The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls

In fact nobody really knew where the Maya had originally come from or, for that matter, where they had got the advanced knowledge necessary to build their great civilization in such a short space of time. There remained many mysteries about the ancient Maya.

As we wandered around the crumbling pyramids pondering why the ancient Mayan civilization had simply disappeared, Catarino spoke again. ‘One of the strangest things the Maya left behind was found right here at Lubaantun.’

He reached in and pulled something out of his pocket. It was an old black-and-white photograph that had definitely seen better days.

‘This was discovered in the 1920s by Mr Mitchell-Hedges’ daughter Anna when she was 17 years old.’

He handed us the dog-eared photo. My eyes were immediately drawn to the image. It was unmistakably a photograph of a real crystal skull. It was an extraordinary object, at once horrifying and yet beautiful. Even in that tattered old photo, the skull had a strange, mesmerizing quality. As I stared into those hollow crystal eyes, I was captivated.

As Chris handed back the photo, I wanted to know more. The image of the skull had drawn us in, raising questions that demanded answers. Who had made such an object and why? Where was it now? Were there any others like it and if so, where? Was this one of the 13 skulls of legend? The questions raced through my mind. Now we knew for sure that a real crystal skull did exist we felt compelled to find out more.

The first question was, where had Catarino got this photo? We were a little surprised when he said it was Anna Mitchell-Hedges herself who had given it to him. After all, this was the woman he said had originally discovered the crystal skull way back in the 1920s. How could this be?

Catarino explained that Anna Mitchell-Hedges had subsequently returned several times to visit the place of the skull’s discovery and her last visit had been in 1987. We worked out that if Anna had discovered the skull as a teenager in the 1920s, she would probably now be in her late eighties. But was she still alive?

According to Catarino, when Anna had made her last trip back she had been a very elderly woman. He had got the impression that she had come back to see the site one last time before she died. Given these words, it now seemed very unlikely that she was still around to tell the tale.

As Catarino was speaking, the shadows started lengthening across the ancient ruins and we realized it was time to leave. We thanked Catarino for his patience with our questions and wandered back to our vehicle, wondering how we could ever track down this old lady. We were just climbing into the truck when Catarino came rushing over.

‘Wait, wait,’ he said. ‘I remember. Anna Mitchell-Hedges did give me her address, but it was a long time ago and I don’t know if I’ve still got it.’

But we had to leave there and then. Our driver was getting impatient. So we swapped addresses with Catarino and he assured us he would look for Anna’s address and send it on to us if he found it.

As we made our way back to the coast for the last few days of our holiday, the whole story began to seem somehow unreal. A young girl on an archaeological dig finding an ancient artefact known only in legend seemed so unlikely, so impossibly romantic. In any case, we didn’t really expect to hear anything more from Catarino and it was soon time to put the whole idea of crystal skulls out of our minds as we returned to the everyday realities of life in Britain.

But we had only been home for a few weeks when a letter did arrive from Belize. It was from Catarino. He had found Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ address. It was in Canada. We were delighted and wrote to her, albeit with some trepidation. We were unsure we would get any answer and half expected that if we did it would only be to inform us that Anna had now passed away. So when a letter did arrive back from Canada, we opened it nervously. As we read its contents, we were thrilled to find that Anna Mitchell-Hedges, now aged 88, was still living happily and healthily – and complete with her crystal skull. Not only that, but she would be only too pleased to tell us the story of the skull’s discovery.

Anna had enclosed a copy of her father’s autobiography, Danger, My Ally,1 and from this, together with subsequent telephone calls to Anna, we were able to piece together the remarkable tale.

The story began in the Britain of the 1920s, with Anna’s father, Frederick Albert, or ‘Mike’, Mitchell-Hedges (1882-1959), a real Indiana Jones-type figure, who had adopted Anna when she was a young orphan. For many years Anna’s life remained inextricably linked to that of her father. She had never married and had accompanied him on many of his overseas voyages.

‘My father’s great love was ancient archaeology,’ she explained. ‘He had a very enquiring mind. He wanted to know more about the past and was the sort of person who liked to find things out for himself. He questioned the way things were and didn’t like to accept what other people told him.’

Indeed, according to Anna, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges had been something of a legend in his own lifetime. He was your archetypal British adventurer-explorer, determined to make his mark in the twilight years of the British Empire. He was a flamboyant, charismatic and somewhat unconventional character who had no time for the petty niceties of suburban English middle-class life, and certainly no time for what he considered the boring nine-to-five existence of the various office jobs, in banking and the stock market, he had tried during his early career.

Instead he had turned to a life of adventure and exploration. His motto, ‘Life which is lived without zest and adventure is not life at all’, spurred him on in his various overseas missions ‘to see parts of the world no white man had ever seen before’. He funded his trips largely through silver-trading and lecturing. He enjoyed gambling and always allowed time to indulge his great love of deep sea fishing along the way. He was a man who seemed almost deliberately to court danger, at one stage apparently even finding himself taken prisoner by the famous Mexican bandit turned national hero Pancho Villa, unwillingly caught up in his border raids against the United States. He travelled extensively and his passion for adventure found its greatest fulfilment in organizing great voyages of exploration and discovery to far-flung places, all the while fuelled by his obsession with the idea of finding the treasures of lost civilizations.

For Frederick Mitchell-Hedges was a member of the Maya Committee of the British Museum. He believed that the cradle of civilization was not in the Middle East, as was commonly supposed, but was the legendary lost continent of Atlantis. He was convinced this was a real civilization which had disappeared after some natural catastrophe and that its remnants were to be found in Central America. Moreover, he was determined to prove it.

To this end he gathered together a party of explorers who set sail from Liverpool in 19242 bound for British Honduras (now Belize). On reaching the Americas they docked at the small port of Punta Gorda, from where rumours had emanated of a lost city hidden deep in the jungle. They tried, at first unsuccessfully, to penetrate the interior via the crocodile infested Rio Grande, a trip which ended in disaster with the loss of all their medical supplies aboard a dug-out canoe which capsized and sank. As a result, one member of the team contracted malaria and later died. Only with the help of the local Kekchi Maya tribespeople, direct descendants of the ancient Maya, was the party finally able to penetrate the dense tropical rainforest and continue their search.

One day, deep in the jungle, they stumbled across some mounds of stone, overgrown with moss and foliage and suffocated by roots and vines. This was the sign they had been looking for. Frederick Mitchell-Hedges was heard to cry out, ‘We can’t be very far from this lost city!’

Work began in earnest as the party and local Mayan helpers toiled in the jungle heat to clear the site. It was back-breaking, seemingly relentless work, hacking away at the undergrowth and felling huge trees which piled themselves high on top of the ancient stones below. It took over a year to clear most of the undergrowth. When they had finished, the trees lay fallen before them in a great mountain of twisted branches. It was time to set fire to the what was left of the forest. The fire raged hot and high for days beneath the blistering sun. It burned ‘like a mighty blast furnace’, spewing out white hot ash and burning red embers all around. It dried the lips, reddened the eyes and almost choked the very life breath from the parry of explorers. But as the flames subsided the ruins of a once great city slowly emerged from amidst the smoke and burning ashes. As Frederick Mitchell-Hedges recounts in his autobiography, published in 1954:

‘We were amazed at the immensity of the ruins. Walls, terraces and mounds came into view as the holocaust swept onwards … in its centre had stood a mighty Citadel.

…The Citadel was raised above the level of the surrounding countryside and when it was first built it must have stood out like a glittering snow-white island, one hundred and fifty feet high. Around it spread the lesser dwellings and burial mounds of the common people and, further out, the thousands of acres of green, waving maize that must have been necessary to feed and support the large population.’ 3

When the blaze had died away Mitchell-Hedges and his team were able to explore the great city:

‘It covered …a total area of six square miles with pyramids, palaces, terraces, mounds, walls, houses, subterranean chambers, [even] a huge amphitheatre designed to hold more than 10,000 people and appreached by two great stairways. The Citadel was built over seven and a half acres and originally every foot had been covered with cut white stone… ‘4

Mitchell-Hedges was amazed at the workmanship that had gone into the construction:

‘The magnitude of the labour required is almost beyond computation for their only tools were flint axes and chisels. I tried to square a similar block of stone with one of these implements, of which we found many. The task took an entire day.’ 5

Frederick Mitchell-Hedges was to spend several years uncovering the secrets of the past that lay hidden in this lost city. During the long excavation of the site he was joined by Anna, or ‘Sammy’ as she was affectionately known to her father (see plates 32 and 33). She settled instantly to life in the jungle, as if she had been born to it. Anna shared something of the same rebellious spirit of adventure as her father and had a strong, inquisitive nature. It was this that led her to make her dramatic discovery.

It was a particularly hot day, an afternoon when the air itself seemed to stand still in the drowsy heat. The archaeological site, which was usually very busy, was strangely silent. ‘Everyone had gone to sleep. They had been worn out by the heat,’ remembers Anna. It was a few weeks before her seventeenth birthday. She was alone in her hut and feeling restless. Suddenly it occurred to her there was something she had been wanting to do for a while.

‘I thought this was my chance to go up and see how far I could see from the top of the highest building. Of course, I was strictly forbidden to climb up there because the stones were very loose and dangerous. But I had heard that you could see for miles around from the top of one of the pyramids and that intrigued me.’

So Anna headed towards the site, knowing that the excavation team were sleeping soundly in their beds.

She began to climb the tallest pyramid. Monkeys chattered in the distant trees and insects buzzed noisily around her as she picked her way carefully over the loose stones until, at last, she reached the top. It had been worth it:

‘Once I was up there I could see for miles around and it was very beautiful. I felt that I could have stayed there for a very long time. But the sun was very, very strong and there was something shining in my face. Way way down below through a crack I could see something shining back at me and I got very, very excited. How I got down from that building so quickly I don’t know, but when I got back I woke my father up and told him I’d seen something. Then, of course, I got a very bad scolding because I shouldn’t have gone up there.’

Anna’s father was disinclined to believe she had seen anything at all:

‘ “You imagined it,” he said.

‘But the following morning my father got all his men together. Before I got up he had everybody moving the stones from the top of the pyramid, because there was no way we could get in from the bottom. It took several weeks of carefully removing stones before a big enough hole was created.’

It was the day of Anna’s birthday when she volunteered to go down. She was lowered slowly by her father and his helpers into the narrow gap between the stones:

‘I had two ropes tied around my body and a light strapped to my head and I was let down into the opening. As I descended into the dark, I became very nervous, because there could be snakes and scorpions down there. When I got down I could still see something shining, reflecting the light on my head back at me. So I picked it up and I wrapped it in my shirt so it wouldn’t be hurt and I told them to pull me up as fast as they could.’

As Anna emerged from the temple into the bright daylight she wiped the dirt from the surface of the object and stared at it in wonder. ‘It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.’ The object was truly remarkable. It was life-size and looked almost exactly the same as a real human skull, and yet it was almost completely transparent. It was a real crystal skull. She held it up to the light. It was carved from a magnificent piece of clear rock crystal and caught and reflected the light in devastatingly beautiful, captivating and complex ways. And, miraculously, it appeared to have survived completely unscathed.

There was a moment of stunned silence as the small crowd of excavators gazed at this strange object, mesmerized by the way in which it captured and reflected the sunlight, sending it forth in a dazzle of light. Anna’s father took the skull from her and held it high for all to see. Then all at once everyone went wild with joy. ‘All the Maya helpers on the dig started laughing and crying. They kissed the ground and started hugging each other,’ Anna said. It was a magical moment, she recalled, perhaps the greatest moment in her long life. It was ‘as if an ancient and powerful force had returned to the lives of those present’.

As evening fell and the first stars appeared in the skies, Frederick Mitchell-Hedges placed the skull with great ceremony upon a makeshift altar the Mayans had built. As he and Anna looked on, fires were lit all around the skull and in the light of the blaze they could see the Mayans blessing it. Then the sound of drumming began. Mayan dancers appeared from the shadows, decorated with the plumes of jungle birds and the skins of jaguars. They moved with agility and grace to the rhythm of the drum. There was chanting and singing. It was a night of celebration, as Anna recalls. ‘They performed ceremonies, rituals and dances in front of the skull in the firelight.’

From the depths of the jungle people appeared, as if something had called to them across the forest.

‘It was as though a message of joy had been sent out across the Mayan lands. A lot of Maya came that we never even knew, and they came so quickly and from so far afield that I don’t know how they could possibly have heard of the skull in such a short space of time. But they knew.’

The celebrations around the skull continued for several days and amongst those who came to see it was a very old Mayan from a neighbouring village. He looked at the skull and told Anna and her father that it was Very, very ancient’.

‘The Mayan priests say it is over 100,000 years old. The Mayans told us the skull was made after the head of a great high priest many, many thousands of years ago because this priest was loved very much and they wanted to preserve their truth and wisdom forever. The old man said that the skull could be made to talk, but how it was done he wouldn’t say.’

Both Anna and her father were puzzled by the discovery. What they didn’t know at the time was that the object would prove to be one of the most mysterious ever found, that it would come to change Anna’s life and the lives of many others who have since come into contact with it. For, as we had heard, many have claimed that the skull has magical and mysterious powers. Some maintain, as the legend had said, that it is encoded with sacred knowledge that can enable us to tap into the secrets of the distant past and possibly even the future. Many others simply believe that the skull can profoundly influence the way people think and feel.

Although Frederick Mitchell-Hedges had no idea of the incredible claims that would come to surround the skull, he seemed to have been deeply affected by the reverence the local people showed for it. He was also concerned that, since the discovery, the Mayan workers had been considerably less willing to spend their days toiling on the dig. He gave it much thought and discussed it with Dr Thomas Gann, the consultant anthropologist on the expedition. Anna said, ‘My father decided that the skull was obviously so sacred and so important to the Mayan people that we couldn’t possibly keep it. He said, “We cannot possibly take this skull away from these poor people.” ’

So, with characteristic flourish, he gave it to the Maya. ‘They were very, very glad,’ recalls Anna, who was not so pleased by her father’s generosity, after the danger she had gone through to retrieve the skull. ‘I was very angry because I had risked my life to go down there and get it.’

But, following the gift, excavations were resumed. The pyramid where Anna had found the skull was part of the further explorations and three months later, the separate lower jaw of the skull was found buried beneath an altar in the main chamber of the pyramid. Anna had originally found only the upper cranium. When the Maya added the lower jaw to the skull, the masterpiece was complete. After this, as Anna remembers, ‘They had it for nearly three years and they had fires burning all around it.’

By 1927 the excavations at Lubaantun were drawing to a close. The final items were catalogued and sent off to museums. Mitchell-Hedges and his team had unearthed hundreds of rare and beautiful artefacts, but none could match the beauty of the crystal skull.

As the party prepared to depart, it was a sad moment for Anna. She had lived with a Mayan family who had treated her ‘as well as their own daughter’ and she had ‘shared in their joys and sorrows over the years’. As Anna and her father bade farewell to their Mayan friends, the Mayan chieftain stepped forward and pressed a bundle into Frederick Mitchell-Hedges’ hands. As he unwrapped the bundle, Anna was delighted to find that it was the crystal skull:

‘The Maya presented my father with the skull for all the good work he had done for their people, giving them medical supplies and work and tools and everything. And that’s why they gave it back to us. It was a gift from the Mayan people.’

So fate had it that the crystal skull should accompany Frederick Mitchell-Hedges as he left Lubaantun for England.

Putting his overseas adventures behind him, Mitchell-Hedges was eventually to settle in England. In 1951 he took up residence in the impressive seventeenth-century Farley Castle in Berkshire. There he would lecture guests from overseas about his expeditions and his wonderful antique collection, and show the crystal skull to members of the British aristocracy who were invited to elegant dinner parties in his grand candlelit dining-room.

Frederick Mitchell-Hedges used to delight in telling his guests that it was called ‘the Skull of Doom’. He said, ‘It has been described as the embodiment of all evil’ and that ‘according to legend [it] was used by the High Priest of the Maya’ to will death. ‘It is said that when [the Mayan priest] willed death with the help of the skull, death invariably followed.’6 According to Anna, much of this description could actually be put down to her father’s sense of humour, but he had been told by the high priest of the Maya that if the skull were to fall into the wrong hands, it could be used for evil purposes.

Mitchell-Hedges was no doubt fascinated as lords and ladies gazed upon the awesome image of the skull. Their initially fearful reaction was so very different from that of the Maya who had helped to bring the skull up from the darkness of its tomb. The rich sophisticated Europeans saw only fear where the ‘poor’ ‘uneducated’ Mayans had seen cause for celebration and joy. Was it that in those dying days of the British Empire the skull was a stark reminder that none could escape their fate? No grand titles, no worldly riches could overcome the inevitability of death.

But whatever their initial reaction, the crystal skull soon held Mitchell-Hedges’ guests entranced. They marvelled at its craftsmanship and became seduced by its beauty. They admired the perfectly chiselled beauty of its teeth, the smooth contours of its cheekbones and the way the jaw fitted faultlessly into the cranium. The question on everyone’s lips was, how could such ‘simple’, ‘primitive’ people, living deep in the jungle all those years ago, have created something so accomplished, so perfect?

Over the years many have been particularly captivated by the way the skull seems to hold, channel and reflect light. For it is made in such a way that any source of light from beneath it is refracted into the prisms at the front of the skull. So if the skull is placed in a darkened room and a fire or candle lit beneath it, the light appears shining right out through the eye sockets.

Others have also observed that the skull has two small holes carved into its base, one on either side of the main cranium. These are just the right size and shape for two narrow sticks to be inserted from below, enabling the skull to be suspended over any fire or light source, and allowing the top part of the skull to be moved in relation to the separate lower jaw. In this way, or with the attachment of the lower jaw by string or animal gut, it is possible to move the skull around in such a manner that it gives the impression that it is talking.7

Taking very literally what Mitchell-Hedges had been told about the skull being ‘made to talk’, some have suggested that it may have been used in this way by the ancient Mayans. They have speculated that the skull could have been placed on an altar at the top of the steps of one of the great pyramids, suspended over a fire concealed from view beneath the altar. The skull’s eyes would have blazed fire red as its jaw moved in precise synchronization with the booming voice of a mighty high priest, whose cohorts would have controlled the skull’s movements. The priest might have made a series of oracular announcements, perhaps announcing the names of the next victims for human sacrifice. This would indeed have been a terrifying spectacle to the masses of ordinary people gathered in the plaza below. Thus, some have concluded, the skull appeared thousands of years ago as a terrifying animated talking god-head, used by the priestly class to wield power over their frightened subjects.8

But this is assuming that when the old Mayan said the skull could be ‘made to talk’, he meant it literally. And the idea that it was a tool the Mayan priests used to fool and terrify their subjects is hardly in keeping with the joy the Mayans are said to have demonstrated on seeing it.

One person who became particularly fascinated by the skull was the author Sibley Morrill. He thought it had been ‘made to talk’ in quite a different way. He was struck by the skull’s incredible anatomical accuracy and noted that it almost faultlessly compared with a real human skull. But one feature was strangely missing. Real human skulls have a series of marks which run across them, known as suture marks. These are the seams that are left when the different plates of the skull have grown together. Morrill pointed out that these markings would have been very easy to add and would have given the skull even greater realism. The fact that they were missing indicated to him that the skull was not made simply to serve as a memorial to any particular individual.