The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls: Unlocking the Secrets of the Past, Present, and Future

 

By Chris Morton & Ceri Louise Thomas

An Excerpt*

 

Chapter 23

The Lost Civilization

We walked along the white sandy beach near Tulum, watching the first stars appearing in the night sky, the waves crashing on the shore. As we looked out across the blue ocean of the Gulf of Mexico I wondered about Atlantis, that mythical paradise island that had shimmered in the human imagination down the centuries like some long-lost jewel.

The crystal skulls seemed to have been associated with this lost kingdom ever since the Mitchell-Hedges made their controversial discovery back in the 1920s. Frederick Mitchell-Hedges himself had devoted much of his life to trying to prove that Atlantis really did exist. He believed it was the cradle of civilization and was originally located somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean along this very coast. He was also of the view that his crystal skull had originally come from this great civilization. Even the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg before him, way back in the seventeenth century, had been convinced that this was where the Maya had really come from.

Conventional wisdom held Atlantis to be nothing more than a myth. But Hunbatz Men had now told us that according to the oral traditions of his people the Mayans’ earliest ancestors had come from Atlantis, bringing the crystal skulls with them. As Chris and I gazed out across the azure blue ocean, I found myself wondering whether the remains of that lost civilization might really lie somewhere buried beneath those waves.

My mind went back to a meeting we had had with another Native American earlier in our journey. This was Paula Gunn-Allen, Professor of English at the University of California in Los Angeles and one of the world’s leading specialists in Native American literature and mythology. Professor Gunn-Allen herself is of Laguna Pueblo and Sioux heritage. She is also a poet, mystic, novelist and writer, ‘depending on what hat I am wearing’, as she put it. She has a razor-sharp mind and excellent sense of humour, and she is particularly unusual for an academic in that she takes the idea of Atlantis quite seriously.

Professor Gunn-Allen told us that Atlantis has long been part of the oral history of Native American peoples. Just like the Maya, the Laguna Pueblo have many legends about this lost civilization, as do the Seneca and several other tribes, such as the Cherokee. But, as Professor Gunn-Allen put it:

‘People put their trust in the written word. They think that oral history and legends are unreliable sources of information. But when stories are passed on in an oral tradition great care is taken to preserve the integrity of the information. These stories were not just “make-believe”, but the histories of whole nations. It was no less true just because it was never written down.’

As she pointed out, written records in the West only take us back as
far as ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and Mesopotamia, whereas the oral traditions of many native peoples take us back much further than that. The legends of the Seneca people, for instance, speak of ‘stories to tell “the children of the Earth” about the worlds before the written histories of the “Two-leggeds” even began’.

There are also remarkable similarities between the mythologies of many continents. The general outline of the story of Atlantis can be found in South America, for example, and even amongst the writings of the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia, who lived in what is now the Middle East.

But perhaps the earliest known written reference to Atlantis itself is to be found in Europe, in the writings of the famous Greek philosopher Plato, writing around 350 bc. In his book Timaeus, Plato recounts that Solon, the great lawgiver of Athens, had travelled through Egypt and talked to a priest at a place called Sais. The priest said that compared with the Egyptians, the Greeks had only scant knowledge of the great events of history that had shaped their culture:

‘You [Athenian Greeks] remember only one deluge though there have been many… You and your fellow citizens are descended from the few survivors that remained, but you know nothing about it because so many succeeding generations left no record in writing.’ ¹

He then goes on to explain that there had once been a great island continent in the middle of the Atlantic:

‘There was an island opposite the strait which you call …“The Pillars of Hercules” [the Greeks’ name for the Strait of Gibraltar], an island larger than Libya and Asia combined; from it travellers could in those days reach the other islands, and from them the whole opposite continent which surrounds what can truly be called the ocean.’ ²

The incredible thing about this ancient Greek account is that it strongly suggests that the ancient Egyptians knew of the American continent, regardless of whether or not the Atlantean civilization to which it also refers really did exist. But Plato’s story goes on to explain how powerful the Atlantean civilization was:

‘On this island of Atlantis had arisen a powerful and remarkable dynasty of kings, who ruled the whole island, and many islands as well and parts of the continent [i.e. America?]; in addition it controlled, within the strait [i.e. within the Mediterranean] Libya up to the borders of Egypt and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia [Tuscany in Italy!]’ ³

It seems this ancient civilization had dominion over rather a large territory, including parts of both America and Europe. Indeed, the Atlanteans were keen to extend this territory even further eastward:

‘Our records tell how your city [Athens] checked [this] great power which arrogantly advanced from its base in the Atlantic Ocean to attack the cities of Europe and Asia. For in those days the Atlantic was navigable.’ ⁴

And then the great war came to rather an abrupt end:

‘At a later time there were earthquakes and floods of extraordinary violence, and in a single dreadful day and night all your [Athenian] fighting men were swallowed up by the earth, and the island of Atlantis was similarly swallowed by the sea and vanished; this is why the sea in that area is to this day [sometime prior to 350 bc] impassable to navigation, which is hindered by mud just below the surface, the remains of the sunken island.’ ⁵

Some archaeologists have suggested that what Plato was referring to was really the Minoan civilization on what is today the Greek island of Crete. This island is certainly thought to have been hit by a massive tidal wave around 1400 bc, caused by a volcanic eruption on the nearby island of Santorini. But it is actually located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, rather than in the Atlantic ‘opposite the strait which you call ‘ “The Pillars of Hercules” ’.

Furthermore, another of Plato’s books, Critias, explains that 9,000 years have elapsed since these events took place. If so, then they must have happened at the latest around 9500 bc, well before the generally accepted start dates for either the Greek or Egyptian civilizations, let alone the Minoans of Crete. Even ancient Egypt is not thought to have founded anything that could be considered a civilization until 3000 or 4000 bc at the earliest. So the precise location of the legendary Atlantis has remained a mystery.

 

There is, however, other supporting evidence for the idea that Atlantis did exist, or at least that a whole continent did once exist somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean between Europe and the Americas. For several ancient maps have been found which show not only what look like the present coastlines of the American continent, as well as Africa and Europe, but also another continent in between.⁶

The most famous of these maps, known as the Piri Reis map, was found in 1929 in the old Imperial Library at Constantinople, now Istanbul, and dated to ad 1513 at the latest, but the accompanying notes explained that it had been compiled from several other source maps, some of them dating back ‘to the fourth century bc or earlier’.⁷ These source maps in turn are thought to have dated back to ‘even older sources’, probably originating in ‘the furthest antiquity’. According to Professor Hapgood of Keene College, New Hampshire, who studied the original map, there was ‘irrefutable evidence that the Earth had been comprehensively mapped before 4000 bc by a hitherto unknown and undiscovered civilization which had achieved a high level of technological advancement’ and whose ‘accurate information’ was then ‘passed down from people to people’ over the years.⁸ Hapgood stated:

‘We have evidence that [these maps] were collected and studied in the great library of Alexandria [in ancient Egypt and] … were passed on, perhaps by the Minoans and Phoenicians, who were, for a thousand years and more, the greatest sailors of the ancient world.’ ⁹

But who were the originators of these maps? What was the ‘hitherto unknown and undiscovered civilization which had achieved a high level of technological advancement’? Could it perhaps have been the legendary Atlanteans who were drawing ‘accurate’ and ‘comprehensive’ maps from their base in the Atlantic Ocean?

What is curious about the Piri Reis map is that it shows the coastline of a continent in the southern Atlantic, which recent studies suggest may represent the ‘subglacial topography’ of present day Antarctica,¹⁰ although it is clearly thousands of miles north of the current location of Antarctica and the continent shown is completely free of ice. Given that the whole of the Antarctic, both land and sea, is covered in ice, most of it over a mile thick, and that the continent was not officially discovered until 1818, this finding is bizarre.

Some scholars, such as Hapgood, have tried to argue that what the Piri Reis map shows is really Antarctica, but that since the map was first drawn the continent itself has actually moved thousands of miles further south due to a massive displacement of the Earth’s crust. Another alternative, that the originators of the map were trying to draw Antarctica but simply got its location wrong, cannot explain why the continent shown is completely free of ice, unless of course global temperatures prior to 4000 bc were considerably higher than they are today. Certainly Greenpeace recently managed to sail a ship through a new sea channel which has opened up in the Antarctic ice as a result of global warming, so perhaps something similar happened at some time in the past?.

However, perhaps a more plausible explanation is that the continent shown is not really Antarctica at all, but some other continent, which has now disappeared. Whichever is the case, the mysterious land mass was clearly capable of supporting a human population and could quite possibly have been the legendary Atlantis.

Its location, however, would be difficult to fit with Plato’s description of Atlantis being positioned opposite the Pillars of Hercules. Indeed, many have suggested that Atlantis may have been situated in the middle of the north Atlantic, not the south. The problem, of course, for most archaeologists over the years has not been any absence of written records, but an apparent lack of any hard and fast physical evidence. If this civilization had really existed and had sunk as recently as around 10,000 bc, why are there no physical remains of it today? Indeed, the middle of the Atlantic is actually one of the deepest parts of the ocean in the world.

In his book The Secret of Atlantis,¹¹ German author Otto Muck has attempted to answer this question. Muck points out that, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the eastern coastline of South America and the west coast of Africa fit together almost perfectly and in keeping with the now widely accepted geological theory of plate tectonics. However, the coastlines of North and Central America and Europe do not fit together at all. There appears to be a chunk missing. Muck suggests that this could perhaps be due to the absence of Atlantis, now lost deep beneath the waves.

Most geologists would argue that the movement of the American continental plates away from the African and European plates occurred several millions of years ago and not during, say, the last 12,000 years, but Muck even has an answer to this. He points out that it is widely accepted that glaciers in Europe advanced almost as far south as London during the last Ice Age. This would not have been possible if the present warm air and ocean currents of the Gulf Stream that cross the Atlantic today had been able to oppose them. So something must have been blocking the Gulf Stream during the last Ice Age. Muck suggests that this was Atlantis, now lost beneath the waves as a result of a catastrophic asteroid collision that struck the continent and created today’s deep hole in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Whether or not there is any truth in this story, it certainly fits Plato’s description more closely.

 

But perhaps the middle of the Atlantic, whether north or south, was not really the most likely location of Atlantis anyway. Perhaps it lay far nearer to the coast of either Europe or America.

Some writers have certainly found connections between the ancient Mesoamericans and Atlantis. In the nineteenth century the American Ignatius Donnelly, in his book Atlantis the Ante-diluvian World,¹² found circumstantial evidence of a link between Atlantis and Central America through analysing similarities in words and language:

‘According to the traditions of the Phoenicians, the Gardens of the Hesperides were in the remote west. Atlas lived in these gardens. Atlas, as we have seen, was king of Atlantis… Atlas was described in Greek mythology as “an enormous giant, who stood upon the western confines of the earth, and supported the heavens on his shoulders, in a region of the west where the sun continued to shine after he had set upon Greece”…

‘Look at it! An “Atlas” mountain on the shores of Africa; an “Atlan” town on the shores of America; the “Atlantes” living along the north and west coast of Africa; and “Aztec” people from “Aztlan” in Central Ameri-ca; an ocean rolling between the two worlds called “Atlantic”; a mythological deity called “Atlas” holding the world on his shoulders; and an immemorial tradition of an island called “Atlantis”.’ ¹³

I remembered ‘the building of the Atlantes’ in the pre-Aztec city of Tula, near Mexico City, its walls decorated with stone-carved skulls. We had also heard that today’s highland Maya of Guatemala have named their great lake ‘Atitlán’. Like Donnelly, I couldn’t stop myself asking, ‘Can all these things be an accident?’

Could it be, as Hunbatz Men had suggested, that Atlantis was really located somewhere quite close to the Central American coast? Certainly there is a whole string of islands in what is now the Caribbean Sea.
Frederick Mitchell-Hedges had already identified the Bay Islands off
the coast of Belize and Honduras as a possible outpost of the original Atlantean civilization, and some, such as Gilbert and Cotterell, have suggested that perhaps the Caribbean islands were at one time the peaks, plateaus and mountains of a larger land mass or series of larger islands. Certainly many of these islands, as well as much of the eastern coastline of Central America, are today surrounded by very shallow waters, particularly that area known as the Great Bahama Bank, to the north of Cuba.

Gilbert and Cotterell have pointed out that the date Plato gives for the great Atlantean cataclysm, around 9500 bc, actually corresponds very closely with the date that is widely believed to mark the end of the last Ice Age.¹⁴ It is also generally accepted that during the last Ice Age the ice caps were much larger, resulting in lower sea levels. Much of the world’s water would have been held frozen as ice within glaciers and the ice caps, and so islands and coastlands would have been far more extensive at that time than they are today. As the last Ice Age ended, ice caps and glaciers started to melt and sea levels to rise. The main cities of the Atlantean civilization would probably have been concentrated around the coast and would have been the first areas to disappear underwater.

The theory is that refugees from Atlantis were able to escape by boat to the larger and higher land mass of Central America, bringing with them their culture, practices and beliefs, and perhaps, as Hunbatz had said, the crystal skulls. Once in Mesoamerica this handful of survivors may have interbred with the local people to create the Olmecs, Mayans and possibly Teotihuacános, Toltecs and even Aztecs. Thus many believe that the ancient Maya, and perhaps several other Mesoamerican tribes, may really have their origins in Atlantis, just as Hunbatz had said.

As Paula Gunn-Allen had told us, there was no denying the great prevalence throughout the Americas of myths and legends about ‘wise men’ or civilizing people who had come from the eastern sea. Many South American tribes, including the ancient Inca of Peru, spoke of a legendary figure, usually known as ‘Viracocha’, who had arrived from the seas to the east following a great deluge. This legendary wise and knowledgeable figure bore remarkable similarities to the Mayan figure of Kukulcan and the Aztecs’ Quetzalcoatl, the great ‘rainbow-coloured feathered serpent’. Though in many Mayan and Aztec versions of this story the great teacher came originally from the skies, almost all versions agree that, having imparted their knowledge and founded great civilizations, this legendary character and his companions sailed off again across the seas to the east. These great gods of Mesoamerican culture were figures of great ‘light’, learning and knowledge, akin to divine or higher beings. I wondered whether perhaps they could have been inhabitants of Atlantis who had visited the Americas either before or just after their own great civilization collapsed.

 

But had such travellers ever brought any crystal skulls with them? Certainly it was Professor Gunn-Allen’s opinion, based on her personal experience with a crystal skull, that they did originate in Atlantis. She told us she had channelled information from the Mitchell-Hedges skull at Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ home in Ontario back in 1987. I had been somewhat surprised that an academic would be interested in channelling at all, let alone have tried it out for herself, and at the time I had not taken what she said too seriously, but it now came back to me in the light of what we had heard from Hunbatz.

Like Carole Wilson, Paula Gunn-Allen believes that through entering a trance-like state she has been able to communicate with the ‘mind’ of the skull and to ‘speak’ its words. She cautioned, ‘You never know when you’re channelling if you’re making it up or if it is truthful and accurate,’ but nevertheless she told us of her experience:

‘I channelled the skull, who told me that her name was “Gentian”, which is the name of a flower, a healing plant that grows in the cold Alpine regions of western Europe.’

This seemed particularly appropriate to me as I had always felt there was an ‘icy’ quality to the Mitchell-Hedges skull. Interestingly, as I discovered a few months later from an article in a newspaper,¹⁵ this particular plant is now one of the world’s most threatened species, specifically because the glaciers around it are melting due to global warming.

According to Paula Gunn-Allen, Gentian is female:

‘Contrary to what most of the owners say, the skulls are all female. They represent a feminine wisdom. By “feminine wisdom” I don’t mean something that men don’t have, but qualities that have traditionally been more highly developed in women, that is, the more intuitive side, the less hierarchical, competitive ways of thinking and behaving.’

In her opinion, interest in the skulls is surfacing now because this is a time when we are beginning to return to a more female-based form of society. As she put it, ‘It is the time of the return of the grandmothers. It is the end of patriarchy.’

She then told us what she had channelled about how the crystal skulls had ‘come into being’:

‘The crystal skulls were made by females. I’ll call them people though I think they are not humans like we are, I think they’re a different kind of human. [Gentian] told me that they lived for a very long time, hundreds of years, and they came from some place that had collapsed, what people call Atlantis. I saw them walking across this vast space that has no plants, not even lichen, no moss, nothing. My impression was that it was the floor of the ocean. Certainly it wasn’t land as we know it. Eventually they came up an incline and then they were on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, which, as you know, is not far from where Mitchell-Hedges found the skull in the 1920s.’

She described the advanced knowledge that the Atlanteans had:

‘These people developed these tremendous disciplines. They knew about movement, the body and balanced emotion. Through discipline they could imbue their bodies with knowledge and wisdom, and then they abstracted themselves, their awareness, from these bodies and slowly the process of petrification took place so they became like rocks, like stones. They left behind in their bones every iota of cosmic knowledge spread throughout the entire universe, not our galaxy alone but many, and through many time frames, including the one that we’re presently occupying.’

Gunn-Allen was unsure exactly how many skulls had been made in this way, although she felt sure that their creators had left their remains, their bodies and their crystalline skulls, in a cavern under the mountains, west of the coast of what is now Belize. She believed the skulls to be ‘communication devices’:

‘What they are is transceivers. What they enable you to do is to talk with the other quadrants of the galaxy. You might think of them as like telephones that get you connected with Galactic Central and enable you to stay in touch with other parts of the consciousness, civilizations if you will, that are beyond our little bitty modern world.’

This knowledge of the wider cosmic connections between the Earth and other planets had been ‘held by indigenous people from Africa to Tibet through to Siberia’, according to Paula Gunn-Allen, but had been inaccessible to the Western world for thousands of years.

That great knowledge from the past had been hidden from us was an idea we had already encountered when we had met psychic channeller Carole Wilson and had heard ‘the voice of the skull’ talking about Atlantis and great discoveries that were yet to come. Again, we had not taken this too seriously at the time, but now we were beginning to keep more of an open mind.

The information Carole had channelled from the skull is that it was once part of the ‘great crystal of Atlantis’. According to ‘the voice of the skull’ ‘the minds of many’ are stored within it and those minds became ‘locked within the crystal skull during the fall of Atlantis’.

As Carole explained it:

‘What happened was that the beings placed the essence of their minds within the crystal. They saw that their home would soon be destroyed and wished to preserve their knowledge for use in the future. First of all they thought to hide the knowledge just within one place, but then decided that it was too dangerous and it was better to distribute the knowledge in different receptacles.’

For Carole, the crystal skulls are a form of remembering that which has been forgotten, and this is especially important now. She urged us particularly to remember some of the other words the skull had spoken: ‘Because of the disasters upon this planet, you will be needed to call upon your reincarnational memories to heal, to counsel, to guide and to love a world gone mad.’

Carole believes that some of these ‘reincarnational memories’ are of Atlantis and that we need to know what really happened so that we can avoid the same catastrophe again. This echoed Nick Nocerino’s view that the skulls were reminding us about past events so that we could learn from the mistakes of the past and not allow them to happen again.

 

Carole had urged us to read the writings of Edgar Cayce, one of the world’s best-known psychics, for he too had channelled information about Atlantis. Cayce (1877–1945) was a photographer by trade but was renowned as ‘the Sleeping Prophet’. He had accidentally discovered the ability to diagnose illness and prescribe accurate treatment while in a deep trance state, and also channelled information about the past and the future. According to Cayce, Atlantis did exist, but was inundated by water and destroyed as a result of a great environmental cataclysm. He described the migration of its handful of survivors:

‘Then, with the leavings of the civilisation of Atlantis, Iltar – with a group of followers that had been of the house of Atlan, the followers
of the worship of the ONE – with some ten individuals – left this land of Poseidia, and came westward, entering what would now be a portion
of [the] Yucatán. And there began, with the activities of the people there, the development into a civilisation that rose much in the same manner as that which had been in the Atlantean land…’ ¹⁶

Could this group have been the ‘Itzas’ that Hunbatz had referred to, led possibly by the great ‘Itzamna’, who helped found the Mayan civilization on the Yucatán Peninsula?

According to Cayce, the survivors brought records of their earlier history and these were still to be found in three places:

‘The records … are stored in three places in the earth as it stands today: in the sunken portion of Atlantis, or Poseida, where a portion of the temples may yet be discovered under the slime of ages of sea water – near what is known as Bimini off the coast of Florida.’ ¹⁷

We had already heard ‘the voice of the skull’ mention Bimini. Cayce had made the prediction on 28 June 1940 that the temples off the coast of Bimini would be discovered in 1968–9, but the importance of the find might not at first be realized.

I was amazed to discover that it was precisely in this area, on one
corner of the Bermuda Triangle, in 1968, that a group of divers led by a Dr Manson Valentine did in fact discover something completely unexpected beneath the waves, in only 20–30 feet (6–9 metres) of water.¹⁸ What they found were massive stone blocks, some as large as 15 feet (4.5 metres) in diameter and weighing around 25 tons (25 tonnes) apiece. Whilst controversy still rages over whether these might be naturally occurring rock formations, one of the most peculiar things is that each block is of almost exactly the same dimensions. While some appear to have been rounded off by the action of sea water, they had originally been ‘fashioned’ into almost perfect squares, with accurate right angles on each corner. They also seem to have been carefully arranged in what looks like a man-made sea wall completely surrounding the small island of Bimini, as if they had been built as a massive defence against the encroaching waves.

Cayce also said that further evidence of Atlantis would be found ‘in the temple records that were in Egypt … also the records that were carried to what is now Yucatán, in America, where these stones (which they know so little about) are now’.¹⁹ I couldn’t help wondering whether ‘these stones’ might be crystal skulls, perhaps some skulls lying still undiscovered somewhere on the Yucatán Peninsula?

But what of the temple records in Egypt? We later spoke to a British psychic, Ann Walker, who had recently made a trip to Egypt in search of these very records. In her book The Stone of the Plough,²⁰ she puts forward her belief that ancient Egypt, just like the ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica, was actually founded by the Atlanteans, who were instrumental in the design and building of the pyramids in both places. Certainly, much of the archaeological evidence suggests that rather than developing slowly and painfully, as is normally the case with human societies, the civilization of ancient Egypt, just like that of the Olmecs and the later Maya and Aztecs, emerged as if all at once, fully formed.

Indeed, even in ancient Mesopotamia, amongst the Sumerians,
who built a civilization in the Middle East that is believed to have immediately preceded the ancient Egyptians, there is a legend of ‘wise beings’ who had emerged from the seas in remote pre-history. These strange amphibious beings, like men crossed with fish, but ‘endowed with
reason’, had given the people the knowledge necessary to found
their civilization. Were these perhaps the Atlanteans that Ann Walker was so convinced had brought civilization to the Middle East and
to Egypt?

Ann believes these bearers of world civilization also carried records from Atlantis and that these may have included one or more crystal skulls. With the help of her ‘spirit guide’, she now believes that she knows exactly where these records are stored. Like Cayce, she thinks they lie in a ‘Hall of Records’ buried beneath the paws of the Sphinx. Interestingly, this very site has now been earmarked by the Egyptian government for excavation. Ann believes that a crystal skull will be unearthed in the process, unequivocally revealing the vital role the crystal skulls have played in shaping our human destiny, even in the West. Whether or not she is right, we shall just have to wait and see.

 

But if Atlantis really did exist, what had led to its final downfall? According to the information Cayce channelled, there was a ‘breaking up of the land owing to the misapplication of the divine laws upon those things of nature or of the earth’²¹ and it seems that crystal, if not crystal skulls, was involved in this process.

According to Cayce, the Atlanteans’ original use of crystal was strictly sacred:

‘In the Atlantean land ... among the household of a priest – a princess of royal blood – [was] one that had supervision of that stone upon which the light of heaven shone, for the blessings of man – that brought the divinations to the people as to their relationship to the godly forces as might find expression.’ ²²

Although Cayce did not refer directly to crystal skulls, I couldn’t help wondering whether ‘that stone’ might be a covert reference to them. Indeed, as I read on it became clear that certainly crystal, whether or not it was fashioned into a skull, had a very important role to play in Atlantis. For, according to Cayce, the Atlanteans originally used crystal as a means of divine communication, just as Hunbatz said was the function of the crystal skulls, but later the power of the crystals became corrupted:

‘Developed originally as a means of spiritual communication between the finite and the infinite, the huge reflective crystals were first known as Tuaoi Stone. [But] later, as its use was improved upon over the centuries, it expanded to become a generator of power and energy radiating across the land without wires. Then it became known as the Firestone, or the Great Crystals.’ ²³

Cayce described a people who learned how to manipulate their environment through harnessing the power of crystal. In an account which sounds like something straight out of science fiction, he goes on to describe these ‘Great Crystals’:

‘Set in the Temple of the Sun in Poseidia, the Firestone was the central power station of the country... Above the stone was a dome which could be rolled back for exposure to the sun. The concentration and magnification of the sun’s rays through many prisms was of tremendous intensity. So powerful was it that it could be regenerated and transmitted throughout the land in invisible beams similar to radio waves. Its energy was used to power ships at sea, aircraft and even pleasure vehicles. ...Cities and towns received their power from the same source.’ ²⁴

Everything Cayce said seemed to corroborate what we had heard from Carole Wilson about a civilization with ‘advanced minds’. The society he described even seemed to have some curious parallels with our
own. His account also appeared to back up what Professor Gunn-Allen had said about the Atlanteans manipulating their longevity and their own bodies:

‘The human body could even be rejuvenated through the moderate application of the rays from the crystals, and man often rejuvenated himself.’ ²⁵

But, according to Cayce, it was specifically through the abuse of the power of quartz crystal that the Atlanteans sowed the seeds of their
own undoing:

‘Yet by mis-application the Firestone [or crystal] could be and was turned to destructive uses [and this] contributed to the cause of the second catastrophe. The rays combined with other electrical forces to start many fires deep within the earth, and volcanic eruptions were precipitated from nature’s powerful storehouse of energy.’ ²⁶

He added:

‘The first breaking up of the land [was] when there was the use of those influences that are again being discovered – that may be of use for benefits in communications, transportation, etc, or turned into destructive forces.’ ²⁷

Cayce had been writing back in the 1940s when the ‘benefits’ of crystal were being explored primarily for military purposes. But now quartz is found in almost every electrical appliance, I wondered whether the Atlanteans might have been using a more advanced form of the very same crystal technologies that are so widespread today?

 

Native American Seneca legend also describes how Atlantis was destroyed due to an abuse of the power of quartz crystal. In her book Other Council Fires Were Here Before Ours,²⁸ Seneca elder Grandmother Twylah Nitsch describes this legend. According to the Seneca, Atlantis was originally part of a great continent known as ‘Turtle Island’, which actually included all the countries of the world before they became separated by the process that scientists now recognize as continental drift. This process is normally assumed to take place very slowly over millions of years, but the legend suggests that it can also take place far more quickly and that it was during one of these great ‘Earth changes’ or movements that Atlantis was destroyed.

According to the Seneca, during the time of Turtle Island, all five races of the world occupied the same land mass, each with their own area. The white race, known as the ‘Gagans’, occupied what was then Atlantis, in the north east of the island. This race was blessed with great creative talents:

‘Marvels … poured forth from [their] brilliant minds. They discovered cures for all the human diseases and found ways to restore their physical bodies [to] health by using the colors of the light from Grandfather Sun.’ ²⁹

In what sounds like an extraordinary parallel to today, the white people ‘developed curious things, which they called machines, to do their work for them. We called these curious forms Makes Work Easy for Two-leggeds.’³⁰ Initially this was not done in a way that was damaging to the Earth. There were no roads or mines. But as time went on, things began to change. Because they did not share their medicine with the other four races, the gagans started to live much longer than them and this gave them a feeling of great superiority. It was then that they decided to enslave the other races.

The new medicine of the Gagans was white and the colour white consequently took on a host of new associations. The Gagans believed that it was strong and clean, and that anything which was not white and pristine was destructive. Soon their fear of dirt, dust, soil and sand began to destroy their sense of belonging to Mother Earth. They moved to all-white encampments made of marble and crystal, and created plants and trees which would not shed their leaves or flowers. This brought to my mind plastic plants in modern office blocks and shopping malls. The Gagans became known as Aga Oheda, or the ‘Afraid of Dirts’, by the other races, who were only allowed into the encampment as servants, singers or dancers to amuse the Gagans during feast days.

So great became the Gagans’ fear of infection by anything that was not white that they began to cover the Earth’s surface with a white substance, known as ‘Hard-Like-Rock Snow’. This ‘rock-hard white robe’ destroyed plants and animals in its wake. At the same time, the Afraid of Dirts began to exploit the properties of crystal:

‘The Afraid of Dirts medicine people found a way to melt … Crystal … and to mix their fluid bodies with ores found on the Earth Mother. [The ‘Crystal People’] were being melted and therefore, murdered, in order to aid the Afraid of Dirts Tribe in their desire to harness the Earth Mother’s natural forces.³¹

Extracting ores from the Earth created great caverns. There was no balance in the frenzy with which the resources of Turtle Island were being used up without being replaced. Again, I was struck by some of the similarities with what is happening today. Were we not taking the Earth’s resources, chopping down forests, mining and taking from the Earth? Were we not slowly covering the planet, not only with the white substance of concrete, but also with roads that were eating up greater and greater areas of countryside? We wondered, was this legend really talking about the past or was it a prophecy describing the present world and our immediate future?

As the story moved towards its conclusion, the Earth Mother looked on with deep sadness at the fate that awaited her children:

‘The Two-leggeds who are my children have always been given free will. It was their choice to destroy the roots that kept them connected to the abundance that was their natural legacy. The waters of the tides of change will purify the damage done this day, but the legacy of their wanton destruction will be felt in the coming worlds and will be inherited by all future generations.’ ³²

And so, according to Seneca legend, just as told in the Mayan calendar, the Third World of Water was destroyed by flood. The lakes in our current world are there as reminders.

The story ends with the statement:

‘The flooding will continue across Turtle Island every time the sacred bonds of life and equality are broken by the Two-leggeds. It is time to call all the Medicine Stones together, because they are the Record Keepers of the true history of our journeys together. There, high on Sacred Mountain, the truth of the coming worlds will be revealed to The Faithful through the records of the Stone People.’ ³³

Again I wondered whether the ‘medicine stones’ might be a reference to the crystal skulls, which have kept the records not only of Atlantis but also of previous worlds. Might these ‘medicine stones’ really be here to remind us of the terrible events of the past so that we can learn from our mistakes and not let such catastrophes happen again? If ‘the flooding will continue … every time the sacred bonds of life and equality are broken’, might there really be some truth in the ancient Mayan calendar and in what Hunbatz Men had said about the possibility that our world might also soon come to an end?

We had been surprised enough to hear from Hunbatz and other sources that Atlantis might really have existed and that at least some of the crystal skulls might have come from this source, but this was nothing compared to what we were about to hear when we got back to the USA.

* The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls is published by Bear & Co. This excerpt printed by permission. All rights reserved.

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