Saturday, March 31, 2012

The Ancients Always Attempted To Warn Us

a stone tablet in Aneyoshi, Japan, warns residents not to build homes below it. hundreds of these so-called tsunami stones, some more than six centuries old, dot the coast of Japan.

Tsunami Warnings, Written in Stone


"ANEYOSHI, Japan — The stone tablet has stood on this forested hillside since before they were born, but the villagers have faithfully obeyed the stark warning carved on its weathered face: “Do not build your homes below this point!”

Residents say this injunction from their ancestors kept their tiny village of 11 households safely out of reach of the deadly tsunami last month that wiped out hundreds of miles of Japanese coast and rose to record heights near here. The waves stopped just 300 feet below the stone.

“They knew the horrors of tsunamis, so they erected that stone to warn us,” said Tamishige Kimura, 64, the village leader of Aneyoshi.

Hundreds of so-called tsunami stones, some more than six centuries old, dot the coast of Japan, silent testimony to the past destruction that these lethal waves have frequented upon this earthquake-prone nation. But modern Japan, confident that advanced technology and higher seawalls would protect vulnerable areas, came to forget or ignore these ancient warnings, dooming it to repeat bitter experiences when the recent tsunami struck.

“The tsunami stones are warnings across generations, telling descendants to avoid the same suffering of their ancestors,” said Itoko Kitahara, a specialist in the history of natural disasters at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. “Some places heeded these lessons of the past, but many didn’t.”

The flat stones, some as tall as 10 feet, are a common sight along Japan’s northeastern shore, which bore the brunt of the magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami on March 11 that left almost 29,000 people dead or missing.

While some are so old that the characters are worn away, most were erected about a century ago after two deadly tsunamis here, including one in 1896 that killed 22,000 people. Many carry simple warnings to drop everything and seek higher ground after a strong earthquake. Others provide grim reminders of the waves’ destructive force by listing past death tolls or marking mass graves.

Some stones were swept away by last month’s tsunami, which scientists say was the largest to strike Japan since the Jogan earthquake in 869, whose waves left sand deposits miles inland.

Aneyoshi’s tsunami stone is the only one that specifically tells where to build houses. But many of the region’s names also seem to indicate places safely out of the waves’ reach, like Nokoriya, or Valley of Survivors, and Namiwake, or Wave’s Edge, a spot three miles from the ocean that scholars say marks the farthest reach of a tsunami in 1611.

Local scholars said only a handful of villages like Aneyoshi heeded these old warnings by keeping their houses safely on high ground. More commonly, the stones and other warnings were disregarded as coastal towns grew in the boom years after World War II. Even communities that had moved to high ground eventually relocated to the seaside to be nearer their boats and nets"

I firmly believe that our ancestors have tried to make us aware of dangers in this physical existence that they experienced themselves by leaving clues that we have to interpret.

Somewhere around eleven to twelve thousand years ago some swift, gigantic catastrophe happened that finally brought the last ice age to an end. To many contemporary scholars it wrote the death knell to a worldwide advanced civilization that existed at the time and societies around the earth still have myths and legends of floods and disasters that exist to this day.
It was so traumatic an experience that humankind was just about wiped out and survivors stumbled through the ruinous devastation for thousands of years - remnants of flooded coastal cities are found all over the world.

Joseph Campbell wisely understood that our ancestors realized that their languages and inferences would have no relevance to future generations so they couched their understanding and warnings in myth and metaphor, things that would last the test of time, be passed down, and could be understood many, many generations later after old tongues came and went.

A researcher named Dr Paul Laviolette postulates that recurring, massive storms emanating from our galaxy's center periodically overwhelm our solar system, making the sun go non linear, creating havoc, and probably was the catalyst that ended the last ice age and raised sea levels by hundreds of feet. Possibly spawning all those flood myths.
When the ancients looked at the night sky and connected the dots to form constellations they might have imagined figures in all kinds of ways. What's striking about Sagittarius the archer is that he's drawing a bead from his bow directly at the center of our galaxy, as if it's some sort of message with great meaning.
"Sagittarius, the Archer carefully takes aim with his bow and arrow directly at the center of the galaxy or as the ancients called it the, Eye of Isis, fountain of creation. This awesome gravitational vortex could be known as the Sun of our Sun. It’s size is potentially a mass of 4 million Suns with a huge black hole in it’s center. It is in a direct line with the Archer’s arrow in the sky between Sagittarius and Gemini."

What's interesting is that modern architects do the same thing. There's a star map built into Hoover dam to let future earthlings know when the dam was built, because who can tell how long current languages are going to last.
There are also plans to speak to our descendents way into the future about buried nuclear waste:
"Giant, jagged earthwork berms should surround the area. Dozens of granite message walls or kiosks, each 25 feet high, might present graphic images of human faces contorted with horror, terror, or pain (the inspiration here is Edvard Munch's Scream) as well as text in English, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Arabic, and Navajo explaining what's buried. This variety of languages, as Charles Piller remarked in a 2006 Los Angeles Times story, turns the monoliths into quasi-Rosetta stones. Three rooms—one off-site but nearby, one centrally located, and one underground—would serve as information centers with more detailed explanations of nuclear waste and its hazards, maps showing the location of similar sites around the world, and star charts to help intruders calculate the year the site was sealed."

The great legacy of our age - stay the fuck out.

1 Comments:

Blogger Mario said...

any warnings in Japan about Empires destroying other cultures??

http://www.jimstonefreelance.com/fukushima.html

regards!

1/4/12 3:47 AM  

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