 Among all the plethora of myths and legends surrounding the 2012 end-date, those relating to the crystal skulls are the most colourful – and they are pale artifice compared to the real thing.
My new novel, The Crystal Skull, grew from the astonishing, beautiful, compelling and inspiring life-sized crystal skull that is on display in the British Museum. It sits in a quiet corner of the main gallery opposite a particularly moving statue of a boy on a horse (whose story I will write one day). Whatever you wish to believe of the skull’s origins and purpose, it is impossible not to be struck silent in its presence.
Of the many accounts of its creation, the ones I have chosen to nurture are those which say it was birthed in the pyramids of the Maya, and that it is one of a series of thirteen which, when brought together, will either avert the end of the world, or provide us with the means to transcend it.
Whoever made it and when, the skull is a piece of extraordinary craftsmanship. To carve a fully life-sized skull with such a degree of anatomical accuracy from a single piece of crystal is, even by modern standards, a gargantuan task. If it was genuinely made in Mayan times, by polishing raw crystal with ever-decreasing grades of sand, knowing that any mistake would destroy generations of work, it is exceptional.
The Museum skull is not alone. The best known of the others is the Mitchell-Hedges skull which is kept in Canada. Like the blue heart-stone which features in The Crystal Skull, this skull was carved from a single piece of solid crystal, with a hinged mandible and the ability to take light up through the occiput and focus it out through the eyes.
Facial reconstructions have been made of this and other skulls, showing faces from a range of readily recognizable racial types. All of these skulls are said to have a solid, calm, quiet presence and to change the lives of those they touch. (For a more detailed description see The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls)
The two foundations of my novel, then, are the 2012 end-date and the legends of the thirteen skulls. From these, I have woven a twin-threaded narrative. What began as a sharp, fast-paced contemporary thriller, grew soon to include also a historical narrative set in Tudor times: a foothold in the past gave me a means to access the makers of the skulls, or at least their descendants among the newly-discovered Maya, and thence to explore the soul of the skulls themselves in a way that was not possible in the faster contemporary thread.
As ever, this was entirely unplanned at the start of the novel and grew with my understanding of the skulls themselves. Like its predecessors in the Boudica: Dreaming series*, this is a novel that has grown out of my own shamanic practice. The difference was one of intent; Boudica was an expression of who we were, and thus who we might yet be. The Crystal Skull is more an exploration of who we are now and what we need to become – starting with the premise that the Maya were right, that there have been four previous 'cataclysms', brought about by the four elements (fire, flood, earthquake, hurricane), that the fifth and final cataclysm of this 26,000 year age is of humanity's own creation – and that it is coming soon. If we make the mess, then we also have the power to avert it; the obvious question is how to do that and the obvious answer is that we need to make the next evolutionary shift, and that it needs to be spiritual rather than material.
Clearly, that kind of shift has to come from within and we can only ever alter ourselves – and so heal the planet, one step at a time. For readers well-versed in spiritual concepts, this is self-evident, but in the outside world of the contemporary thriller, it's not necessarily as obvious as I might like to think. The Crystal Skull, then, is my exploration of how the thirteen skulls might work together to help us move forward. In the end, because this is a thriller, I found a way to bring the thirteen skulls together to raise Kukulkan, the rainbow serpent (also known as Quetzlcoatl by the Aztec). To do that, I had to work back and question why the legends spoke of thirteen skulls in the first place and how they might act. The dreaming of this – and clearly it is my own dreaming and may not be shared by others – was that there were nine coloured skulls – the seven of the rainbow plus black and white – and four 'beast' skulls, a jaguar, an eagle, a crocodile and a snake, which came together to build Kulkukan, the dragon who can open the doorway for us into a new way of being.
It makes a good thriller, but the reality is that we cannot engage with whatever the skulls might have to teach us if we don't act on ourselves, if we don't embrace whatever spiritual path opens for us and work through the hard parts to the places of growth. It's not a static process and whereas I'd like everyone to read the book (obviously!) – I'd hate for the end result to be that we sit back as a culture and wait for someone else to sort the problem. I don't think the world works like that. And I don't think there's time for complacency. Good luck. I hope you enjoy it.
© Manda Scott November 2007
*to be featured in next month’s Cygnus Review
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