all the knowledge and wisdom of the old one would pass on into the young one through the skull and the old one would pass away during the ceremony and go to sleep forever. And that was the willing death ceremony.’
Anna went on to explain that she had been looking after the skull for many years now and letting people come to her house and experience its power for themselves. She said the Mayan people knew what she was doing with the skull and that they were very happy about it. She said that before she died she wanted to ensure that the work she had been doing would be carried on. ‘This is what my father would have wished and it is the wish of the Maya people too.’ She added, ‘I think I have someone in mind already to take over the care of the skull when I’m gone.’ She said she was also planning a final visit to Lubaantun. We wondered whether Anna was planning to give the skull back to the Mayan people, but she said the skull would not be going with her.
In Annas opinion, the crystal skull was bequeathed to her and her father for a reason, a reason whose time would come. ‘The Mayans told me that the skull is important to mankind. It is a gift from the Mayan people to the rest of the world.’ She added, ‘The Mayans have a lot of knowledge. They gave us the skull for a definite reason and a purpose. I am not exactly sure what that reason is, but I know that this skull is part of something very, very important.’
We of course wanted to know more, but all Anna would say was, ‘You will just have to ask the Mayans.’
Every now and then in the history of mankind there comes a discovery so unique and so incredible that it cannot be explained according to our normal set of beliefs and everyday assumptions, a discovery so remarkable that it challenges our normal view of history, and therefore our whole view of the world today. Could it be that the crystal skull was just such a discovery?
After all, we had always assumed that we were more advanced and developed than our simple and primitive ancestors. Everything we had learned about human history seemed to have shown that civilization had logically evolved in a constantly improving fashion over the millennia, so that we now found ourselves, almost by definition, living at the very pinnacle of mankind’s evolutionary development.
The crystal skull appeared to challenge this view. For how could such ancient and ‘primitive’ people have made something so accomplished? Indeed, where exactly did the Maya, with their elaborate cities, their complex hieroglyphics, their mathematics and calendrics, and their knowledge of astronomy, fit in with our simple model of a constantly evolving and improving human history?
The skull was a mystery. Not only was it beautiful to look at, but it seemed that nearly everyone who had come into contact with it had some strange tale to tell of unusual experiences or inexplicable phenomena. Whatever its real powers, the skull certainly seemed to have us entranced.
Now we knew crystal skulls were not just the stuff of legend, there were other questions to consider. Were there any other skulls like Anna’s? What did her skull have to do with the ancient legend? Why did some people, including Anna’s own father, consider it evil, whilst for others, such as Anna, it was a force for good? And had the ancient Maya really made such a beautiful and sophisticated object themselves?
After our visit to Anna Mitchell-Hedges, these questions remained unanswered. But our desire to find the answers was now even more pressing. We began by trying to find out more about the ancient Mayan civilization. From the books we were now reading it seemed that archaeologists had managed to reconstruct quite a vivid picture of it from the detailed inscriptions, monuments and artwork the Maya had left behind. They had a pretty good idea of many of their ancient customs, rituals, knowledge and beliefs, and in some cases very specific information, such as the birth dates of kings and the names of their ancestors for up to seven generations.
So we now began talking to various Mayan experts and archaeologists, hoping that they might be able to tell us more about the crystal skull. Did the Mayans make it at the same time as they built their great cities, only to abandon it and perhaps others like it on their sudden departure? Could the crystal skull perhaps give us some clues as to why they left? How had it come to remain in the temple ruins?
We also wanted to see whether there were any other clues as to how the Mayans might have made the skull or how they might have used it, or even, as Frederick Mitchell-Hedges had suspected, whether it in fact dated back to some even more mysterious pre-Mayan civilization.
But as we began our further investigations it soon became apparent that these were questions to which there would be no easy answers. Despite the details archaeologists had uncovered about some aspects of Mayan history, whole chunks of knowledge seemed to be missing.
Indeed, as we continued our investigations we realized that we had unwittingly stumbled into a veritable minefield of great archaeological controversy. For not only was there heated debate about who the Maya were, where they had come from and where they had disappeared to, but one question in particular seemed to divide the archaeological establishment perhaps more than any other, and that was, where had the Mitchell-Hedges crystal skull really come from?
As we were to discover, the controversy began even with the site of the skull’s original discovery – Lubaantun. Mitchell-Hedges himself was of the view that the site was really pre-Mayan in origin. He felt the evidence from the site suggested that pre-Mayan peoples were involved in its construction and that it actually dated back to a much earlier period.
What had made Mitchell-Hedges suspect that Lubaantun might have been pre-Mayan was that, as we ourselves had noticed, the building techniques used there were so very different from those used at every other Mayan site. In their Recent book The Mayan Prophecies1 author-historians Adrian Gilbert and Maurice Cotterell point out that the style of construction was remarkably similar to the techniques used by the even more ancient Incas of what is now Peru in South America. There are certain similarities between Lubaantun and the famous ancient Inca sites such as Machu Pichu, hidden high up thousands of miles away in the Andes. Gilbert and Cotterell suggest that whoever built Lubaantun might have enlisted the help of or learnt construction techniques from the ancient Incas of South America. Or perhaps both the ancient Maya and Inca had learned their construction techniques from some other civilization even more ancient than their own. This raised the question, had the crystal skull originally come from this same mysterious pre-Mayan civilization?
Mitchell-Hedges believed this civilization to have been the legendary Atlantis. Though this struck us as rather unlikely, he did in fact later find evidence that there had been some sort of pre-Mayan civilization in this part of the world during his later excavations of the Bay Islands off the nearby coast of Honduras. He donated several specimens from these digs to the British Museum in London and the Museum of the American Indian in New York, and Captain James Joyce of the British Museum wrote to comment:
‘It is my opinion that [the samples] represent a very early type of Central American culture; probably pre-Maya. The fact that they appear to bear relations with the pre-Conquest civilisations of Costa Rica, early Maya, and archaic Mexico, suggests that this is an early centre from which various forms of culture were diffused over Central America…
‘The results [of further research] are likely to shed new light on the current ideas of the origin and development of the American aboriginal civilisations…
‘I consider that your discovery is of great importance.’ 2
George G. Heye, then Chairman and Director of the Museum of the American Indian, had also written:
‘In every way we concur with the findings of the British Museum in regard to your amazing discoveries made on a chain of islands off the coast of Central America… The specimens … are of a hitherto unknown culture…
‘[They] open up a new era in scientific thought relative to