Chapter 9: The Skull of Doom, Part 9

WEBSITE ARTICLE of WARD COURIER

"Crystal Skulls and Short-Faced Bears"

Appearing in February 2007 at www.MasonWinfield.com under the pen name Mason Winfield

My last update discussed the upcoming film "10,000 BC" and its presumed subjects before it premiered. I have seen it by now. I see that I had guessed a few things right.

Advanced cultures involved in the flick were presumptively drawn from the Atlantis-cycle. There was a lot of what I call "Hollywoodizing" (stock plots and political preaching). They also left out the short-faced bear, my favorite Pleistocene predator. I guess they were on the wrong continent for the short-faced, a North American beastie. To their credit, they must have known it.

Let's see how prophetic I'll have been with the backdrop to the upcoming - and hopefully last-with-Harrison Ford - "Indiana Jones" flick, swashbuckling in on April 7 and clearly based on the Crystal Skulls.

Ah, the Indy-cycle! The films were delightful. And there was no one like Harrison - in 1980. Adventure-fantasy may be a lighthearted genre, but it could be argued that the hero of the "Indy" and "Star Wars" cycles was one of the great leading men of the twentieth century. But he has to stop doing these. I'm a little worried about the fourth Indy.

The three Indiana Jones films have had a predilection for occult totems, ancient mysteries, and Peace Corps-style locations. They did the Ark of the Covenant, some sacred Indian stones, and the Holy Grail. Other than the four totems of the Celtic gods - sword, stone, cauldron, and spear - or something related but Arthurian like the sword Excalibur, I couldn't think of a logical next step for them... Unless it was something Native American that had been waiting a long time for its popular treatment. They had to be scouting for ideas. The Skulls were there...

I circulated a proposal ten years ago and have no idea where it went. (Does this mean I get to sue somebody? More on that later.) If the names of a certain pair of agent-producers are involved anywhere in the Indy flick we may have to talk, but until then...

Let me confess that I am shocked that no one picked up on the Skull theme before. It's such a natural, and they've done so many other things to death. Why did they wait so long?

By the 1930s there was some collective oral mythology about the Skulls, a hierarchy of interdependent power-objects. (It could have been some inspiration to Tolkien's Ring-cycle.) I don't know of any source that put it all together, but by 2005 there were websites devoted to the Skulls. Some of them today are quite informative.

I say we start with the basics of the Skulls and then go on to the levels of the modern mythology - A, B, and C. For the basics:

There are thousands of crystal skulls in the world, most of them in Meso - "Middle," Central - America. Most of them are small - tennis-ball-sized - and commercially made within the last sixty years. They're toys and trinkets brought out for sale at "Day of the Dead" November 1 celebrations all over Latin America. (You can see them by the rack at festivals.) There are a handful of unique ones.

The skull was a symbol to most world-cultures. You find skull-cults on all the continents at a certain level of development, usually well before the urban stage. In fact, "the Cult of the Severed Head" seems to be something all societies displayed at some point, usually when they needed to express warrior-virtues. This, too, is natural. Body-parts of dreaded enemies are expressions of cultural and personal prowess. The heads and then skulls of victims or enemies were celebrated and even displayed.

It's remarkable, though, how big the skull became as an image to Central America. It is possibly the dominant symbol of Mesoamerican art. In cross-cultural terms, the skull is right up there with the familiar icons - crosses, spirals, roses, hearts, lotuses, stars-of-David, yin-yangs, and the rest - of Eurasian societies. So omnipresent is this image that, almost like one of our letters, it is used to form many of the characters in Maya writing, the only true writing system ever developed in Native America.

It's no exaggeration to say that the skull-symbol was an obsession for this part of the world when the Christians took over starting with Cortez in 1519. Cortez' snatch of Mexico has been seen as a rude power-grab, a thirst for gold. That it surely was. It was at least partly a spiritual culture-clash that could be likened to a Crusade. Mesoamerica's skull-cult was eventually fixed on a Christian holiday.

Europe's "All-Souls' Day" (October 31/November 1) was nothing to Mary, Moses, God, or Jesus. Developed well before the Conquest of Mexico, it was one of the substitutes the Church foisted on Europe in place of the pagan Halloween, the dominant festival to Celtic societies. It made Christianity all that much more palatable to the Dark Age Welsh, Scots, and Irish. A few centuries later it was music to the ears of the post-Conquest Mexicans. Their original festival could have been thousands of years old, but its date was about the start of August - another Celtic cross-quarter day (and the time of their festival Lugnnasa). This alone is the subject of a study - someone else's. Mexican imagery came down to the skull.

The trick is that almost every Mesoamerican working of the image looks cartoonish. Think of Disney; Corben; Moebius. For observation purposes, there was no shortage of real skulls - ahem - in known Meso societies. Maya. Teotihuacano. Toltec. And the Aztec, ah, yes. Racks of them. Still, the painted, sculpted, etched and bas-relief skulls came out brutally stylized. Some of the old ones were made of glassy crystal.

A few dozen of these crystal skulls are near-life-size and in museums. These were found in circumstances that lead us to believe they were significant totems to Mesoamerican societies before the Christians got there. They are made of different varieties of glassy quartz crystal, and they come in colors. Rose-quartz and gold-quartz come to mind. They were found or bought well before the mid-1900s craze of fake-manufacture. They are starting to get to be famous in New Age circles. Some have quite colorful nicknames: The Rose Skull, The Rainbow Skull, The Jaguar Skull(s), "ET," "Max..."

It's hard to tell for sure how many of the big ones we have in museums are truly ancient.

Then we come to the one you all know, "The Skull of Doom..." and the related cycle.