Chapter 12: The Skull of Doom, Part 12

WEBSITE ARTICLE of WARD COURIER

"The Skull of Doom"

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

[I wrote my first article in this series about the film "10,000 BC" and its presumed subjects before it premiered. I see that I'd guessed a few things right. Let's see how prophetic I'll have been with the upcoming "Indiana Jones" flick, lashing-and-crashing in sometime soon and clearly based on the Crystal Skulls.]

My last update surveyed the general background to the world's crystal skulls. Now we come to the one you all know, "The Skull of Doom."

You know the one I mean. Otherwise called "the Mitchell-Hedges Skull," it's the glassy-clear crystal skull, almost perfectly lifelike, whose image you've seen countless times in books and on TV. It was the trademark image in the credits of Arthur C. Clarke's fine old TV program Mysterious World. Doubtless it's a major player in the new Indiana Jones film.

We call this "the Mitchell-Hedges Skull" because it first surfaced to history in the possession of British adventurer F. A. (Frederick Albert) "Mike" Mitchell-Hedges (1882-1959). He claimed to have found it in 1927 during an expedition at the Mayan site of Lubantuun in Belize. We have the Skull, all right, but other questions remain.

The circumstances under which Mitchell-Hedges' expedition turned up their Skull were dodgy, to say the least. Mitchell-Hedges was no archaeologist, and the world's finest crystal skull was an unlikely object to have been left behind when its owners packed up and moved out. It was said to have been found by Mitchell-Hedges' adopted daughter Anna (nicknamed "Sammy"). She was drawn to it in a flash of insight as if it spoke to her.

The team didn't spend much time at that site, so Mitchell-Hedges was either psychically guided to that spot, mighty lucky, or... he brought the Skull with him and faked the find. Bavarian glass-blowers of the day were doing some amazing things that looked just as miraculous as that Skull. Mitchell-Hedges could surely have met some of them or seen their work. Furthermore, the Skull didn't surface officially till some time later. A funny discovery all the way round.

However Mitchell-Hedges came by it, the Skull is a storied object. To summarize the folklore in bullet-form, the Skull may be:

- A healing object. (It can cure what ails you.)

- A prophetic object. (It enhances ESP and prophecy, possibly with just a touch.)

- A big crystal computer, capable of imparting the knowledge of the ages. (Our own computers work on quartz chips, don't they?)

- A weapon. (It can curse or kill, possibly with a sudden beam of light or energy, at the behest of a power-person or possibly its own "will." It could become a magical laser.)

- Incredibly ancient. (As in, "Atlantean.")

- Extraterrestrial. (As in, from the Pleiades.)

- The "ruler" of the other "true" - original - skulls. (In one version of the mythology there are thirteen of these skulls, possibly all in Mesoamerica, possibly distributed among all major Native American culture-groups and language-families.)

This latter point deserves a bit of comment. It's possible that the Skulls were exclusively Mesoamerican objects. Sure Skull-possessors would seem to be the Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacanos, and through them - or the Toltec - the newcoming Aztec. (Why Cortez and 500 Spanish peasants could knock off an empire of millions could be because the Skull had decided to go dead for the Aztec.) There should have been at least several Skulls in "Meso," as they slang it, a part of the world in which both crystal-traditions and skull-cults were well established.

But there could have been a pan-American distribution. In that motif, several power-Skulls should have been in South America, all interdependent magical objects. I imagine there would be a couple Skulls among the Andean societies, and surely one in the Amazon, whose cultures were far more developed than anyone had suspected till recently.

The rest of the skulls would have been in North America. The Iroquois or their ancestors doubtless had one, as did the Hopewell, the Anasazi, possibly the Algonquin... I hear there was a crystal tradition among the Iroquois. Surely the Confederacy had one of the Skulls. Or they would have taken it from someone else had they wanted.

But one thing stands out: When all the Skulls are brought together, it's supposed to be a major moment for humanity. Whatever that might mean... Maybe the "Indy" film will tell us.

What were these thirteen original Skulls like? Were they primitive one-piece jobs like all the known ones except "the Skull of Doom"? Were they anatomically correct masterworks, jaw and all, of different colors and functions? (Quartz crystal comes in several shades.) Is the Skull of Doom, therefore, the Great Skull? How many "real" Crystal Skulls do we have, anyway? Do we have only the knock-offs? Do we even have the top dog? Could it be that the world has only one authentic Skull? How would we know for sure?

There are a handful of big skulls in museums and private collections that people sense may be special; but they're hard to verify. None of them were found on true archaeological digs. They didn't even start turning up until the early 1900s. Could it be that none of them are historic artifacts any older than a century? Is it likely that none of these are anything other than rude copies of the originals?

Testing seems to reveal that a few of the big ones in museums may be at least a few centuries old. But there's enough controversy to go around about a single one of them, "The Skull of Doom," to say nothing of its finder, Mitchell-Hedges. With him the real questioning begins.

Mitchell-Hedges was a character. You could write a book about him. Actually someone, did: Mitchell-Hedges himself. His James Bond-ish titled autobiography, "Danger, My Ally" came out in 1964. I hope he turns up as a character in the new "Indy" flick. (I nominate Johnny Depp, Robin Williams, or Jim Carrey for the part.) There was a web of intrigue dating back to the World War I era surrounding Mexico. It involved Ambrose Bierce, "the Zone of Silence," U.S. General Pershing, Pancho Villa, and Karl Hausofer, Hitler's evil tutor. I hope this, too, comes up in the Indy film.

However Mitchell-Hedges came by it, the Skull exists. There are pros and cons to its validity.

The cons begin with the appearance of the Skull itself. It is unlike all the other known crystal skulls suspected of being historic. This is the only one of the known ones with a detachable jaw, and the only one remotely lifelike. (Most crystal skulls are crude, cartoonish, and one-piece. Their etched-on teeth bloom like rows of corn on a cob.) The Skull of Doom is natural enough to have been given a forensic cranio-facial reconstruction. We can even infer its gender and ethnicity: Polynesian, I hear, and female. This alone is very special. Let's see you try making that out of glass.

The fact that the Skull of Doom was found in Maya territory is strange, too. The Maya did a lot of work in jade, but they weren't known to do much with crystal. Either the Skull was not a Maya artifact, or... someone before them or after them made it. (The "before" possibility is most problematic.)

Not only is the Skull of Doom unlike other skulls, but it is completely unlike any other work of Mesoamerican art. That alone could be a giveaway. True-to-life art is very rare among preindustrial societies. Only in a few parts and periods of Europe and the Mediterranean did art resemble life. Usually when you see a piece of realistic art or drawing from anywhere else, it has to be reasonably recent. Or else... someone in or before the Mayan culture had a breakthrough, and the Maya ended up with the Skull of Doom. Few exposed to late twentieth-century New Age mythology would put it past them.

The Skull itself is its most persuasive defender. Simply put, it shouldn't exist. Engineers from Hewlett-Packard studied the Skull in the 1970s and decided that only three places in the world could have been the source of the crystal - Brazil, Madagascar, or Russia. Funny beds for an ancient object found in the Gulf of Mexico. At least Brazil was in the hemisphere, but it's believed that there were not even trade networks between South America and Mesoamerica before the Euros landed. The Inca didn't know the Aztec existed. Why should they? Neither empire was maritime, and land travel between the zones was almost unthinkable.

The Hewlett-Packard team also couldn't figure out how the Skull of Doom was made. They found no signs of the scratching you'd expect with such an object, and figured it had to be made with soft techniques like polishing with rags, sand, and oil. Right. Three hundred straight years of it - that's 24-7 man-hours - one worker at a time. (You can't fit an assembly-line around a skull!) Even with modern tools like diamonds, its crafting would take a year. Hewlett-Packard's team, though, had no idea if it was an authentic artifact. After that, "Sammy" Mitchell-Hedges quit testing it - as if the Skull was getting tired of the probing and told her so itself. Maybe the Pleiadians did make it.

The Skull of Doom is a cult object today, still as far as I know in the possession of the family of the recently-late Anna Mitchell-Hedges (1907-2007), RIP, in Kitchener, ON. (If it was in the U.S. the Death Tax would own it by now.)

"Sammy" and the Skull came to Lily Dale in the early 1990s for a talk - it was Anna, I mean, doing the talking - and attendees got to parade by and touch it. I was one of them. I got a flash of insight for fiction, as yet unrealized, and circulated it only as proposals (on which more to follow). My tennis elbow, though, is better. (Now if we could just get working on the right knee... Maybe another touch of the Skull...)

So where might the "Indy" people go with this? I imagine the new film will be another adventure-chase like the "Ark" and "Grail" films. I presume the military and informational potential of the Skull would be the draw of the action. I know enough to suspect that it's set in the Cold War, so the drama could be over the simple possession of the object. (The KGB was known to be researching all avenues of edge over the CIA.) After that... Let's just see what they do with it. I get the feeling they'll go back to the "Indy" roots - the first film. May as well. Let that be the end.

Whatever they do, they have a lot to work with. Folklore of the outright psychic variety goes with the Skulls. The attendants of a British museum holding one big Skull say that it moves now and then of its own accord. Allegedly, a Skull arrived in the mail at the American Smithsonian, and a curator of the museum started to unbox it. "Don't look it in the eye," warned one of his colleagues as the wraps fell away. He did anyway, and took his own life shortly after.

If you have any unsettling feelings after seeing the Indy flick, please talk to someone you trust. Call crisis services otherwise before you make any rash decisions.