while also learning a new global language at the same time. And depending on what resources the countries have remaining to them, you know that some are going to develop way more quickly than others. Seems a bit unfair given the state the world has found itself in in this imagined future.

Can’t we all just get along?

Guideline 7: Avoid petty laws and useless officials.

Explanation: “Self explanatory”.

Ha ha, the explanation says it all. I bet this person had a specific “useless official” in mind when they submitted this guideline. Who knew that someone’s prolonged legal battle over where they could park a car would make it into the guiding principles for a future generation. Everybody hopes to avoid useless officials so at least there’s something to look forward to in the desolate, blasted future world.

Guideline 8: Balance personal rights with social duties.

Explanation: “Individuals have a natural concern for their personal welfare, but man is a social animal and must also be concerned for the group. Failure of society means failure for its individual citizens.”

Be a good post-apocalypse citizen now, mm-kay? I am a bit confused over why these guidelines want to push people to work for a greater good yet still remain insular and within their own nations. I don’t know whether it was the ethos of the sponsor group or if the individuals within it are making their differing beliefs show. Whatever, there’s no denying that pulling together after a crisis is preferable to going it alone especially if you’re like me where my best chance of survival would definitely be dependent on being in a larger group.

Preferably with people who can cook.

Guideline 9: Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.

Explanation: “The infinite here means the supreme being — whose will is manifest in the workings of the cosmos — if we will seek for it.”

OK, who let Hippy Charlie have a guideline? Seriously, as well as learning a new language and keeping all their emotions in check, future people are supposed to also be going on spiritual journeys too? Doesn’t this contradict guideline 4 about ruling everything with tempered reason? And don’t tell me to prize truth, beauty and love, you patronizing old git, I’ll do that on my own, thank you very much. This one sounds more like something you’d see on a fridge magnet than a line of advice for the ages.

Guideline 10: Be not a cancer on the earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.

Explanation: “In our time, the growth of humanity is destroying the natural conditions of the earth which have fostered all existing life. We must restore reasoned balance.”

There’s that word again — “reason”. There are references to it all over the guidestones. The inscription on the capstone is “Let these be guidestones to an age of reason” and the sponsors are described as “a small group of Americans who seek the age of reason”.

But what does that mean? It seems that this group has a bee in its bonnet about human overpopulation but reasonable people would not demand rigid population control to combat that, that’s what unreasonable people would do. It’s also not clear why “Leave room for nature” is repeated.

Is it to underline the importance of the message or did the stone mason accidentally keep chipping away so ended up just doing the whole sentence again? This one more or less says the same things as guidelines 1 and 9 but is delivered in a more biblical 10 Commandments way than either of the other two. Nature also seemed to be important to the group but maybe they could have stuck with one guideline about overpopulation vs nature and then used the other one to give future people some more useful advice like a foolproof bread recipe or how to diversify your portfolio.

And I’m not altogether sure why they thought these were really worth preserving in the first place as most of them are just common sense and the way many people live their lives anyway.

The Sponsors

Judging by what little we know of the group who sponsored the Georgia Guidestones, we can make a few deductions. Ok, assumptions. They were all American.

This is stated on the explanatory tablet. At least some of them were very wealthy. The group was quoted a silly amount to get the monument built and they accepted the price without haggling.

Maybe this also means R.C. Christian in particular was a bit dim. Or trusting.

Let’s go with trusting. The overall impression given by the messages and the enterprise in general smacks of a group of wealthy, white American men, generously bestowing their largesse on the world in the form of their ten wise commandments. I am more than happy to be proved wrong on this point but come on, you know it’s true.

The only real lead we have to the identity of the group is the pseudonymous R.C. Christian. As pseudonyms go, it’s pretty on the nose.

R.C. Christian? Either it was an obvious allusion to his religious beliefs or the total opposite and was ironically used by an atheist or, shock horror, a Satanist.

Onlookers at the unveiling were swift to decry the guidestones as Satanic but I’m not really sure why. Maybe they thought they were blasphemous alternatives to the original Ten Commandments or that the astrological aspects inherent in the monument meant it was automatically occult somehow. While it might make you think of Stonehenge in that it’s made up of large stones with a capstone on top, that’s about as far as the similarities go as everyone knows how this baby was assembled.

It’s also not as accurate celestial body-wise as Stonehenge but this wasn’t really the group’s chief concern. The original sponsor group did hope that another group in the future might add an additional circle around their original cluster but so far nobody has appeared to find this necessary.

It’s been speculated that “R.C. Christian” is a thinly veiled reference to the Rosicrucians, a movement that sprang up in the 1600s and whose manifesto referred to “a universal reformation of mankind”. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica: “The central feature of Rosicrucianism is the belief that its members possess secret wisdom that was handed down to them from ancient times.”

All this does sound quite familiar and from above the guidestones even kind of resemble the Rose Cross so maybe these 20th century members thought they should quickly pass on their secret knowledge before humanity accidentally destroyed itself. A lot of big names from the past have been linked to the Rosicrucian movement, including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Thomas Paine. Paine has been widely credited with helping to inspire American revolutionaries, particularly with his pamphlet entitled “Common Sense.”

In 1794, he released part one of a pamphlet called “The Age of Reason”. This does cover a lot of the ground that the guidestones espouse, and comes under the umbrella of “deism” which is, according to dictionary.com: “an intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that accepted the existence of a creator on the basis of reason but rejected belief in a supernatural deity who interacts with humankind.” Rosicrucianism pulled ideas from all over the place including occultism and Christian gnosticism and some scholars are not even sure if it really existed at all or was actually some sort of hoax.

The movement does still exist today, though, with The Rosicrucian Fellowship coming with the tagline “an association of Christian Mystics” so maybe this was where old R.C. and his group were coming from.

Another sponsor of the guidestones or maybe R.C. Christian himself, has long been thought to be Ted Turner. Turner is an American billionaire, media tycoon, entrepreneur and philanthropist.

A brief look at his CV is quite telling. As well as many other things, Turner is the chairman of the United Nations Foundation and the Co-chairman and founder of the Nuclear Threat Initiative. He also created a foundation in his own name to address issues about population growth and, prior to launching CNN in 1980, created a so-called “Doomsday video” of military bands performing “Nearer my God To Thee” to be broadcast whenever the end of the world came.

He also grew up in Georgia and is a big nature lover so does seem to be a good call, but the anonymity clause has held since 1979 so I don’t think anyone’s going to break it now. The appointed go-between, Wyatt Martin said in 2013: “They could put a gun to my head and kill me, I will never reveal his real name”. So I guess that’s one mystery that will forever remain unsolved.

Other Theories

While the messages were seemingly written in good faith and were meant to be taken literally, conspiracy theories, of course, still sprung up. The stones have been vandalised many times over the years with graffiti saying things like “Death to the new world order” in 2009 and “I am Isis, goddess of love” in 2014. Bits have been chipped off and also in 2014, somebody replaced a chipped-off bit with a new cube with mysterious letters and numbers engraved onto it.

People went wild with numerology theories and references to what it might mean until the man responsible spoke up saying he’d just carved his and his wife’s initials and anniversary of their wedding date into it. They had actually been married at the Guidestones the year before. The biggest conspiracy theories relate to the problematic population cap guideline with this being interpreted as an immediate call to cull humanity and establish a new world order rather than some advice for what to do in the aftermath of a disaster.

And what of the occult nature of the guidestones? Religious figures in the community had always warned of Satanic practices and blood sacrifices that would be carried out at the site but maybe they just gave people the idea to do it. Shadowy groups such as the Illuminati have also apparently performed rituals at the guidestones but there is no real evidence that any human or animal sacrifices have been made there.

There was aerial footage of what looked like a big bloodstain on the capstone in 2015 but people at the scene said the video had been photoshopped and there wasn’t really anything on the capstone apart from maybe some water residue. And it’s not like the guidestones are sitting on a particularly spiritual or holy spot or have any reference to rituals or religious practices on them. They were put up in 1980, the year of The Empire Strikes Back and shoulder pads, so it’s not exactly a venerated historical site yet.

The languages chosen for the messages to be inscribed onto the granite slabs were deemed the most likely to be understood at the time, although this begs the question as to why there was stuff written in Babylonian Cuneiform around the capstone. One sentence in any language isn’t enough to extrapolate a whole alphabet so maybe they were just showing off. And while there are 8 living languages represented, as well as 4 dead ones, the explanatory key is all in English.

Imagine if you made it to the stones, didn’t recognize the English name for your language on the explanation tablet and collapsed in a sobbing heap on the ground. Maybe the hope for humanity would give up before they started! Or maybe the whole monument was supposed to be the time capsule for future people or alien races to discover.

If so, maybe they should have made a bit more of a song and dance about it as I think less than 1% of the population alive today has even heard of the Georgia Guidestones, let alone what all their extremely important tenets are.

So anyway, if you find yourself on the other side of an apocalypse and need to work out how to rebuild society according to a group of wealthy white men from 1970s North America, now you know where to find the answers. Good luck, future humans, good luck.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the Georgia Guidestones?

The Georgia Guidestones are a set of granite stones in Elberton, Georgia, USA, that contain guidelines for rebuilding society after an apocalyptic event. They were erected in 1980 by an anonymous group.

Who commissioned the Georgia Guidestones?

The Georgia Guidestones were commissioned by a mysterious stranger who identified himself as R.C. Christian. This individual represented a group of anonymous Americans who wished to remain unknown.

What languages are inscribed on the Georgia Guidestones?

The capstone of the Georgia Guidestones has inscriptions in Babylonian Cuneiform, Classical Greek, Sanskrit, and Egyptian Hieroglyphics. The four main stones carry inscriptions in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian.

What are the ten guidelines inscribed on the Georgia Guidestones?

The ten guidelines are: Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature; Guide reproduction wisely; 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.

What is the significance of the astronomical features of the Georgia Guidestones?

The Georgia Guidestones are designed to function as a calendar and clock. The oblique-cut hole in the central column indicates the celestial pole, allowing one to see the North Star. The letterbox-like slot is for tracking the sun, and the monument is oriented so that the sun shines through a slit in the capstone at noon each day.

What is the physical size and weight of the Georgia Guidestones?

The overall height of the Georgia Guidestones is 19 feet, 3 inches (5.87 meters). The total weight is 237,746 pounds (107,839 kilograms), and the entire structure is made up of 951 cubic feet (26.9 cubic meters) of granite. Each of the big slabs weighs over 20 tons.

What is the purpose of the explanatory tablet near the Georgia Guidestones?

The explanatory tablet provides the date the stones were erected, a guide to the languages used, and astronomical uses for the guidestones. It also includes physical data about the monument and mentions a time capsule buried six feet below it, although the details about the time capsule are incomplete.

What are some of the conspiracy theories surrounding the Georgia Guidestones?

Some conspiracy theories suggest that the Georgia Guidestones are part of a plan to establish a new world order, involving a cull of humanity to meet the population cap of 500 million. Others speculate about occult practices and rituals performed at the site, although there is no concrete evidence to support these claims.

Why were the Georgia Guidestones placed in Elberton, Georgia?

Elberton, Georgia, is known as the ‘granite capital of the world’ due to its high-quality granite. The anonymous group behind the Georgia Guidestones chose this location for its durability and stability, especially in the event of a natural disaster or missile strike.

What is the significance of the name R.C. Christian?

R.C. Christian is a pseudonym used by the mysterious stranger who commissioned the Georgia Guidestones. The name is believed to be an allusion to the Rosicrucians, a movement that emphasizes secret wisdom and universal reformation of mankind. Some speculate that it could also be a reference to religious beliefs or an ironic use by an atheist or Satanist.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Georgia Guidestones America’s Enigmatic Stonehenge #shorts
• Hero image source by Tawhid Sadman / openverse, cc0.