What do you think about this?
There is a legend that refuses to die. It says that scattered across the earth are thirteen ancient skulls, each one carved from a single block of solid crystal, and that when all thirteen are finally reunited, at humanity’s hour of greatest need, they will release knowledge that could save our species.
It sounds like pure fantasy, until you remember how the people of ancient Mexico actually felt about skulls. To the Aztec and the Maya, a skull was not only a symbol of death. It was a symbol of life and rebirth. Beneath modern Mexico City, archaeologists uncovered the Huey Tzompantli, a great rack of more than six hundred human skulls mortared together at the Templo Mayor, built to keep the gods alive and hold the universe together. Skulls sat at the very center of their world.
The most famous crystal skull, the Mitchell-Hedges, was said to be lifted from a Maya ruin in Belize in 1924. The official verdict today is that it is a fake, carved with rotary tools that did not exist before the 1800s and traced back to a London auction.
But here is the question that nags at me. Is it possible that branding these skulls as modern fakes is exactly how you stop the world from hunting for the real ones still out there, and how much should we really trust the institutions that keep them locked in their vaults?
A clever hoax, or an old secret buried under an official stamp of doubt? What do you think the thirteen skulls really are?
