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Max the Crystal Skull

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I had no idea that money could be made exhibiting new age crystal skulls. Living in Seattle, and being an occasional Seattle Museum of the Mysteries patron, I follow the updates on their website. Scheduled to appear is "Max" a crystal skull of alleged great antiquity.

Admission price is $10. for that "The first 40 people to sign up for the first hour will be allowed to touch Max upon leaving". I gather that the skull's owner routinely tours with the thing.

The museum's website is: http://www.seattlechatclub.org/museum.html "Max" appears about half way down the long page.

Having been a sideshow performer, I'm somewhat familiar with the history of sideshow "gaffs" like the classic "Fiji Mermaid" and the "Minnesota Iceman". Sadly, "Max" seems to be promoted as pure unadulterated mystical goodness, unlike sideshow gaffs where there is at least a bit of wink-wink nudge-nudge.

I understand there are a number of "crystal skulls" floating around, and from a brief perusal of the Internet I gather that a number of these things are now believed to be German fakes. Does anyone else know more about this?
 
tube said:
I had no idea that money could be made exhibiting new age crystal skulls. Living in Seattle, and being an occasional Seattle Museum of the Mysteries patron, I follow the updates on their website. Scheduled to appear is "Max" a crystal skull of alleged great antiquity.

Admission price is $10. for that "The first 40 people to sign up for the first hour will be allowed to touch Max upon leaving". I gather that the skull's owner routinely tours with the thing.

The museum's website is: http://www.seattlechatclub.org/museum.html "Max" appears about half way down the long page.

Having been a sideshow performer, I'm somewhat familiar with the history of sideshow "gaffs" like the classic "Fiji Mermaid" and the "Minnesota Iceman". Sadly, "Max" seems to be promoted as pure unadulterated mystical goodness, unlike sideshow gaffs where there is at least a bit of wink-wink nudge-nudge.

I understand there are a number of "crystal skulls" floating around, and from a brief perusal of the Internet I gather that a number of these things are now believed to be German fakes. Does anyone else know more about this?
Click to expand...
I wonder if people will be using the crystal skull for skrying. I'm not real sure what skrying is exactly, but I'm told that's what the woo woo's do with crystal skuls. It sounds messy. You might want to suggest to to the museum curators that they have a mop and bucket handy during the exhibition.
 
The crystal skulls that are more "eye-catching" according to a documentary I saw some time ago at NGC were manufactured in Austria using hyaline (transparent colorless) quartz crystals from Brazil.

Possibly, the only one that may be authentic (but not from Atlantis, of course), is composed of milky (witish) quartz and is rather anatomically incorrect when compared with the others. It also looks quite like other skull sculptures made by Aztecs. Its nowdays part of some object used in masses at a church in Mexico. That thing a priest holds at a certain point. Don't ask me the name of it. Don't know and if I ever knew I forgot. I liberated myself from the opression imposed by religion ages ago.

The crystal skulls history has been linked with hoaxes and fakery since the start, an alleged discovery at Belize. More info can be obtained at http://skepdic.com/crystalskull.html. Skeptical POV, of course.
 
Crystal skulls from the past? Phoey. Titanium skulls from the future, now that's impressive:
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There's a bit of woo-new-age myth circulating that says an old Indian legend (never can find out which tribe; Cherokee, I think) describes a memory machine made of so many of these skulls along with so many crystalline rods, that supposedly will give up knowledge of the ancients...

At one point, I remember a shaman claiming that only three of the skulls found were from this set, but how he would know, I have no idea.
 
The Eerie Crystal Skulls
Some people with a mystical bend credit them with strange, supernatural powers. Geologists marvel at their size. Archaeologists wonder who made them. And nobody denies that they possess an eerie, horrible beauty unmatched by almost any other objects. They are the crystal skulls.

There have been many replicas of human skulls that have been polished out of a single crystal of quartz rock. Some are ancient, some contemporary. A few have been made from pure quartz and are absolutely clear. A rare few are also life-sized.

Quartz, composed almost entirely of silicon dioxide, is found in almost every type of rock and can form huge crystals that weigh tons. While it is colorless and transparent when pure, when a tiny portion of the silicon atoms are replaced with iron, aluminum, manganese or titanium, the crystal can take on beautiful colors. Amethyst is violet quartz. Jasper is quartz with red, yellow, brown, gray or black coloring. Onyx and Agate are quartz with bans of color. Bloodstone is green with red spots. If a single streak runs through the quartz it might be called Cat's Eye, Tiger's Eye or Rutile.

All crystal is ancient and there are no good ways of guessing how long ago a skull shape was carved or polished out of the quartz. Scientists have examined some of the skulls whose history is not known looking for tiny marks that may tell what type of tools were used to carve them, but this may not always give a reliable age or origin. It does not eliminate contemporary artists using ancient methods.

Probably the two most famous clear crystal skulls are the "Mitchell-Hedges" skull and a skull owned by the British Museum.

The British Museum's skull was part of the exhibit at the The Museum of Mankind in London for many years. The skull sat in a case there labeled as "possibly of Aztec origin- the colonial period at the earliest." This was guesswork on the part of the museum staff. The museum itself obtained the skull from Tiffany's, the New York jewelers. Nobody is sure where Tiffany's obtained it, though there are rumors that it was part of a collection amassed by a mysterious soldier of fortune in Mexico. More recent examinations of the skull seem to indicate that the tools used to make it are most likely more modern than originally thought, placing the age of the skull at century at the most.

The skull is so strangely hypnotic that there is a story that the cleaning staff at the musem one time insisted that the object be covered with a black cloth before they worked around it at night.

The Mitchell-Hedges skull (right) has an even more checkered past than the Museum of Mankind Skull. F.A. Mitchell-Hedges was a self-proclaimed British adventurer during the early twentieth century. He told stories about how he gambled with the rich J.P. Morgan, roomed with Leon Trotsky and fought with Pancho Villa. All of these appear to be tall tales.

The skull itself is, of course, very real, but how it came into Mitchell-Hedges possession is an open question. We know for sure that he was in possession of it by 1944. That year a member of the staff of the British Museum had bid on the skull at an auction and made this note:

Bid at Sotheby's sale, lot 54, 15 x 43 up to 340 [pounds] (Fairfax). Brought in by Burney. Sold subsequently by Mr. Burney to Mr. Mitchell-Hedges for 400 [pounds].

Mr. Mitchell-Hedges had always indicated that he had found the skull in an ancient temple in British Honduras, though he seemed very reluctant to reveal the details, writing: "How it came into my possession I have reason for not revealing."

Some researchers believe the story about finding the skull in Honduras was just another tall tale and Mitchell-Hedges obtained it through Burney, an art dealer.

Mitchell-Hedges' adopted daughter, Anna Mitchell-Hedges, who inherited the skull when he died, supported her father's story. She explained her father placed the skull with Burney as collateral for a loan. When he realized Burney was trying to sell the stone, he bought it back.

Anna Mitchell-Hedges also claimed that it was she who discovered the skull on her 17th birthday while with her father in British Honduras. She found the skull, missing the jaw, under an ancient alter. Three months later she found the jaw in the same room.

The rock, probably the strangest gemstone in the world, weighs some 11 lb, 7 oz (5.19kg) and is carved out of a single quartz crystal. Mr. Mitchell-Hedges often referred to it as the "Skull of Doom." The separate jaw looks like it might have been wired to move, perhaps giving it the ability to appear to be speaking. It has been theorized the skull was used as an oracle, the jaw operating by remote control as a voice came from a hidden speaker tube. It isn't hard to picture the priest of some ancient religion dazzling his followers with such a display.

One scientist, Dr. G. M. Morant got to examine the Mitchell-Hedges skull and the skull at the Museum of Mankind together in 1936. He noted the skulls were very similar in many anatomical details and suggested that the one in the museum might be a slightly rougher copy of the Mitchell-Hedges skull.

Neither Morant was unable to definitely establish a time or place where either of these skulls were created. So they remain, along with many other crystal skulls, a beautiful, but puzzling enigma.



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From parascope.com:

The Mitchell-Hedges skull is made of clear quartz crystal, and both cranium and mandible are believed to have come from the same solid block. It weighs 11.7 pounds and is about five inches high, five inches wide, and seven inches long. Except for slight anomalies in the temples and cheekbones, it is a virtually anatomically correct replica of a human skull. Because of its small size and other characteristics, it is thought more closely to resemble a female skull -- and this has led some to refer to the Mitchell-Hedges skull as a "she."

The Mitchell-Hedges family loaned the skull to Hewlett-Packard Laboratories for extensive study in 1970. Art restorer Frank Dorland oversaw the testing at the Santa Clara, California, computer equipment manufacturer, a leading facility for crystal research. The HP examinations yielded some startling results.

Researchers found that the skull had been carved against the natural axis of the crystal. Modern crystal sculptors always take into account the axis, or orientation of the crystal's molecular symmetry, because if they carve "against the grain," the piece is bound to shatter -- even with the use of lasers and other high-tech cutting methods.

To compound the strangeness, HP could find no microscopic scratches on the crystal which would indicate it had been carved with metal instruments. Dorland's best hypothesis for the skull's construction is that it was roughly hewn out with diamonds, and then the detail work was meticulously done with a gentle solution of silicon sand and water. The exhausting job -- assuming it could possibly be done in this way -- would have required man-hours adding up to 300 years to complete.

Under these circumstances, experts believe that successfully crafting a shape as complex as the Mitchell-Hedges skull is impossible; as one HP researcher is said to have remarked, "The damned thing simply shouldn't be."

See the skepdic entry for the contra and explanations on how this "damned thing" is ... a fraud that is.
 
do you guys remember that 80's movie... "house"? had a crystal skull and a decomposed relative from the Wild West.
 
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