What if I told you that America has its own Stonehenge?
These giant stones were set up on a hillside outside, of all places, Atlanta in 1980. The man who had them built remains unknown, as does the monument’s true purpose. In fact, other than their half-million-dollar price tag, almost nothing is known about the stones at all. They’re composed of 119 tons of solid granite and have coded messages that are engraved into them in the world’s eight most commonly spoken languages.
These rectangular pillars are also precisely crafted to track astrological and solar cycles. There are some who interpret the messages here as a sign of the end of days. Others theorize that they’re a call for genocide on a massive scale. So what’s the message they contain? Who built them? Why are they located on a remote hillside in Georgia? And, of course, what are they intended to guide us toward?
How and why the Guidestones were built have never been answered. But here’s what we do know: The monument didn’t just appear out of nowhere.
On a summer day in 1979, a man using the alias R. C. Christian shows up at the Elberton Granite Finishing Company, presents very detailed and specific plans, and tells them he wants to build the Georgia Guidestones. The only details we have about the man is that he was balding, with a fringe of white hair, and had an accent that suggested he was from one of the Plains states. Also, he had money—a lot of money. And the only thing he absolutely demanded was that he remain completely anonymous. To this day, no one has been able to figure out who he is.
What Christian commissioned, though, was no small undertaking. In fact, even with as deep a history of working with granite as Elberton had, they’d never encountered anything like the request from “R. C. Christian.”
In fact, even if there was nothing more to the Georgia Guidestones than the stones themselves, the monument would be exceptionally impressive—a testament to the skills and abilities of the granite company R. C. Christian hired.
But there is more to the Guidestones than the granite slabs. Much more. Some say it’s mysterious, others say it’s sinister.
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The stones were unveiled during a public ceremony in 1980. They were controversial immediately. Supporters like Yoko Ono praised their message as a stirring call to rational thinking. But opponents attacked them, calling them the Ten Commandments of the Antichrist.
So what’re the messages on the stones? First, you need to know that each message appears in English, Spanish, Swahili, Hindi, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, and Russian—the eight most widely spoken languages on Earth—which means the ten lines on each slab are intended for all of the world’s inhabitants.
But as for the messages themselves, the first nine, reading up from the bottom, seem to be a benign call to higher thinking: Don’t be a cancer on the earth; seek harmony; balance personal rights with social duties; avoid petty laws; resolve international conflicts in a world court; protect people with fair laws; rule with reason; unite humanity with a new language; and guide reproduction wisely. But it’s the topmost directive on the stones that stops everyone cold:
Maintain Humanity Under 500 Million In Perpetual Balance With Nature.
Now reread that directive again.
A human population under 500 million would certainly be more “in balance” with nature. But . . .
To achieve a population under 500 million would mean that more than 7 billion of us would have to die.
Or be killed.
Now reread that again.
Exactly. The directive makes some believe that the Guidestones are calling for the mass murder of billions of innocent people—a global genocide that would kill the vast majority of the human race.
Which interpretation is accurate? Or is there another interpretation altogether?
The only way to find out is to decode who—or what—is behind the creation of the Guidestones themselves.
No question, whoever built the Georgia Guidestones, they were determined to protect their anonymity. So to find out more about the mysterious R. C. Christian, we began by talking to Guidestone historian Raymond Wiley, coauthor of The Georgia Guidestones: America’s Most Mysterious Monument. According to Wiley, the pseudonym R. C. Christian is a clue itself—a fairly blatant one—that hearkens back to a 15-century physician and mystic named Christian Rosenkreutz, the idea of the Rose Cross, and the secretive organization known as the Rosicrucians.
Christian Rosenkreutz is said to have founded the secretive Rosicrucian Society in Germany in the early 15th century, but some dispute that the man even lived at all. Some people say he’s not even real. Others say he’s more than one person.
For the members of the society, Rosenkreutz was a doctor who had spent a lifetime gathering what he called sacred knowledge. Studying ancient Turkish, Sufi, and Persian paths toward understanding, as well as Western medical knowledge, he supposedly traveled through the Middle East, being instructed by masters of ancient wisdom.
When he returned, Rosenkreutz supposedly founded his own church to pass on the learning to make sure that it didn’t die with him. So, at first, all the members were doctors. Each one took an oath to heal the sick without payment, to maintain the secrecy of the fellowship, and to find a replacement for Rosenkreutz before he died.
The sacred knowledge is said to include elements of alchemy and psychic manipulation. Yup. Modern Rosicrucians are believed to have even been able to tap the ultimate power of the human mind. Some think the sect has evolved and they now seek to protect and guide humanity away from its own destruction. Others have accused the Rosicrucians of being out-and-out evil. To be clear, there are offshoots of Rosicrucians everywhere.
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Think about this—if you had a vision of an American Stonehenge, a massive granite creation bearing your philosophy for the world, and you possessed the resources to underwrite its creation, would you want to keep your name out of it? For most of us, I think the answer would be “probably not.” Our egos and our vanity might insist that we take at least some of the credit. Yet among the inscriptions on the monument is the announcement that their byline is a pseudonym. Is this humility—or deliberate misdirection?
Human nature and the role vanity plays in it would seem to rule out one name often mentioned as a possible source of funding for the Guidestones: Ted Turner, media mogul and one of America’s largest individual owners of real estate. At one point, Turner argued that the earth would be better served by a far smaller population than our present numbers, a statement that generated much controversy at the time. But while the ideas expressed on the stones, if interpreted benignly, do reflect Turner’s well-known global harmony and environmental concerns, modesty, humility, and anonymity are not qualities often—or maybe ever— associated with the man once widely referred to as the “Mouth of the South.”
So if the man behind the Georgia Guidestones wasn’t Turner or, probably, any other high-profile, well-heeled philanthropist or visionary, who was he?
Only a few people ever met him. One was attorney Wyatt Martin, who handled the legal matters related to the Guidestones, and who signed a vow never to discuss his client, a vow he has kept.
Another was Hudson Cone, who was present at the granite company when the Guidestones were being created. Cone remembers Christian as a tall, balding man, with a fringe of white hair. He was well spoken and comported himself well. He gave no indication of who—or what—he represented.
That ambiguity, Cone believes to this day, was deliberate.
What better way to get people talking—and thinking —about the nature of our relationship to the world and to one another—than by creating an enormous mystery?“Any time you have something with an air of mystery around it,” he said, “you invite different interpretations.”
Those differing interpretations, Cone insists, are one of the things that have kept the Georgia Guidestones at the center of so much speculation and public interest. He has had people tell him that the site is the holiest spot, while others argue that it’s a profane location, a focal point for satanic power and ultimate evil.
Cone doesn’t believe that the spot or the Guidestones are evil. In fact, he thinks that the questions the Guidestones raise are themselves its truest purpose.
“I believe it was put here to stimulate curiosity,” Cone said.
That, too, makes a lot of sense to me. What better way to get people talking—and thinking —about the nature of our relationship to the world and to one another—than by creating an enormous mystery . . . and presenting that mystery in the world’s great languages so that all can participate in the discussion?
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One question that has remained throughout our investigation of the Georgia Guidestones—why Georgia? Why were the stones placed on their particular site?
Turns out there’s a serious—and mysterious—reason for that as well.
The theory of Earth Changes, first propounded by the mystic Edgar Cayce early in the 20th century, argues that we are rapidly approaching a time of devastating changes to the surface of the earth. Those changes could be the result of earthquakes, asteroid or comet impact, super volcanoes, solar flares—whatever. As we’ve seen, particularly in terms of the 2012 believers—but also as with previous apocalypse believers such as those who feared the end of the world would accompany the new millennium, or those who saw global devastation coming as Halley’s Comet returned, or any of the hundreds of other doomsday faiths that have come and gone—the specific details of the actual apocalypse vary from believer to believer, and some of them have already been proven inaccurate.
What matters for the purposes of decoding the Guidestones is the consequences of the devastation.
And those consequences include a radically altered surface of the earth—a surface that will lack many of the most familiar features of the world we know.
What sort of features?
Minor things like: California, New York City, parts of Florida, and other landmasses throughout the world.
That’s scary.
But according to Cayce’s Earth Changes theory, it turns out that in addition to the changes that would alter the physical face of the world, there are “safe zones” that would ride out the earth changes, and in doing so provide a psychic focus for the energies needed to rebuild the world.
Where are those safe zones?
You guessed it—one of them is in rural Georgia. (See Exhibit 8B, page 56, for a map.)
It’s where the Guidestones stand, meaning they’re ready to help the survivors of the earth changes rebuild the world. And rebuild it better.
I believe that the Georgia Guidestones are, on one level, exactly what they appear to be—a tool for getting people to think about the nature of existence, and the ways in which that existence could be improved.
I think that there’s a good chance that the person behind them was a Rosicrucian.
But I also think that there’s a motivation for the stones that may have been overlooked, and that the motivation lies in the times during which they were commissioned and created.
The Georgia Guidestones came into being in the late 1970s and early 1980s—a time of enormous international tension between the United States and the then-existing Soviet Union. At the heart of those tensions: tens of thousands of nuclear warheads, an arsenal of destruction aimed at each other’s throats and more than capable of bringing civilization down in a mass of radioactive rubble.
They were among the scariest times in human history—and a reminder that we don’t need an apocalypse beyond our control to end the world. For more than half a century, we have held the power to do it ourselves. Self-inflicted genocide by nuclear bombs controlled by our governments: No secret cabals need apply.
And I think that it was the possibility of just such a nuclear holocaust that prompted R. C. Christian to create the message he placed on the Georgia Guidestones. A message intended for the survivors of a global nuclear holocaust. A message designed to help them restore a balance to the earth—and to avoid the mistakes that destroyed their ancestors.
That, I think, is the purpose of the Georgia Guidestones, and that’s the message we decoded during our investigation.
Of course, there’s one person, if he’s still alive, who knows whether or not my interpretation is accurate, and that’s R. C. Christian, but he’s not talking.
I just hope that he does come forth, and tell us whether or not any of our interpretations of the Georgia Guidestones are accurate. Or if there is another interpretation—perhaps brighter, perhaps darker—that we may have overlooked.
Until then, we have the Georgia Guidestones themselves, speaking their message to the ages—and to each of us in their own way.
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