Fortean Frolics - The Legend of The Crystal Skulls

The Legend of The Crystal Skulls

The Legend of the Crystal Skulls

   The crystal skull legends can be found across the world, and many of them seem to be associated with a ‘Great Flood’ which various sources claim to have happened approximately 5300 years ago with the myth, if myth it is, of the
"thirteen crystal skulls" seeming to be the one that crops up the most in those various cultures - and the people that tell of them state that at a crucial moment in time the skulls, which are scattered across the lands will be brought together and usher in a new age.

   Each skull is said to hold a certain area of information, and when they are one day assembled in a circle with the largest, the thirteenth, which is said to be the collective consciousness of all existence, placed at the centre, their accumulative knowledge will be revealed to those who learn to communicate with them.  What this information may be we can only guess, and how it is used, hopefully for the good of all, will be a revelation worthy of any apocrypha.

    There is, of course, a problem with all the myths – one that sceptics are prone to wave like a battle flag, albeit it is surely one worth serious consideration, and that is one of authenticity for not one of the skulls to be found in museums across the world have been unearthed and discovered on any recognised archaeological expedition whilst those in private ownership have apparently never been allowed to be examined. Indeed, various scientific ‘authorities’ claim that they are all man made, for those that have been tested and scanned under electron microscopes are said to reveal tool marks made by diamond drills and even carborundum ( which was only discovered by Henri Moissan in 1883 whilst prospecting in Arizona ) which would render them all fakes unless they are mistaken in their diagnosis- on the other hand many believers argue the case for ‘ancient technologies’ ,  suppressed histories, and even extra-terrestrial intervention, pointing out that the vibrations created by modern tools would, in all likelihood, cause these solid quartz crystals to fracture if not even shatter.

   The British Museum and Paris's Musée de l'Homme have crystal skulls of their own to display and these do seem to lend weight to the argument of ‘fakes’. Records indicate that both have their origin with a French antiquities dealer Eugène Boban, who lived in Mexico City between 1860 and 1880 when by all reports there was a roaring trade in fake artefacts. The British Museum crystal skull came via New York's Tiffany's who had purchased it for £950  from  him , whilst the Musée de l'Homme's one was was  the result of a donation made  by Alphonse Pinart who had bought it from Boban also. Sceptics often point to the question of how he came by not one but two, and the previously mentioned examinations that have been carried out on them. Are they then intended purely as a metaphor that reality is a consciousness hologram through which we experience virtually, just tools intended to awaken human consciousness, deciphered by the  design of the crystal and the allegorical eyes, or are the sceptics wrong and they are in truth something far more ? 

   A good example is one sometimes known as the ‘Skull of Doom’, perhaps the most famous of them was ‘discovered’ in by Anna Mitchell-Hedges in 1924 who claimed that she unearthed the skull from beneath a ruined altar within the confines of a temple in Lubaantun, in British Honduras, or Belize as it is now known.  Made from a block of clear quartz it is surprisingly small, being only 5 inches high, 7 inches long and 5 inches wide. Anna claimed that she was "warned by locals at the time that it was used by Mayan priests to ‘will death’, hence its name.

   Frank Dorland, a freelance art restorer, had the Mitchell-Hedges skull in his care for a short time during the early 1970’s. He stated that after examining it closely that he believed it had been without the use of any metal tools, albeit some form of mechanical grinding had been used to create the teeth, and made a point of stressing the fact that, unlike so many other examples, the lower jaw was a separate piece. Speculating that it could have been created as far back as twelve thousand years ago he believed that diamonds had been to first cut it into a rough form, and that by using sand its final shape would have been the end product of between 150 to 300 years of  grinding and polishing .

    What are we left with? To gaze upon one within the confines of a museum cannot be enough to decide, and with those in private ownership so carefully hidden away it would be an incredible stroke of luck to be able to stare into its eyes and see for ourselves yet, with so many fakes out there I fear the truth of the matter will only ever be known to a select few- for the majority of us they can only remain a mystery until, if they are indeed real, they reveal their secrets at the time of their own choosing - if they ever decide we are ready for them to do so.

D W Storer  2018/19