History of the Crystal Skulls and Some Musings on Imagination vs Knowledge

There is a tendency among people to self-deception. It's like science has explained away all imagination and magic and now we must go deep into ourselves and defraud our psyches to re-enchant the world. We have too many answers now, are getting them too easy, and the questions have become facile, pointless to ask. When the answer is so easy to get, the question becomes irrelevant. Classical physics has proven consistent in practice; the universe as so revealed seems symmetrical all over so that we can infer the laws we perceive here constrain even ETs; and nothing can happen for which we don't already have empirical evidence that it will happen, at some point, as predicted. Everyone is living inside their own little elevator room of self-authored reality; however some live as children while other pretend to act like adults.
Our perception of the world is delimited by what we believe possible. We use well-wrought and hard-earned schemas based on experience to order our perceptions, assumptions etc. This is why when you see the head and paws of your kitten emerging from behind the couch you know the other half of the cat exists too, somewhere behind the couch, probably defecating. The enshrinement of science as arbiter of the possible is massively negative to a civilisation that cannot refrain from sloping toward the lowest common ruminator and his/her bland thoughts. If scientific materialism has its way we'll all be walking around unconvinced that we're alive and consciousness, that we can find in anything more than just the sum of its parts. I was thinking about this with a friend the other day. We were conversing as of old about the state of Imagination in the world. As this most undervalued commodity (it underlies and supports the whole damn stock market, the entire fiat money system, and things we wage wars about [like religion]) is turned into pedantic dogmatism, the astral winds abate and near-mythical creatures like I, incredibly talented hermits, become anaemic and find it even harder to appear.


(image courtesy of Wikipedia)

This movie is notable as being (possibly) a fictionalisation of a fictionalisation. Synopsis: venerable adventurer seeks Hollywood artefact long past his own use-by date; adventure devolves through indecipherable tangents and emotional flat spots. Lots of imagination though, which is why you can't disparage this thing too much. The real-world aspect of this story, it's factual basis is, surprisingly enough, the Crystal Skull. There have actually been, in the History of the World, several of these skulls discovered (or made[but everything must be made at some point, by some thing]). What is least plausible-seeming in this movie is actually a real thing: Harrison Ford back again as Indy (who's gonna rehire someone for a job 20 years after they last worked that job and have lost the skills and think they know everything about it, when a younger worker can simple be hired, underpaid, intimidated and exploited). But what parallels are there between Indy's alien skull and Earth's Crystal Skull mysteries?
Not heaps.
In the flick the Crystal Skull is, like, the cranium of an alien and confers upon the holder mysterious powers. In reality there are two main crystal skulls: the British-Museum skull (1881) and the Mitchell-Hedges skull (1924) both propounded as genuine Mayan relics. The history of these skulls is still enigmatic but human curiosity has been pretty thorough in extinguishing itself with overconfident answers to these riddles.
Mystery is a weird thing; it always has its own end in sight and it's fulfilment is its death. Curiosity feeds on itself like a mortal ouroboros that can always take the final bite and eventually consume its own head. The more indissoluble a mystery is the more we set off in our khakis with pick-axes to shatter the ground underfoot. As I assign more and more plausible explanations for an occurrence, it becomes more and more banal, more within the purview of scientific logic, and less capable of shattering all my assumptions about the world. It falls by the potholed wayside and we say the road is clear.
The British Museum Skull first debuted in collective consciousness in 1881 in Eugène Boban's reliquary, after which it was placed into the juggling hands of capitalism and eventually dropped in the eponymous London museum.

(courtesy of Britishmuseum.org)

However, it is the Mitchell-Hedges Skull that more obfuscates us moderns. It was allegedly discovered in Lubaantun (Belize) among ruined pyramids in 1924 by the adopted daughter of adventurer, self-mythologiser and Indy-forbear F. A. Mitchell-Hedges. Then again, allegedly, she wasn't there and Mitchell-Hedges bought the thing in 1943 at a Sotheby's auction from a Sydney Burney, with whom the ownership records stop. Either way, the skull now exists and if we don't establish an official chronology and address every contradiction regarding it we are flawed children of the Renaissance not fit to carrie Descartes' sceptical torch or even work a Henry Ford 40-hour week.
Numerous things about the Mitchell-Hedges Skull make it confusing, probably anachronistic, possibly alien. Firstly: the skull was hewn from one block of quartz with a detachable jaw made from the same original bulk. An art collector in the 70s who had the chance to look over the object found no evidence of the use mechanical tools in its formation, instead believing it was hewn to rough form before being finally being polished with sand for several-hundred years (M-H himself averred in his autobiography 'Danger My Ally' that the skull was 3600 years old and used in mystical rites). Secondly: the same art collector said it was carved against the natural orientation of the crystalline body, which is like rubbing a match up and down a matchbox and expecting it to cooperate. The skull shouldn't even physically exist then. Since modern lapidaries would never attempt such destructive practises on such a valuable item, this lends credence to the belief that the skull is ancient and/or naturally formed.
Add to this reports that the skull takes with it a balmy microsystem of 21°C warmth, that if you look into its eyes and ask a Q you'll get an A, that the skull can visit death upon others at the discretion of the owner, and that there are 13 more skulls which, when aligned, will open the Library of the Universe and usher in a new timeline, and you've got the makings of a best seller on your hands.
Anyway, never content to let a good mystery sizzle (and probably a little embarrassed that it had been rearranging this puzzle for a hundred years with all the pieces still in play) science came in and hit it with the scanning electron microscope, the greatest clinical eye of rationalism. Boom! It found evidence of mechanical scraping. Then they used a particle accelerator to reveal captured molecules of water in the lattice which were dated and determined to be modern. So long mystery! Goodbye romanticisation of the distant past! Fuck off delightful skeins of ignorance! Current scientific theories have its origin in a small German town late in the 19th century. Boy what a secret someone in that town has.
As I read deeper into the Crystal Skull controversies, I consciously decide to repudiate truth as a dead currency unable to buy much joy in these days of the double-blind infinitely replicable study and consensus truth.
But what about piezoelectricity? Where science and mysticism meet, through a venn-diagram darkly. Piezoelectricity exists, definitely, and has been documented since at least the 1880's. It occurs when a mechanical stress is given to a crystalline structure, producing electricity. In quartz (aka the prototypical crystal), under heat or pressure, silicon dioxide molecules decompose their orbits and the energy potential results in a mild charge, usually producing flashes of light. This is why crystals can be programmed and used to power watches, radios, healing etc. It's why IBM uses crystals in their hardware. I wondered, reading this, whether the Mitchell-Hedges Skull could possibly hold the history of the Acashic record behind its cranial bones? The accreted thought of all men, the energy of all times. Not for nothing does the hippy at the crystal shop tell you not to let anyone else touch your crystal or molest it with their energy. Not that their energy is bad, just that it's different to yours, like the sound waves of two equally good songs are different and won't necessarily strike you as danceable when played over the top of each other. What if this skull is single-handedly maintaining reality like the divine rationality that understands the dialectic and therefore keeps the chronology of time cohesive, along with allowing our complacent assurance of a tomorrow? We'll never know, until someone shakes the box too hard and breaks the fragile contents.
Anna Mitchell-Hedges (F. A. Mitchell-Hedges' daughter) was liberal with letting the skull be examined, taking it on PPV tours across the world for the foremost to study. Whether she confabulated finding it under an alter in Lubaantun as a child, or accepted her father bought it in auction, she seems nevertheless to preserve belief in the skull and its power. Her husband possesses the skull today and still believes in its mystical aspects. Whether this is due to personal bias, nostalgia, genuine intuition from being around it all the time, or irrationality, no microscope can tell. Fiction always tries to present itself as fact whereas facts, no matter how unbelievable, simply appear for judgement.
After I finished telling my friend all about this strange artefact he said he thought I was talking about a particular brand of the semi-precious Russian tonic, vodka, which he was drunk on at the time. I guess the spirits of the skull can converse with us after all.