Resurrect Dead

ChesapeakeHouseMDGreetings, Dreamers!

I wanted to talk about something that has become a bit of an obsession.  I am one of those people who, if presented with a mystery, won’t stop until I’ve figured it out.  So I’ve been researching a 30-year-old mystery that I myself witnessed back when I lived in the Philadelphia area — The Toynbee Tiles.

There have been many that have come before me about this particular mystery.  Everyone has their own opinions, and it is time that I share some of my thoughts on the subject.  There is a wonderful documentary called “Resurrect Dead – The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles” that was done a few years back.  Using that documentary and my own independent research and thought exercises I think I have a pretty good idea about what is going on here.  But first let me explain the mystery:

In the early 1980’s, tiles, like the one depicted above, started popping up all over Philadelphia.  The tiles are embedded into the pavement through an ingenious method of using tar paper, asphalt glue, and linoleum.  The persons placing these tiles, or Tilers, cut the messages meticulously out of linoleum, then they deploy them through various means.  Tiles have been found in many cities all over the country and even in Argentina and Chile.  The message is always the same:


Now let us dissect this message one line at a time as if it were a Nostradamus quatrain:


Arnold Toynbee was a British Historian & Philosopher.  His autobiographical work, “Experiences” delves into his beliefs on god, religion and the universe.  It seems that Toynbee’s idea comes from a series of passages in his discussion on the spirit:

Human nature presents human minds with a puzzle which they have not yet solved and may never succeed in solving, for all that we can tell. The dichotomy of a human being into ‘soul’ and ‘body’ is not a datum of experience. No one has ever been, or ever met, a living human soul without a body… Someone who accepts—as I myself do, taking it on trust—the present-day scientific account of the Universe may find it impossible to believe that a living creature, once dead, can come to life again; but, if he did entertain this belief, he would be thinking more ‘scientifically’ if he thought in the Christian terms of a psychosomatic resurrection than if he thought in the shamanistic terms of a disembodied spirit.

Toynbee eludes to the fact that resurrection is possible, but did he really mean dead people or something else? This message is augmented by the story The Toynbee Convector by Ray Bradbury, the premise also being based on another Toynbee idea that we must always rush to meet the future in order to survive, which means, we must believe in a better world and create a better world.  Life, after all, is a Waking Dream, as I’ve said on many occasions.


In Stanley Kubrick‘s magnum opus, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the story ultimately revolves around the cyclical nature of life and the cosmos.  This movie still has profound effects on people seeing if for the first time.  Even though it was done over 40 years ago, the message, the effects and the plot could easily be mistaken for a newer movie.  It has truly endured the test of time.  I believe that the Tilers had all seen this movie, and began to formulate their own beliefs on how we as a civilization can be resurrected.  The movie is based on a short stories by Arthur C Clarke called “The Sentinel” and “Jupiter V”.


This particular passage is not as obvious as one would think, but on the surface it is believed that the Tilers were trying to explain that all the dead on the planet could be resurrected…


This is also not as clear as it may seem.  This could be seen as a direct reference to the movie 2001, which revolves around a mission to Jupiter.  However, people as ingenious as the Tilers would know from the book adaptation of the movie, which came out right after the movie, has the mission going to Saturn and not to Jupiter.  Kubrick’s special effects department could not model a believable Saturn with its rings, so they chose to model Jupiter instead.  However, in “Jupiter V” there is another clue because the space craft in that story, The Arnold Toynbee, does go to a moon around Jupiter.  Why would Clarke name the ship the Arnold Toynbee unless he, too, believed in his ideas?


Each tile has a smaller side text attached and eludes to a grand conspiracy between the media, our government and the U.S.S.R.  Immediately one would think that they are merely a group of conspiracy theorists, yet, that is not the main purpose of the message.  The quatrain is the main message, the sub text is warning others to be wary of the media, and make more tiles.  Over the years it is clear that other Tilers have joined the movement because the styles have changed, and we have exceeded the life span of the one person, I believe, was responsible for beginning the movement, but we’ll talk about that shortly.

No one person has claimed responsibility for the tiles, however there was a group called the Minority Association which had connections to the message and philosophy of the tiles.  There are three suspects uncovered who would have the intellect, means and motive for trying to spread this message:

1) James Morasco – A carpenter from Philadelphia who had a beef with the local media mogul John Knight, and had a fatal disease.

2) Severino Verna – A blue-collar worker from Philadelphia whose family owns a funeral home.  He was also known to be extremely intelligent and kept dead pigeons so that he might be able to bring them back to life one day.

3) Railroad Joe – A rail worker who worked lines that ran near areas where tiles were found.

But the fact of the matter is that their identity was never meant to be discovered, and most likely never will.  The message is not about a person, it is about the message itself.  This group of Tilers, the Minority Association, saw something that today we still do not see.  And this is the core of my conclusion.


I believe that the person who began the tiling and came up with the original idea was James Morasco.  He mentions in a tile that he had a fatal disease.   We know that James Morasco had his voice box removed, mostly likely due to cancer.  He was faced with his own mortality, yet, I believe it was more than his own mortality he was concerned with.  The media do control the message, and did even more so back in the days of the Cold War.  But I believe that his original hypothesis was that we are killing our civilization.  This is another Toynbee idea. “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”  If we are killing our planet, we are committing suicide.

Jupiter has many moons, and I believe that the Tilers believe that we need to colonize those moons to save our own world from extinction.  I interpret “Resurrect Dead” as resurrecting our dying civilizations, but learning from what we did wrong.  I know there are many people who want to turn a blind eye to the fact that our climate is changing.  I am a data geek, and though I don’t have all the data NOAA and other organizations have, I can see for myself that the climate has changed in my short 44 years on this planet.  I am addicted to the weather, and process roadway weather in my data experiments.  Things are not as they should be.

This is further exacerbated by the Solar Maximum, which happens every twelve years.  This is a time when our sun is most active and produces massive solar flares and coronal mass ejections.  This is to say that the sun has an eruption, like a million nuclear weapons going off all at once, then it shoots the debris in the direction of the blast.  This is what causes the Aurora at the poles.  And in the beauty of the Auroras is hidden a destructive force — Electro Magnetic Pulses.  While this is not directly harmful to humans, a large enough CME could wipe out ALL of our electronics.  A single burp from the sun could send us back into the dark ages.  Billions of people would die over the course of days.

I am not predicting the end of the world, because it is inevitable.  in 4 billion years our planet will be consumed when the sun expands to a Red Giant.  Our planet will be nothing more than a cinder floating around a dying sun. This is the cycle of our universe.  But, this effect would Jupiter a perfect candidate to retreat to.  There are so many moons, and there is water on some of them as recent probes have discovered, and scientists discovered in the 1970’s before the Voyager probes.

We are on a collision course with disaster if we continue to treat our planet this way.  Our Tilers know this, and they know that the media controls the message.  Any information that could trigger mass hysteria is suppressed.  One man’s plight has turned into a message that should not be ignored, nor be taken as the ravings of a madman.

And finally, we consider the film 2001, which is about a the stages of our evolution, and ultimate redemption.  It reminds us that we should not rely on technology for everything, embodied by HAL.  It reminds us that violence is never the answer.  It reminds us that all things in the universe is a cycle and we must forage ahead seeking new ways to ensure that we, our civilization, does not commit suicide for being short-sighted.  Kubrick believed this.  Clarke believed this. And Arnold Toynbee believed this.  If you look at the chronological events that happened in the year 2001, you can see that this movie is semi-prophetic, but that is something you need to research.

What does it all mean?  It means that if we must plan to colonize other worlds to ensure that our species survives.  We must learn that the wars we have fought have been needless.  We fight over dirt.  We fight over religion.  We fight over material things.  It is all summed up in Toynbee’s title, life is all about “experiences” and learning from our history.  We have learned from our history in all the wrong ways.  We have learned how to be more efficient at dealing death.  We have learned how to rape our planet to the point of extinction.  But we have not learned that we cannot stay on this planet forever.

I have said a great deal of things.  I respect Toynbee, Kubrick, Clarke and the Tilers.  They are trying to tell you something, but we are not listening.  My friends, the universe is a waking dream.  Each of us has the ability to force the powers that be to fix the problems.    Force them to see that our planet, our civilization is dying.  Awaken your weirdness and change the world.

So I will leave you tonight with a message from the Tilers, hidden in the subtext. “You must make + glue the tiles!  You!!!”

Toynbee tile photographed a block or so from t...
Toynbee tile photographed a block or so from the White House by User:Erifnam in 2002. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Toynbee Tile, 13th & Chestnut Sts., Philadelph...


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Michael Hibbard

I am a writer of dark fantasy and southern gothic literature

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