Patricia Mercier (Alloa) has written six books about mind-body-spirit and ancient civilizations. She is an artist, lecturer, the co-director of The Sun & Serpent Maya Mysteries School in the UK and Spain, and a focal point for healing and shamanic training. She has studied and travelled widely in the lands of the Maya in Central America. In 1995 she received a shamanic Solar Initiation and in 2000 she was initiated into the Sovereign Solar Order of Chichén Itzá (Mexico) by shamans and elders using quartz crystal skulls. This complements her experiences as a crystal healer and yoga teacher. She lives with her husband Mikhail in southern Spain and the UK.
By the same author
Maya Shamans – Travellers in Time
Secretos de los Chamanes Mayas
The Maya End Times – a Spiritual Adventure
Chakras
The Chakra Bible
The Chakra Experience (workbook and CD)
This edition first published in the UK and USA 2011 by
Watkins Publishing, Sixth Floor, Castle House,
75-76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QH
Text Copyright © Patricia Mercier 2011
Patricia Mercier has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Designed and typeset by Paul Saunders
Printed and bound by Imago in China
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available
ISBN: 978-1-78028-135-3
www.watkinspublishing.co.uk
List of Plates
Introduction
1. The Cave of Skulls
2. Crystal Skull Initiations
3. The Teaching Tree
4. Crystal Skulls, Oracles of the Future
5. The Sacred Way and Time Future
6. Pyramids and Himalayan Skulls
7. Timelines
8. The Nine Lords of Time
9. The Visionaries
10. Crystal Mysteries
11. Maya Cosmovision and the Never-Ending Dream
12. Quantum Time
13. The Evolution of Spiritual Consciousness
Appendix 1. Days in the Maya Calendar and an Introduction to Maya Time
Appendix 2. Quartz Crystal Properties
Appendix 3. Himalayan/Mongolian/Chinese Crystal Skulls
Appendix 4. List of Crystal Skulls
Appendix 5. Star Johnsen-Moser’s Work with Max
Appendix 6. The Tibetan Crystal Skull Amar
Appendix 7. Practical Considerations
Bibliography
Acknowledgements and Contacts
1. Rare Tibetan crystal skull Amar, surrounded by twelve crystal skulls. From http://www.crystalskulls.com/gathering.html Photo © 2010 Lee Simmons, award-winning photographer and creator of the extraordinary ‘Secret World of Crystals’ oracle deck
2. Amakua and Xamuk’u. Photo © Star Johnsen-Moser
3. Rare Tibetan crystal skull Amar. Photo © crystalskulls.com
4. AsKaRa. Photo © M Baker, courtesy of AsKaRa’s guardians
5. Author and husband. Photo © M Baker
6. The Sun God Kinich Ahau breathing and speaking. Photo © M Baker
7. Ball-player’s skull speaks within the ball as he achieves cosmic consciousness. Photo © M Baker
8. Vision serpent arising during ceremony. Photo © M Baker
9. Compassion. Photo © J Bennett
10. Early Maya carving of Sun God Kinich Ahau. Photo © M Baker
11. Hunbatz Men. Photo © M Baker
12. Jomcata Mayab. Photo © Lia Scallon
13. Red obsidian late-Neolithic shamanic tribal skull. Photo © LionFire
14. Crystal skull guardians presenting their skulls at a Maya initiatory ceremony. Photo © M Baker
15. Star Johnsen-Moser and Xa-mu-k’u. Photo © Alex Domingo
16. Xa-mu-k’u. Photo © Star Johnsen-Moser
17. The labyrinth – Temple 19, Yaxchilán, Mexico. Photo © M Baker
I got up early and looked across the valley. Some 6okm away the sea at Malaga was touched with a silver streak. In the distance, the smoky-grey Andalucian mountains formed a magical silhouette against a blazing orange ball of fire as Great Father Sun rose into a violet dawn sky.
Standing quietly watching, breathing in the essence of this spectacular sunrise quickly melting into rose-gold, the clouds twisted into the shape of a serpent undulating across the sky. Immediately other wisps of fine cloud gathered into the image of a skull just behind the serpent’s head – an excellent portent! Today I was to speak to my publisher and, little was I to know this morning, this book was to be conceived.
‘What is your fascination with crystal skulls?’ people often ask me. Finding no immediate or rational answer to this question, I embarked upon a quest to find out. My deep experiences and traditional initiations with crystal skulls had begun in 1995 when Maya elders in Yucatán, Mexico, invited me to take part in ceremonies to manifest spiritual energies for the coming new age of the Maya, connected with the 2012 predictions and their calendars.
By handling and especially meditating with the skulls I underwent many transformations. I discovered that life-sized crystal skulls, particularly those carved from quartz, reveal to us the presence of a higher consciousness which, with focused intention, we can seek to embody in our own lives. Through what I learned I now believe the crystal skulls are a deep-memory trigger, urging us to use that consciousness in ways that animals cannot. Because of our place in species evolution, our development enables us to rise above both individual and immediate needs, to conceive a bigger picture of life.
Unlike other creatures, humans can study the past to learn from it. We can look forwards into the future to plan and make choices which affect all life-forms. We have the ability to give ourselves a better quality of life and, most importantly, leave something worthwhile for our children. This enables us to value the present moment, to appreciate our interactions with one another, with our wider environment and, along the way, it teaches us how to care for our planet.
I will always remember a little shiver passing down my spine as I heard the following Native American wisdom at a gathering of indigenous elders from the whole of the Americas. It is vital that we cherish the Earth. We must leave her in a better way than we found her for the sake of our children, our grandchildren and our grandchildren’s children, seven generations into the future.
My journeys took me to wild and exotic places where I studied with wisdom-keepers and shamans. In ancient temples and the remote rainforest I received a number of initiations with crystal skulls and, as a practising crystal healer, I have come to understand the different vibrational qualities of crystals and stones. I have seen amazing jade skulls and other ancient artefacts recently discovered in the Himalayas between Tibet and China, and I have wondered at the huge pyramids in central China.
I asked Great Spirit – the words I use for God or Creative Intelligence – to show me connections between crystal skulls found in very different parts of the world, from Tibet to Mexico. Even in London, in a section of the British Museum, I gazed upon a stunningly clear quartz crystal skull said to have unusual properties, if rumours of its emission of sounds, light and movement are to be believed.
People seeing crystal skulls for the first time find them either spooky or fascinating – it’s hardly surprising that few appear to be indifferent to them. Throughout the world are a number of collectors or, as they prefer to be called, guardians of crystal skulls. Occasionally, permission is given for their skulls to be handled by people with psychic abilities or to be placed upon a modern altar as a meditation focus. Sometimes these skulls are used as channels for spiritual, crystal or vibrational energy healing.
Crystal skulls, ancient and contemporary, are attracting a great deal of interest because of their apparent connection with the Maya people of Central America. I shall explain the reason for this as I take you with me on my colourful journeys to exotic places and inner realms. Along the way we will meet myth and magic and their companions on the flip side of the coin, history and science.
Imagine that you could look into the past or have the vision to navigate time future. It is not such an impossible idea since some of our ancestors believed that past and future are all around us in ever-expanding circles, and fully accessible within the present. Closely associated with Time are the images of skulls to be found in Central America, where real skulls are even gaily decorated for Day of the Dead celebrations. Death and regeneration, symbolized by the skull, is often accompanied by a ‘vision serpent’ of ancestral life-energy.
I have chosen to invoke myths within this story about my quest that are primarily of rebirth, the future and co-creation. Imagine you are standing on the flat top of a towering stepped pyramid. Around you as far as you can see is a vast ocean of green vegetation. Occasionally a flock of bright yellow parakeets flits across the top of this tree canopy and a lone howler monkey begins its unearthly cries. As if synchronized by an unseen hand, conch shell trumpets sound out while clouds of fragrant copal tree-resin smoke billow around us.
A shaman-priest arrayed in a jaguar skin cloak and ceremonial headdress of quetzal-bird feathers steps forward. He is accompanied by a priestess carrying a sacred bundle that she carefully unwraps upon an ancient stone-carved altar, setting a mysterious smoky quartz crystal skull upon it. The shaman reverently lifts the skull up to acknowledge Great Father Sun, then walks towards you. This is your invitation to begin a quest with crystal skulls and look through them at worlds beyond worlds.
From the minutiae of cells to the vastness of space, everything is interrelated. What happens to one fragment affects all. But in addition let us look more closely, for the phenomenon of life, by its nature, needs to create a vehicle, a body to use, and it is morphogenesis, the dividing and structuring of growing cells, that builds the vehicle. When it is ready for ongoing sentient life, a living impulse enters in the form of light-encodements to begin the communication processes that spark between cells. This is just like building a house, but until it has life in it that house doesn’t become a home. It needs a family and it needs a purpose – until then it is but an empty shell. In morphogenesis, cells join together into a pattern which, as it gains in complexity, evolves into more and more complex life-forms as the process itself evolves.
Science has now gone beyond Darwinian theories to explain evolution. The existence of crystal skulls causes us to confront within our own skulls the issue as to whether humankind has evolved as far as evolution can go.
However, at this pivotal point a higher creative intelligence exists with a plan for the positive advancement of life. Suppose this higher intelligence wanted to direct an impulse to strengthen the creative morphogenetic fields of life at a given time in our history. Where would this impulse be placed? Not, I suggest, in the minds of animals, that are unlikely to plan or evolve, but in humans. It would be placed into the seat of our consciousness, our minds, our skulls.
What better way to convey this message than with uniquely carved skulls, fashioned from a solid piece of sparkling crystal, to remind us of this? Skulls that would ‘talk’ or ‘sing’ directly to the consciousness inside our own heads; skulls that would emerge to coincide with humanity’s development of silica-based technology – computers and complex instruments – to enhance brain power. The message would be embedded in a material that would survive intact over aeons of earth changes, a material such as stone or crystal – called ‘frozen light’ by the ancestors – and greatly valued for its beauty.
Some of the most stunning and powerful crystal skulls are carved from living, growing crystal called silicon dioxide, a very pure form of quartz, which is identical to that now artificially grown for use in microchips. Today we use these chips in computers for communication and a myriad of applications in the functioning of complex systems or machinery. We are even building intelligent computers that learn as they work. They replicate the morphogenesis of growing cells by self-selecting specific cells for specific purposes and then evolving that purpose into the next stage.
At this point in history we can pose two fundamental questions. Is it possible to concentrate our life-force sufficiently to further evolve our human species into a higher state of consciousness? Can we manifest a realization that evolution is no longer restricted to the three physical dimensions?
The answer to these questions fits like a key into our own skulls. My quest suggests we are the designated life-form which can turn that key, because we are the only fully conscious, upright, two-legged creatures on Earth. If we get it right we are promised a new rose-gold dawn. Indications from many quarters imply that, at the present time, we are standing, both watching and creating the dawn of super-intelligence. Such a dawning would not have been possible even 100 years ago, around the time when the first extraordinary crystal skull was found on an archaeological dig in present-day Belize by Anna Mitchell-Hedges.
It is this precise window in time which presents us with unimaginable challenges and incredible rewards. All the signs are positive, if we make the right choices, and if we heed the wisdom imparted to humanity by the Maya calendar-keepers of Central America, who maintain that we are presently within a ‘Shift of the Ages’. The shift involves the fulfilment of ancient and archetypal myths on Day Zero of a calendar count of 5,125 years, part of a larger cycle of 25,920 years. (An introductory overview of the Mayan calendar, dates and day names is to be found in Appendix One.)
These myths speak of the return of Ku-kul-kaan, the Mayan name for Quetzalcoatl, the prototype enlightened human who, it is said, will return from the east on a raft of serpents. The symbolic promise embedded into human consciousness so long ago is that we can all create a higher life-form than that which currently lives on Earth. In consequence the development due to occur is a quantum leap forward into another type of evolution – let us call it ‘spiritual’ – not into ‘God’, our name for a deity, but into the actual mind-source fields of Creation.
Look deeper into the enigma of the crystal skulls and you will find they are here to remind us of something extraordinary, that they can take us into other-dimensional realities. Their subliminal messages demonstrate that we have a unique entranceway being shown to us beyond our five senses, beyond our extra-sensory perceptions, and the only requirement is to focus on a heartfelt intention to evolve thought processes within our own skulls. That is where the entranceway exists, and the key turns because therein lies the seat of consciousness.
Through my quest I found that we are very close to finding the truth. Yet this truth is laid before us not only on Earth but beyond this planet and beyond the stars. It is hidden in the culmination of ancient myth, lines of Time and archaic shamanic practices as well as in modern quantum theory.
The questions seem tantalizing. But the answers are simple and don’t need complex calculations or scientific evidence. Crystal skulls are both a key and an answer. With their clarity we can unify consciousness deep within our own skulls. We become a focal point for the living consciousness-field that is all around us and for our internal consciousness. They then expand together at will, to connect with an extraordinary superconsciousness arena – which is the unity of consciousness – and is all One.
So enjoy my story and the adventures and the wisdom teachings it contains. But before you read on, close your eyes and, in the blackness, see a sparkling life-sized quartz crystal skull in a field of stars, and ask what it has to teach you.
•
The destiny of man is in his own soul.
– HERODOTUS, ‘THE FATHER OF HISTORY’, 494–23 BCE
Some things come back to haunt us – whether we are dead or alive.
Awakening from a long, long sleep, I look around the cave and call out two Mayan words, meaning ‘jaguar star’, the name of my quartz crystal skull: ‘Balaam Ek, Balaam Ek!’ Where is Balaam Ek, my beautiful and prophetic crystal skull, that I hid down here?
There’s no answering voice. Just the silence of the grave – for there is nothing but human bones. A large quantity of them are arrayed around sparkling stone walls together with a dozen or so skulls, all turned to soft chalky stone by the constant drip of calcite-laden water.
It seems I’m trapped with these bony ancestors whether I like it or not, and it’s going to be difficult to get out. I shift my position slightly, holding my head, which is pounding with pain and echoing with strange information.
Everything I saw, was it a dream? Did I explore the magical Maya ruins of Piedras Negras in the Guatemalan rainforest? Had the gunmen pursued us on the Rio Usumascinta as we sped away from the ruins in a motorboat? Did I really present the thirteenth crystal skull at a grail mass in the Heart of the Earth? Did I really take shelter in the cave at Tulum in Mexico, by the soft, warm Caribbean, as the Earth changes began and the sea churned into a tempestuous vision of hell?
Slowly I recalled … I was no longer in Mexico. Only three or four hours ago, against all advice, I had ventured into this cave system alone. After that, something happened. I couldn’t immediately recall what it was. I looked around again with the light from a match and found my head-torch. I was equipped with all the right gear and ropes, but I knew it was going to be a tight squeeze to clamber back to the surface, and my head was pounding. Despite wearing a hard hat, I realized I had somehow managed to knock myself out when I slipped and fell.
The cave is hidden high in the mountains of the Sierra in southern Spain, where my family frequently explored the rough terrain below the peaks. Always one for taking risks, I had now put myself in the position of contemplating the impermanence of life in this deep subterranean chamber, as I moved in and out of consciousness and vivid dreams.
Yet, awakening, I knew the ongoing story was waiting to be told, a story of how we are obsessed with death and skulls, holding as they do the essence of consciousness. I respectfully picked up one of the human skulls sitting in the dust alongside me. With the aid of my head-torch, with renewed interest I gazed around at other skulls of Neolithic ‘ancestors’ interred here. Some of them were of a strange, rather elongated shape. Why this was I didn’t know.
My son had discovered the cave system some weeks previously. On that occasion we had walked a long way and thick grey banks of moisture-laden cloud were beginning to spin across the mountaintop, causing tiny wisps of pale numinous cloud to escape and scroll softly around the jagged rocks. Suddenly we found a hidden entrance, one we had not explored before, amongst yellow flowering gorse, rock roses and a tangle of prickly sprawling vegetation.
With the weather deteriorating we cautiously decided to leave, agreeing to return when the sun was shining. It’s never a good idea to venture into caves when it’s wet outside because of the risk of sudden underground torrents or rocks shifting. Exploration could wait for another day.
For now, all I knew was that I needed to clamber out of the cave, leave the ancestors’ bones in their resting place and get back to the land of the living. With this accomplished, I started wondering about my fascination with skulls while I finally sat, dusty and tired, back in our house. As my husband Mikhail poured me a refreshing glass of deep red vino tinto, an old memory tried to surface.
My head was still pounding. The colour of the wine seemed to indicate blood, or a sacrament. Was it something mentioned in the Bible, something about Golgotha, ‘the place of the skull’, that was tantalizing me? I remembered that, as the Cross is to Christianity, the World Tree is the basis of Maya teachings from Central America, carrying many esoteric interpretations.
Taking another sip of the blood-red wine, I reflected on why people have a kind of morbid fascination with skulls. To many they are really scary. In a pile of ancient human bones, the skull is the most enduring part of the body. It has had magical properties attributed to it from time immemorial, being revered as a remnant of the soul of the ancestors, used as a drinking cup for dubious rituals and as an emblem for death and for secret societies. Beneath some old cities such as Paris and Naples, catacombs stretch for miles with thousands of skulls of former inhabitants interred in them.
Deep esoteric studies always seem to point in the same direction, suggesting that the skull is sacred because, in life, the head contains our brain, consciousness and even our soul. This is hardly surprising, for it is the location of the most evolved physiological energy in the human body, as well as the chakra energy centres of the ‘third eye’ and ‘crown’ in yogic systems. The chakras are foci of subtle vibrational energy developed in Indian esoteric practices, especially tantric yoga. It is now widely recognized that these two chakras are associated with sleep patterns and enhancing the ability to meditate.
Once over my shock and fall in the cave, a little voice inside my head emerged time and again, saying, ‘The skulls have something to tell me.’ So I decided to set aside a few hours to prepare and go into deep meditation, specifically focusing on the enigmatic skulls carved from crystal that had recently entered my life. I settled down to ask whether and how crystal skulls could bring a new spiritual dynamic into human consciousness.
My mind had focused on human consciousness before. I am involved in numerous aspects of healing, environmental and social affairs and so I reviewed the critical choices and challenges the human race is encountering. I highlighted areas of mental and physical changes, psycho-spiritual insights, environmental awareness, political and social changes leading to peaceful coexistence with all beings. Melding all this together, a holistic vision emerges that places a value on the interdependence of all life to co-create a balanced future.
Holding these reflective guidelines in my heart my process gradually deepened into meditation. I became aware I was being prompted by the crystal skulls to remember how we feel when in a divine loving situation, or when having a peak experience such as an enlightenment moment or a near-death experience. In these heightened states we can transmute our world. When truly ‘in love’ with someone there is no separation, only an enhanced superconsciousness that quickly merges into a consciousness of Oneness.
Eventually I returned to normal perceptions. I thanked all the skulls – the old human skulls from the cave and the crystal skulls that I knew about. Sometimes I began my meditations by looking at a photograph of one of the ancient crystal skulls. At the time I wasn’t using a real crystal skull, so a photo gave me a deep connection to their essence. The crystal skulls seem to lead us from the everyday into the psycho-spiritual realms. Expect to be transformed! Earth ‘guardianship’ and personal energy-development go hand in hand and cannot be separated.
During quiet times I often remembered my very first experience with a special skull. It was carved from clear crystal, sitting shimmering in the centre of a circle of students at a crystal healing training in England some years earlier. Although much smaller than life-size and probably newly made in Brazil or Taiwan, it had a certain presence, and I came to understand that it was capable of being a transmitter of mysterious healing energies.
This crystal skull often ‘spoke’ to me and I even found that I could pick up something about its recent history. The crystal carver had put good intentions into making a skull from a specially chosen, unflawed block of rock crystal. This was important. It was carved with the love of his craft. Of course he had used power tools and grinders with diamond tips to do the laborious parts of the work, but each time he touched the crystal his intention was that of perfection and beauty in the object he was making. He encoded his thoughts and ideas into the emerging crystal skull as he worked. When finished, feeling pleased with his labours, he held the sparkling object up to the light to see its clarity and the inclusions in the crystal of a fine golden rutile mineral (dubbed ‘angel hair’) which shone like gold. He then set it upon a shelf with a number of others that he had created.
Once this crystal skull was purchased and in a new guardian’s hands, it was treated to all sorts of beneficial rituals to wash, psychically cleanse and empower it to be a conductor of healing energy. It sat in the centre of the circle and radiated light to us all. Though it was a recently-made skull its presence was tangible and its potential untapped.
In some ways a contemporary crystal skull such as this is preferable to an old one since it is ready and waiting to be ‘encoded’ (programmed) with all manner of positive information. Exactly what this is depends upon how the healer wants to use it and what the crystal is able to communicate to them in a two-way contact. Often it’s as though the crystal is simply waiting to be woken up to its true purpose – rather like the way we humans sometimes need to be prodded and prompted to wake up to our own true soul-purpose.
I learned many useful techniques during my crystal healer training, yet something within me remained unfulfilled. At that time, with pressures of work, I felt I was not allowing deeper mysteries into my life. It seemed as if the little sparkling crystal skull in the healing circle was prompting me to do something about this, and so I started to question what really inspired me.
One day I asked Mikhail, ‘Why do I always seem to be attracted to crystal secrets and caves?’ This was more a rhetorical question than a real question for him.
‘Because you are a Scorpio, of course,’ he replied. ‘You can’t help being drawn into mysteries – you can rise to great heights of understanding as an eagle, the alter-ego of a scorpion, or you can sink into exploration of the darker arts of magic.’
My stinging scorpionic tail began to rise with his assessment, but Mikhail, a Gemini, recognized this and began his flight before the sting could do its work. He continued, ‘But you have an enquiring mind and want to know how and why the past can inform humanity’s future. You want to learn more about subtle energies. I sense that you have a part to play in advancing human understanding of ancient crystal skulls.’
‘Wow, that’s a big statement!’ I exclaimed. Little did I know what he meant, or what adventures and intrigue I would encounter as I set out to discover more.
That night I remember drifting into a state of drowsiness, focusing my inner mind. I filled the cavity of my own skull with a crystalline frequency, visualizing it streaming in as liquid golden light. It flowed into all the little grooves and indentations in my mind so that it became like a shell of thin crystal within my head. It was a technique I was to employ on other occasions if I wanted to connect to crystal energy.
That same night I dreamt of a crystal skull. It shone with a golden light but inside it was a soft pink rose quartz colour, conveying a gentle feminine-like essence. I knew she had appeared in order to lead me on a quest. She would guide me as a ‘spirit crystal skull’ and perhaps one day I would even encounter her in the real world.
As my quest deepened, I found there were all kinds of crystal skulls, from miniature to larger than life-size ones. Some keepers of these skulls allow them to be used in meditation or to be held by people able to obtain information from them. Others only draw on them for healing, ‘readings’ or in ceremonies.
Meanwhile I established that crystal skulls are mainly associated with two continents – the Himalayan regions of Asia and the lands of the Maya people in Central America. Just a few that have been revealed to humanity today are classed as truly ancient – for example skulls which have acquired names such as Mitchell-Hedges Skull of Love, Max, Sha Na Ra, Mahasamatman and Synergy.
When examined with electron scanning microscopes and other modern technology ancient skulls are found to be entirely hand-carved and estimated to be over 1,500 years old. The problem with ascertaining the age of crystal skulls is that they cannot be carbon-dated like other artefacts such as pottery or bones. The source of the crystal can usually be established through scientific analysis by examining its properties and matrix structure, but the age of the carving simply does not reveal its secrets.
What can be ascertained is that numerous skulls were made using primitive techniques that left microscopic irregular groove cuts. They are regarded as ‘old’ when they are between 100 and 1,500 years of age. Examples are Amar, a skull from the Himalayas, the fine British Museum Skull and the Paris Skull. Finally the classification ‘contemporary’ is given to new skulls carved in the last 100 years using modern tools such as electric rotary diamond saws. Nowadays quartz is even melted at high temperature and moulded into shape.
When microscopically examined, contemporary skulls have uniform miniscule grooves that easily identify the fact they were carved with power tools. Many contemporary crystal skulls are made of the finest pure rock crystal mined in Brazil, where detailed and skilful carving is done, whilst some are made in countries such as Germany and China.
Today skulls of diverse materials are readily available in many shapes and sizes. It is common to see clear quartz, amethyst, smoky quartz, yellow citrine or rose quartz as well as black obsidian, labradorite (a bluish stone with rainbows), jade of all colours and lesser-known minerals. Any mineral hard enough to take cutting and grinding without shattering has been carved into skulls in recent times. The ready availability of crystal skulls has somehow caught the imagination of the public. It seems not to be a random occurrence, since some unknown force is encoding new skulls with the information of our age, just as the older ones were encoded.
Crystal skulls pose many questions. I was to discover several complications during my quest. For example, skulls originating from the Himalayas and Tibet had a different historic fate to skulls from the Americas. For the most part they were lost for aeons in mountain caves or kept hidden away in monasteries. Their stories didn’t pass into folklore like those from Mayan speaking Central America. This is why so many people have been surprised that crystal skulls have been discovered in Tibet, Mongolia and China, seemingly well removed from the influences of the Mayalands.
This convinced me that there must have been connections between diverse peoples in the distant past. Historians theorize that, towards the end of the last Ice Age (about 10,000 BCE) people walked over a land bridge across the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska. According to this theory, these migrants eventually populated the whole of the American continent, North and South.
One day, Mikhail and I sat beneath the hot afternoon sun and chatted about this. ‘Mikhail, I think that, in far-off times, there was more contact between civilizations than we give credit for today. Some Maya people still speak of their ancestors having lived in Tibet and Atlantis whilst affirming, like other peoples, that the original impulse for life came from the stars.’
‘Well, their wisdom-holders say that, following the Atlantean destruction, one group of survivors went north to become known as the Hopi, and another group remained in Central America to become the ancestors of the people there today. You remember how our Maya teachers, the hau’k’in Solar Priests, call four of their legendary founders of civilization “the Four Balaams”, who came from the constellation of the Pleiades? They say they were the first interdimensional travellers to arrive on Earth.’
We had seen depictions of these beautiful interdimensional beings at Ek Balaam in Mexico, carved in stone. As if to indicate their god-like status, they stood there with wings and curiously elongated heads.
‘Isn’t it exciting?’ I exclaimed. ‘The same head shape is portrayed on Egyptian pharaohs, notably Akhenaten, as well as on Maya rulers and Andean mummies. Strangely, it is also like one or two of the skulls we found in the cave in Andalucía. It’s popularly referred to as an extraterrestrial head since this shape does not fit into accepted morphology or the known development of humans.’
‘A lot of people are sceptical about star travellers, forgotten civilizations and Atlantis …’ Mikhail said, pouring me something to drink.
‘I know, but I have strange dreams, even daydreams, where an odd collective memory keeps arising. These memories surface, it seems from nowhere, like the bubbles in this glass of soda, but now I nurture them with my research into myth and legend and absorb them with excitement.
‘D’you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to seek out and ask crystal skull guardians what they know. I’m going to ask them to consult their crystal skulls, asking three simple questions, starting with something that really intrigues me about the fact that crystal skulls come from two continents.
‘I want to ask them what the connection is between the ancient skulls from Central America and the Himalayas. Then I’ll ask what the role of crystal skulls has been in the past and what their role is today, and finally I’ll ask how the crystal skulls are connected with the evolution of spiritual consciousness.’
I thought the questions were simple, but the answers, like the nature of crystal itself, turned out to be highly complex and multifaceted.
•
The day science begins to show an interest in non-physical phenomena, it will advance more in a single decade than it has in all the centuries of its existence.
— NIKOLA TESLA, PHYSICIST
I began questioning some of the crystal skull guardians about the extraordinary information they were sharing with me, then my curiosity led me into an interesting encounter with a shamanic teacher in Britain. It involved intense secret ceremonies with crystals, resulting in my understanding some Egyptian past-life connections. During these encounters I held a large piece of double-terminated quartz crystal, with a natural point at each end. This particular crystal is also a ‘timekeeper’ and ‘phantom’, having multiple layers of growth within it which make up the shape of a pyramid pointing in two directions. This gives the holder the ability to travel forward or back in time. Perhaps my exploits were overseen by an ancient Egyptian God of Time, since Horus is the name that this crystal had acquired!
My esoteric studies then moved to the enigmatic indigenous Maya people of Central America. I became fascinated by their culture, whose deep mythic roots extend back to ‘the time before time began’. Their traditional teachings have barely changed over the centuries.
Soon after encountering their complex system of calendars, my husband and I began keeping the day-count with the sacred Tzolk’in calendar, called Chol q’ij in Guatemala. Unlike our Gregorian calendar of 365 days, this one has a different count of days. It is a living story that moves within other cycles of time. The Tzolk’in is widely used by present-day Maya in its pure traditional form, and it is based upon periods of 13 days that interlock with cycles of 20 days, together yielding a longer cycle of 260 days (13 × 20).
My husband and I became Solar Initiates, able to pass this knowledge on to others through the Maya Mysteries School we founded at the invitation of the Yucatec elders. Over the years we were fortunate to be initiated by Maya shamans who followed ancient ways, seeding little gems of wisdom within us that are still germinating. The shamans are adept at channelling or directing solar encodements through crystal skulls during their ceremonies in ancient temples. One shaman and ‘day-keeper’, Hunbatz Men of the Itzá Maya tradition, taught us to use a beautiful little prayer whilst sounding the Mayan name for the Sun at dawn:
Father Sun give me strength.
Father Sun make me wise.
Father Sun make me into a seed.
Father Sun make me eternal.
The year 1995 found us preparing to go to the Yucatán peninsula of Mexico to take part in energy-activations to re-open the cosmic communication in the ancient cities of the area. These places are referred to by the authorities as zona arqueológica, and by the Maya wisdom teachers as sacred cities where the ancestors’ voices whisper in the trees and their breath lives on, occasionally stirring the dust of ages into mini-whirlwinds.
This conveys a very different sentiment to that of an archaeological zone. It means that an energy impulse still beats at their heart, waiting to be sensed and absorbed. We felt this opportunity should not to be missed since Mikhail had travelled extensively in these lands some 20 years previously and he had been seduced by the beauty and magic of what he beheld.
‘Imagine,’ he said, ‘what these ruined cities once looked like. I’ve visited a lot of special places that, on first sight, appear to be mostly grey stones standing sentinel over the dust of long-dead rulers.
‘When the Conquistadors arrived, chaos and cruelty engulfed Central America. The unique cosmic connections the Maya held were submerged. Nearly all of the ancient crystal skulls in the Americas were lost, but their power was not forgotten. Stories about them passed down through the local Maya as living legends.
‘Hence the delight, awe and excitement of archaeological explorers when Anna Mitchell-Hedges found a life-size quartz crystal skull glittering in the rubble of a tomb in the remote ruined city of Lubaantún in Belize. It was her 17th birthday, in 1924. Some time later, as this dig continued, the skull’s jawbone was found.’
‘Listen to this, from Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ father’s autobiography,’ I said. ‘ “The Maya workers performed ceremonies, rituals and dances in front of the skull in the firelight,” and, “It was as though a message of joy had been sent out across the Mayan lands.” ’
Anna’s crystal skull was to become the best-known of all the skulls because she allowed sensitive people to sit with it, or meditate, and for it to be scientifically tested. This is one of the few skulls that is anatomically correct, with the exception of the teeth, which look non-human. From drawings and models made by forensic experts came agreement that it was typical of a female aged 25 to 29, of Meso-American descent.
Many dubious stories grew up around its discovery and what could be seen in the skull. At one time it was referred to as ‘The Skull of Doom’. Anna said that, in the past, this precious skull was used in healing or to will death. It was able to transfer power between an old shaman and his younger apprentice as the older shaman was dying. By lying down with this object, the young man would then arise with all the older man’s knowledge.
This caused me to recall something that author Drunvalo Melchizedek mentioned in his book Serpent of Light. While he held a crystal skull, imagery appeared to him of how they were used by the Maya and other ancient races. Apparently a person was chosen at birth and specially trained to capture the essence of the time in which they lived. Eventually, when their knowledge was complete, they would willingly take a deadly overdose of natural psychedelic drugs, withdrawing their life-force and spirit from their body and transferring it to the crystal skull. It would then become their ‘body’ for the next few thousand years until such time as another initiate was ready to encode the skull with their spiritual vibrations and perceptions.
After Anna’s death her crystal skull passed into the safekeeping of Bill Homann, and today it is called, more appropriately, ‘The Skull of Love’, but it is still the subject of much intrigue.
Carole Davis is a trance medium who worked extensively with the Mitchell-Hedges skull. She said, ‘I do not know why the Mitchell-Hedges skull became the icon it is today. Is it because it is a beautiful work of art in its own right, or is it the information it transmits? Whatever it is, the Mitchell-Hedges skull has become the benchmark against which all other crystal skulls are measured. Not bad for a skull once called “The Skull of Doom”!’
Tzik’inT’zolk’inMen (Men