Today, I shall take you on a new trip. Grab my hand, and let’s get lost in history. We would try to find out why people are fascinated by skulls. Not any kind of skulls, crystal skulls made of quartz.
Around the 19 century, the first skull appeared. The word came that the skull could be from the Aztec period. Aztecs had the habit of gathering many skulls and building them into a wall. This kind of wall was called Tzompantli. It was a wall full of skulls, but it wasn’t made of crystal skulls but from real skulls that dried into the wall with time. The Aztecs sacrificed people, getting their hearts off and keeping their heads for the wall. They were pretty good with obsidian blades and very precise. I guess they were doing it quite often. This wall was dedicated to their war god.
Now let’s go back to the crystal skulls. Some skulls are part of the museum’s collection. One of them is exhibited in the British Museum. You can see it on the link below.
Another one is in the Smithsonian Museum, and you can also see it on the link below.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-smithsonians-crystal-skull-51638609/
Other crystals have private collectors. People are fascinated about the skulls as a memento mori, constantly reminding us that death can come, and also, for some, the crystal skulls seem to have some powers, or at least that’s what some are pretending. Some people think the skulls have healing power. So if you touch them, you might get healed( I wonder if they really do that, it could be suitable for this season to cure all the flu, at least for sure I would need that to get rid of my flue 🙂 ) or you psychic abilities might expand in the presence of them. Some find the skulls like some kind of computer that are already programmed. You just need to touch them. Others believed they could bring misfortune for some.
Nobody was able to find anything about their power scientifically. Except maybe they can enchant the eyes with their beauty as they are adorable carved in quartz.
They can’t be dated. The date can be approximated by how skulls were made. The tools that were used to carve them. These crystals were probably made somewhere in Germany, probably somewhere late in the 19 century. The material probably came from Madagascar or Brazil. At first, they were supposed to be from the pre-Columbian period. But there were no such skulls in any excavations found.
Another famous skull was supposed to be discovered in 1924 by Anna Mitchel Hedges, a British adventurer’s adopted daughter of Mitchel Hedges. This skull, at first glance, seems like a replica of the skull from the British Museum, a more intricate replica with mobile teeth. It seems, according to Anna, that she found it buried into a collapsed altar inside a temple in Lubaantun in British Honduras, now Belize. There are some proofs the skull wasn’t found there but bought by Mitchel Hedges at an auction in London. He wrote a letter to his brother where he mentioned this fact.
Either way is a beautiful skull made of clear quartz having the same size as a small human cranium, measuring 13 cm height, 18 cm long, 13cm wide with the lower jaw detached. At some point, the skull was in the custody of freelancer art restorer Frank Dorland. He thought that the skull was quite old, around 12000 years old. He felt that he couldn’t fine any tell-tall scratch marks except mechanical grinding on teeth, thinking that it was chiseled into a rough form, probably using diamonds and the final polish using sand of a period of 150 to 300 years. While the skull had Anna Mitchel Hedges, she refused other tests on the skull.
The skull is mentioned scarcely in the autobiography of Mitchel Hedges without saying from where he got it. But he did claim that it was at least 3600 years old, saying that according to the legend, it was used by the Highest Priest of the Maya when he was performing esoteric rites. The Priest was using it when he wanted the death of someone, and the end would come. For that reason, the skull was also called the Skull of Doom.
After Anna died, the skull got into the possession of her husband. He took the skull to the office of an anthropologist in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History for examination. A detailed examination of the skull was carried using ultraviolet light, a high-powered light microscope, and computerized tomography. A year later, the skull was examined again for a documentary. On this occasion, two sets of silicone molds of surface skull marks were made for the scanning electron microscope. It seems that the skull was made with a high-speed metal rotary tool coated with an abrasive such as diamond. This fact leads to the conclusion that most probably that skull was carved around 1930 probably as a replica of the one exhibited in the British Museum. The exciting part of the documentary is that there was a facial reconstruction after the skull, and it seems it was a female skull with European characteristics. So most probably, the skull was carved over a replica of an actual human skull. So most likely is not an ancient skull.
With or without special powers, the skulls still remain beautiful carvings, even if most probably they are not ancient and probably not from Aztecs or Maya times, they are still beautiful, mysterious carvings.
Here is a documentary that I found on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxEmA1rTQdk ;
I hope you enjoyed the trip with me and next time you will come to enjoy another trip to an exciting place.
cursedtraveler 