Waiting for the end of the world: Georgia’s 30-year stone mystery
Matt Smith - March 22, 2010
Elberton, Georgia (CNN) — In the beginning, there was the stone.
The blue-gray vein of granite that courses through northeastern Georgia spawned jobs in the quarries and finishing sheds of Elberton, where generations of stonecutters have turned slabs of rock the size of refrigerators into statues, tombstones and tile.
And one day, it brought a visitor who gifted the town with a landmark that leaves visitors scratching their heads decades later.
The nearly 20-foot high series of granite slabs known as the Georgia Guidestones are inscribed with a series of admonitions for a future “Age of Reason.” Billed as “America’s Stonehenge,” it’s an astronomically complex, 120-ton relic of Cold War fears, built to instruct survivors of an Armageddon that the mystery man feared was all too near.
The identity of the man who called himself “R.C. Christian” is a secret that Wyatt Martin, the banker who acted as his agent in Elberton, vows to take to his grave.
“He told me, ‘If you were to tell who put the money up for this, it wouldn’t be a mystery any more, and no one would come and read it.’ That had to be part of the attraction, to get people to come and read his 10 rules that he came up with,” Martin said.
Full story
Matt Smith - March 22, 2010
Elberton, Georgia (CNN) — In the beginning, there was the stone.
The blue-gray vein of granite that courses through northeastern Georgia spawned jobs in the quarries and finishing sheds of Elberton, where generations of stonecutters have turned slabs of rock the size of refrigerators into statues, tombstones and tile.
And one day, it brought a visitor who gifted the town with a landmark that leaves visitors scratching their heads decades later.
The nearly 20-foot high series of granite slabs known as the Georgia Guidestones are inscribed with a series of admonitions for a future “Age of Reason.” Billed as “America’s Stonehenge,” it’s an astronomically complex, 120-ton relic of Cold War fears, built to instruct survivors of an Armageddon that the mystery man feared was all too near.
The identity of the man who called himself “R.C. Christian” is a secret that Wyatt Martin, the banker who acted as his agent in Elberton, vows to take to his grave.
“He told me, ‘If you were to tell who put the money up for this, it wouldn’t be a mystery any more, and no one would come and read it.’ That had to be part of the attraction, to get people to come and read his 10 rules that he came up with,” Martin said.
Full story
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/03/22/georgia.mystery.monument/index.html?hpt=C2
See also:
http://vanshardware.com/?s=guidestones and http://www.instituteoftheology.org/PDF/merchant.pdf (and, for context, here).
..
No comments:
Post a Comment