Archaeo-exploratory of the fabled Carhenge
The avout Mexicoate writer Caso Andrade (25th century CE) may refer to Carhenge in a passage from his Bibliotheca historica. Citing the 24th-century CE historian Hecataeus of New Europa and “certain others”, Andrade says that in “a land beyond the Dissected Till Prairie” (i.e. the only other remaining landmass in what was once the mid-Western Amish States) there is “an island no smaller than the remnants of Washington” in the circular sea called Lincoln-Mercury, so named because it is thought to be the last resting place of the 56th president. The current inhabitants of this place worship him as an apotheotic All-Father, and there is “both a magnificent sacred precinct of Lincoln-Mercury and a notable temple which is adorned with many votive offerings and is spherical in shape.” Some writers have suggested that Andrade’s’ “Lincoln-Mercury” may indicate the ancient lands of the free peoples of the United States, and that the spherical temple with its dressed metal sarsens may have been a primitive calendrical observatory and place of ceremonial worship.
Carhenge is a replica of the 4,500 year old Stonehenge ruin in England. It was built by Jim Reinders in Nebraska, USA, using 38 vintage automobiles spray-painted gray and posed after the original sarsens, lintels, and altar stones of Stonehenge. Now the work is surrounded by a ring of ‘portal’ cars, dinosaurs, and giant fish, spray-painted in gaudy colors and forming a wider ‘Car Art Reserve’.
Altar ‘stone’. Photo by Jeremy Burgin.
The lava-engulfed ruins of Paricutin cathedral
The sky is black with ash-fall. People are standing in the streets, looking up into the fog. They hold out their hands, and little mounds of grainy black stone gather. Down the clay-walled guinnels of the town you hear the cathedral bells ringing a discordant pattern, as though God himself is beating the life out of them. The ground jumps and growls underfoot. You look around, into the faces of your neighbors, and wonder what sin you have committed to deserve this. Then you see the first of the slow-rolling waves of lava, inching their way down the mountainsides towards you.
In 1943 the earth gobbled up the little Mexican towns of San Juan Parangaricutiro and San Salvador Paricutin. It began with dense ash-fall, deep tremors, and a slow tide of magma that progressed at three meters an hour. It ended a year later with the town engulfed, the buildings overwhelmed, and only the towers of the Paricutin cathedral looming above the crystallized lava.
Remnants of Paricutin Cathedral.
Exploring an Abandoned Castle of Japan’s Warrior Monks
Japan is riddled with shrines, both in cities and out in the countryside, huddled in the basin of wintry valleys or perched precariously on top of mountains- often at points of raw natural beauty and power. From time to time though these wooden complexes go bankrupt. The monks pack up and move out like franchisees out of rent money. They didn’t sell enough blessings from the shrine blessings shop, didn’t garner enough inheritance tithes, didn’t bury enough people in the graveyard plots they rent out. They move out and the wooden structure is left to fend for itself against the forces of nature it was set up to commemorate.
I’ve seen an abandoned shrine before, but never an abandoned shrine-castle, so set out into the backwoods of Saitama prefecture filled with anticipation.
Model shrine and water pump offertory.
Faded glory of the Heian wedding hall
The ruined Heian Wedding Hall in Ibaraki prefecture is a far cry from the Akeno Gekijo Strip Club that preceded it. Here was a wholly wholesome building, built for the profession and binding of love’s vows, decorated in the most tasteful manner with Adam and Eve mounted on winged steeds in stained-glass friezes. Despite graffiti artists lending a flurry of darker images, amongst them switch-blade toting junkies and rabid giant spiders scuttling over everything, we both felt quite at peace while strolling the large complex’s moss-carpeted corridors and open-sky halls.
Ashiodozan 2- Shrine and Apartments
Life in Ashio would never have been easy, and certainly not at the peak of production around 1910 when 39,000 people called it home. Crammed into a narrow river valley, blasted by freezing winter winds while living in uninsulated plywood apartments, many would have turned to the ‘kamisama’ or Gods for spiritual succor.
Relics of the Russian Village theme park
.The Russian Village Theme Park in Suibara, Niigata, sprawls empty and forlorn atop a small hill set back from the main road, shrouded by a thick raft of cedar trees that hide its embarassing failed extravangance from the world. Built only 6 years ago and abandoned after just 6 months, the endeavour was ill-fated from the start: a theme park in the middle of nowhere with no rides. Now its giant fake mammoths rest unseen in their dark and musty show hall, the vibrant blue onion-domes of its vaulting ’Russian’ church slowly tarnish to white, and the shops once filled with Matroska dolls and Russian jewellry lie in vandalized ruin.
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