Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles

Legend & Lore Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Things You Never Knew You Wanted to Know Anything About

Paranoia Made Public: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles

Paranoia Made Public: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles Charles Wesley Orton

Scattered in the roadways of more than two dozen cities--mostly in the United States, but some in South America--are hundreds of mysterious homemade “tiles” about the size of n automobile license plate bearing the cryptic message, “Toynbee Idea: In Kubrick's 2001, Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter” or some variant of the same.

The message seems to allude to a strange connection made in the tilemaker's mind between Stanley Kubrick's movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was based loosely on Arthur C. Clarke's short story “The Sentinel,” and the ideas of historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee The movie 2001 and the book by the same name center on an adventure that ends with the kidnapping of a U.S. astronaut to that planet by extraterrestrial forces.

Toynbee (1889-1975) was a British historian famous for promulgating

the concept of comparative history, which investigates the rise and fall of entire civilizations rather than just nation-states. According to the Wikipedia article about Toynbee tiles, the pertinent passage from one of Toynbee's works is the following: “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.”

Just how that passage connects with 2001 and Jupiter is not clear.

Another possible link to Toynbee might be a play written by David Mamet in 1983. In this play, 4 A.M., a caller to a radio host insists that 2001 is based on Toynbee's writings.

Somehow the supposed connection between 2001 and Toynbee has given the caller the idea that he can somehow resurrect Jupiter's dead.

The Tiler's Identity Obscured Mamet says the play is entirely his own creation, and that the caller is a

figment of fiction, but in the same year a person identifying himself as James Morasco phoned Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Clark DeLeon and told DeLeon about a plan to resurrect people on Jupiter.

DeLeon recalls, “"He had this idea about people living, or being resurrected from the planet Jupiter.

Something about the molecules. It was just so wacky and out there. I believe my headline on it was, 'You wanna run that by me again?'"

There was a real James Morasco, a city social worker (another source identifies him as a carpenter), now deceased. His widow says her husband wasn't a kook and didn't have anything to do with the Toynbee tiles.

The Toynbee tile found in Santiago, Chile, sparked great interest in Toynbee-tile researchers by giving an address in Philadelphia. The residents at this address, however, deny any

Legend & Lore

The Take-Me-Home Waiting Room Magazine

Published monthly by Clear Lake Media, Inc. 881 Majela Lane, Hemet, CA 92543 951-213-9556 Website www.LegendandLoreMagazine.com Publisher & Editor-in-Chief Charles Wesley Orton charles@LegendandLoreMagazine.com Advertising Sales Call 951-213-9556 Subscriptions US$24/12 issues to U.S. address; US$30/12 issues to other countries.

Contents copyright 2010 by Clear Lake Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

knowledge of the tiles and (perhaps understandably) get quite upset when approached about the matter.

The identity of the Toynbee tiler might never be known. What we do know is the tiles seemed to start showing up in the early 1980s, just about the time of Mamet's play and DeLeon's mystery caller.

Paranoia Made Public So where does the paranoia come in? It's self-evident in messages on tiles adjunct to the main “Resurrect Dead” tiles.

A famous set of four such tiles, now obliterated by time and traffic, read as follows: “John Knight Ridder is the Philadelphia thug hellion Jew who'd hated this movements guts- for years- takes money from the Mafia to make the Mafia look good in his newspapers so he has the Mafia in his back pocket. John Knight sent the Mafia to murder me in May 1991 [illegible] journalists [illegible] then gloated to my face about death and Knight Ridder great power to destroy. In fact John Knight went into hellion since of joy over Knight-Ridder as great power to destroy.

“I secured house with blast doors and fled the country in June 1991.

“NBC attorneys journalists and security officials at Rockefeller Center fraudulently under the "Freedom of Information Act" all [illegible] orders NBC executives got the U.S. federal district attorney's office who got FBI to get Interpol to establish task force that located me in Dover England.

“Which back home Inquirer got union goons from their own employees union to [illegible] down a "sports journalist." Who with ease bashed in lights and windows of neighborhood car- as well as men outside my house. They are stationed there still waiting for me.

“NBC CBS group "W" Westinghouse, Time, Time Warner, Fox, Universal all of the "Cult of the Hellion" each one were Much worse than Knight-Ridder ever was mostly hellion Jews.

“When K.Y.W. and NBC executives told John Knight the whole town gloated in joyous fits on how their Soviet pals found a way to turn it into a...”

These messages and others indicate the Toynbee tiler was obsessed with the idea that the popular media was out to get him, as were various agencies of the U.S. government and the Soviet Union (even after the Soviet Union no longer existed as such).

Copycat Tiles Toynbee tiles have continued to appear after the death of purported tiler James Morasco in 2003. So maybe he isn't (or wasn't) the tiler.

But these newer tiles are often smaller than the older ones, and have some verbal and stylistic differences.

The “original” tiles all read: Toynbee Idea In Kubrick's 2001 Resurrect Dead on Planet Jupiter.

The new ones read: Toynbee Idea Movie 2001 Resurrect [sometimes Raise] Dead Planet Jupiter.

The size and differences suggests these new tiles are copycat tiles, so perhaps James Morasco was, indeed, the original Toynbee tiler.

How the Tiles are Made and Laid The tiles are all embedded in asphalt paving. Therein lies the creativity of their inventor. The tiles are asphalt linoleum with words carved into it.

The tile is wrapped in tarpaper and just laid on the street. With time, the cars that drive over the tile embed it into the asphalt and their tires wear away the tarpaper, revealing the message.

The Future of the Tiles Supposing that the original Toynbee tiler has died, and supposing that the copycat tillers will someday give up their endeavor, the Toynbee tiles will soon be a thing of the past, crumbled into oblivion by the passage of car tires. The only evidence of their existence will be photographs and account such as this one.

But the tiling method will live on, and is a unique--if somewhat short-lived--way of getting a message to pedestrians and bicyclists. One indicator of such a legacy is what is known as the “House of Hades” tiles, which recently surfaced (pun intended) in Buffalo, N.Y. The House of Hades tiles are constructed the same as the Toynbee tiles, out of linoleum, and laid in the streets in the same way. Once again, no one knows who is laying them, and so far no one has claimed credit for them. But there they are, a harbinger of a “new age” in graffiti.

Locations Where Toynbee Tiles Have Been Found Toynbee tiles have been found in about 24 U.S. cities and three South American cities. Here is a list: Philadelphia, Penn.

Pittsburgh, Penn.

New York City, N.Y. Baltimore, Md. Aberdeen, Md. Edgewood, Md. Washington, D.C. Columbus, Ohio Toledo, Ohio Cincinnati, Ohio Cleveland, Ohio Boston, Mass.

Atlantic City, N.J. Bellmawr, N.J. Chicago, Ill. Indianapolis, Ind. Noblesville, Ind. St. Louis, Mo. Kansas City, Mo. Detroit, Mich.

Mottville, Mich.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Buenos Aires, Argentina Santiago, Chile Tiles found in the following cities are considered by Toynbee-tile researchers to be copycat tiles: San Francisco, Calif.

Roswell, N.M. Buffalo, N.Y.