Читать книгу The Mystery of the Crystal Skulls - Chris Morton - Страница 15

It was a warm winter’s day when we arrived in Houston. The Parks lived in a typical suburban home with one of those street numbers running into the thousands which always surprises us British, whose street numbers never get nearly that far. JoAnn had told us that the day we planned to visit an ‘activation ceremony’ with the skull had been scheduled, which we would be welcome to join, and as we arrived we found the suburban Saturday afternoon calm disturbed by a steady drumbeat emanating from the Parks’ home.

JoAnn Parks came to the door to greet us with a big smile. Petite, with bouffant white-blonde hair and dressed in a bright green shiny trouser suit, she welcomed us into her home and invited us to join her and a group of about six other women, presumably friends and neighbours who had gathered for the occasion. Pictures of JoAnn’s family adorned the walls, along with a dramatic print of a jaguar stalking through the forest, alongside assorted pictures of JoAnn’s crystal skull.

The sofas in the Parks’ comfortable living-room had been pushed back, the curtains were drawn and the women were sitting silently on the floor in a circle, eyes closed, with one woman in the centre. She was in her mid-40s, wearing a colourful poncho and clutching two large crystals. She had large intense eyes and a peaceful expression on her face. As we later discovered, her name was ‘Star’ Johnsen-Moser. JoAnn sat down and joined in the drumming. The crystal skull was at the centre of the circle, facing Star, so at first I couldn’t see its features. I could see that it was bigger than the Mitchell-Hedges skull and that the crystal was both cloudy and clear, with a white patch on the top of the head.

We quietly joined the circle. The drumbeat was steady and hypnotic. After a few minutes Star started to breathe very strangely, with very short, gasping intakes of breath. Beginning slowly at first, she started to talk in a strange language I did not recognize, becoming quicker and more fluent as she went on. Her face contorted and she started to writhe around, gesticulating. In a sudden unexpected movement she thrust the two crystals upwards, stabbing at the air with them in all directions. She began chanting, joined by the other women, who vigorously repeated the sounds.

There was something slightly surreal about witnessing this extraordinary ceremony. What were Chris and I doing, watching this strange chanting and crystal waving being performed in front of a crystal skull? Had these people taken leave of their senses? Star was now waving the crystals around directly above the skull and the chanting was becoming louder and louder. Star then put her hands on the crystal skull, slumped forward and stopped.

I had not been sure what to make of Carole Wilson channelling, but this crystal-waving ‘activation ceremony’ seemed even stranger still. Trying to make sense of it as Star recovered her composure, I asked her about her relationship with the crystal skull. Star, who lived on a remote farm in Missouri, explained that she wasn’t even ‘interested in crystal’ until she met the crystal skull in 1987 and since then her life had ‘totally changed’:

As soon as JoAnn brought the skull out I could hardly understand my feelings, because I had never seen a crystal skull before… But as soon as she brought the skull out, something stirred in my heart. It was like meeting a long-lost friend and I just felt this overwhelming degree of love for this rock, for this skull. It was on a very basic emotional level… A little while later I spontaneously found myself speaking in this strange language and I thought, What the hell is going on? What would my friends think? What would my family think? But something told me the crystal skull would understand this language.

‘So I went to see it again and I began speaking in this language. And then I could see what looked like things beginning to happen and things beginning to quicken inside the skull. And then, all of a sudden, this “presence” seemed literally to emerge from right out of the skull, with such a force that it almost knocked me off my feet.

‘I felt almost paralysed by this immense degree of pain. But it wasn’t like a physical pain. I couldn’t move and I thought, What’s happening to me? But then, just when the intensity of the energy was becoming almost intolerable, what looked like an intense beam of light, almost like a laser beam, seemed to come right out of the skull and went straight into my heart and then down to the Earth below. I felt a tremendous amount of energy and power flowing through me, almost as if I might be about to burst into flames or something. But then the presence in the skull began speaking in this same language that I could now recognize and understand. And it was just so beautiful, such a wonderful experience.’

As Star spoke tears started to well in her eyes. She explained that ever since that time she had been having ‘telepathic communications with the presence in the skull’. She went on to tell me that the language in which the presence communicated with her was an ancient Tibetan language named Tak. This language was named after an ancient civilization that had existed over 36,000 years ago, before the continents of the world drifted apart, in an area of the world that is now known as the Takla Makan desert in Central Asia.¹ She pointed out that Tak was also the ancient Tibetan name for the constellation of Orion. Indeed, it seemed this was no coincidence as, according to Star, there was some connection between the crystal skulls, we human beings and the stars. As she explained it:

‘We all came through the star cluster of the Pleiades and Orion … we all came through that same source and we are now on our journey back where we came from.’

These stars apparently also had something to do with our own bone structure and our DNA, although Star said she could not be too specific yet about the detail of these points. She did add, however, that she had also contacted the ‘presence’ inside the Mitchell-Hedges skull on a visit to Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ home. Through this contact she had also experienced the total destruction of a whole planet called Maldeck, which had once existed within our own solar system. Star said this planet had been completely blown apart due to an ‘abuse of the power of the word’ which had led its inhabitants to abuse the power of technology. As Star recalled this experience, she stopped speaking, she was visibly shaken and tears started to fall from her eyes.

I asked how she felt about her experiences in working with the skull.

‘I’ve found it very difficult to put into words what I’ve learned and experienced. It’s almost more like a feeling or an emotion. What I began feeling is that this presence is like our “oversoul”. It is like the part of us that is above and beyond each of us as separate individuals. But I have been given the distinct impression that this oversoul somehow came into this, our own physical dimension and split into separate bodies in making its original expression on its descent into matter. And at one time our civilizations, such as Tak, were in complete communication with this higher evolution, with this higher source, but then over the course of our time on this Earth we have forgotten how to communicate properly with each other and with this original source.

‘It is as though in working with the crystal skull it is like tracing a thread of light, which is our connection with our original source. In working with the skull it feels as though you are moving along that thread of light back to the source and passing through various other dimensions en route.’

Star also explained that it was now time to awaken to our full consciousness and to reawaken the memory of our connections to our source. This was what the activation ceremony had been about. The skull had told her ‘to gather together a Family of Light for the purpose of remembering’ and to start to create the right energies on Earth. Those present, it transpired, were her ‘fellow lightworkers’ who had come together with the skull for this purpose. She said we needed ‘to open ourselves up again to connect our own pathways with the pathways of the stars, so that we can allow ourselves again to receive the light from the stars that we have all come through’.

She said she had received some very detailed and specific information from the skull but had been told that the time was not yet right to share much of this information with others, as people would have enough trouble in accepting even the most basic information from the skull at this time.

I was certainly having enough trouble accepting it all. All this talk of stars, bones and an exploding planet was a little too much for me. Luckily JoAnn Parks came over and saved me by handing me the crystal skull. It was heavy, weighing 18 lb (8 kg), although a lot smaller than the Smithsonian skull. I noticed that half of the face was cloudy and the other half clear, giving it quite an unusual visage that some may consider ugly alongside the clear chiselled beauty of the Mitchell-Hedges skull. There was none of the fine workmanship to be seen on the Mitchell-Hedges skull, no real attempt at the accurate rendering of a skull and no separate jaw-bone. Compared with the Mitchell-Hedges skull, the Houston skull looked more like a rough draft, almost hastily produced, with thinly drawn teeth and crude round eyes (see plate no. 10).

As I looked at the skull at close range, I wondered whether it was really possible that the type of ‘light being’ or ‘presence’ Star had spoken about might really exist inside this skull? Somehow, I couldn’t imagine it. It all seemed ridiculous. But then there was something appealing about this odd-looking rock.

Looking at the crystal, I noticed thin cracks dividing the cloudy areas from the clear. These imperfections travel deep within the skull, giving the appearance that it had been made up of different pieces of crystal stuck together, although it is actually made up of one single chunk of quartz.

‘I had a crystal carver examine it,’ said JoAnn. ‘He said that those cracks do in fact make this type of crystal very difficult to carve. The structure gets weakened and it could split apart under the pressure of a carver’s tools. Most carvers would prefer not to risk working with these flawed materials, particularly if they were using modern machine-powered tools.’

The carver had described the material from which the crystal skull is carved simply as ‘junk crystal’, the stuff that most carvers would throw in the bin. As I looked at the skull, I could appreciate that great delicacy and care would have to have been taken not to shatter the poor quality quartz. One clumsy move and the skull would have been in pieces.

The fact that the crystal looks as if it is made of different pieces is because, according to JoAnn, it was formed under conditions of great geological instability. Over a period of thousands of years, a section of crystal was laid down and then dramatic changes in the geological environment led it to crack. The crystal continued to grow but in the next section of growth it changed as a result of the changed geological conditions, leading to these interesting variations in colour. JoAnn claimed that the rock the skull was carved from had been ‘through five major Earth changes, which created these imperfections or inclusions, then it healed itself over again’.

So where had this strange ‘junk crystal’ skull come from? JoAnn explained that it was a chance encounter that originally brought her and her husband into contact with the crystal skull and that since then it had changed their lives forever.

As JoAnn started talking her face saddened as she recalled the terrible series of events that had led her to the skull. JoAnn and Carl had two children. But in 1973, their elder daughter, Diana, who was only 12 years old at the time, was diagnosed as having bone cancer.

Around the time that his daughter became ill, Carl, a carpenter by trade, found himself doing some work for a quiet self-contained man, Norbu Chen. The work was almost complete when Carl happened to notice an article in a magazine: ‘Norbu Chen the Tibetan healer’. He showed it to JoAnn, who was anxious to work with anyone who might be able to help her child, as the doctors had given Diana only three more months to live.

JoAnn recalled her meeting with Norbu: ‘When I met him he was completely quiet and polite but I knew instantly that there was something out of the ordinary about this man.’

Norbu was a red-hat Tibetan lama who had undergone many years of arduous training in India before moving to Houston and setting up his healing practice, the Chakpori Ling Healing Foundation. He led JoAnn down red-carpeted stairs into a small room that had red carpets on the floors, walls and ceiling. She had never seen anything like it before. Her eyes were immediately drawn towards the red altar at one end of the room, ‘where in the flickering candlelight was the most awesome sight I had ever seen. In the centre of the altar was a crystal skull. Nothing in my God-fearing Christian upbringing had prepared me for anything like the sight of that skull.’

Despite the unorthodox appearance of Norbu Chen’s ‘doctor’s surgery’, something inspired JoAnn’s trust and she took her daughter to see him. With the help of Norbu and the crystal skull, she says, ‘My daughter lived very well for three years before she finally did pass on.’

Sometime after Diana died, Norbu Chen told JoAnn that he was looking for a secretary and so she offered to help out. She worked for Norbu for several years, but during this time learned little about the crystal skull. All Norbu told her was that the skull had been given to him as a gift from a Guatemalan shaman. However, as JoAnn explained:

I saw many Tibetan monks. They lived in a small building behind Norbu’s house. They studied from ancient Tibetan books, conducting healing ceremonies and prayer sessions every morning in the healing room. They burned incense, chanted and rang bells.

‘The monks honoured the crystal skull reverently. They would chant and talk Tibetan to it. It was used by the monks to direct energy into the bodies of the people who came to be healed. They would tap into the energy of the skull and run it through the meridian of the patient’s body to assist their healings.’

During her time at the foundation JoAnn says she ‘witnessed many miracles emerging from that healing room’, including the help it gave to her daughter, and over the years Norbu Chen became a close friend of the Parks. In 1980, he too died, but just before his death he gave JoAnn and Carl the crystal skull, telling them nothing more about it ‘except “One day you will know what it is for.” ’ Norbu explained that when he died it was the Tibetan belief that he would have another body waiting for him to move into and that he would begin another life. The crystal skull, he said, was part of his life, but it too needed to reach its next stage and that was why he was giving it to JoAnn and Carl.

JoAnn and Carl took the skull home, but they had no idea what to do with it, so it ended up at the bottom of their wardrobe.

About a year later the crystal skull started to come to JoAnn in her dreams. At first its image would appear just occasionally. Then, about two years further on, it started ‘talking’ to her. ‘It wasn’t an actual voice,’ she explained. ‘It was telepathic.’

JoAnn had never experienced anything like it before. She had always considered herself a rational person ‘with both feet planted firmly on the ground’. At first, the telepathic communication was infrequent enough just to dismiss it, but gradually it started to happen more often and at odd times of day, when JoAnn would be fixing lunch for her grandchildren, for instance, or doing the books for Carl’s business. The skull would even come and speak to her while she was out driving the car. It kept saying, ‘I want out of this closet.’

As JoAnn explained, ‘I began to wonder if I was losing my mind. I even thought about visiting our family doctor.’ But things got even more bizarre when the skull started repeatedly telling her that she had to ‘contact the man’ without giving any details of who ‘the man’ was. Finally, one afternoon, ‘I found myself sat in my bedroom closet having conversations with this rock.’ She told it firmly, ‘Leave me alone, I don’t want anything more to do with you, just get out of my life!’ She slammed shut the vanity case in which it was stored and pushed it to the back of the wardrobe, covering it with other boxes and cases and shutting the wardrobe door after it.

‘But the skull was persistent. He was not about to give up. As I ran down the stairs he continued, “The world is going to know about me. I am important to mankind. And, by the way, my name isn’t ‘Skull’, it’s ‘Max’!”

‘Well, now we were on first name terms, we could really talk!’

Some time later JoAnn was to see a TV programme about UFOs that showed a photograph of the Mitchell-Hedges skull. The only information that she had had on crystal skulls prior to this had been Chen’s brief parting words over seven years previously. Now she was thrilled to discover that there were other people with ‘these extraordinary talking rocks’.

When JoAnn rang the TV station for more information, they gave her the number of a man called Nick Nocerino, who they thought might be able to help. Max, who was as conversational as ever, assured JoAnn that this was the man he had been talking about, the man he had wanted JoAnn to contact.

JoAnn called Nick, who, in gravelly tones, assured her that he had been looking for Max since 1949. He ‘tuned into’ him and was surprised to see Tibetan monks. JoAnn was amazed. She had only given Nick the description of the skull over the telephone and here he was telling her some of its history! She quickly arranged to meet Nick at Houston airport the following week.

Cutting a mysterious figure in a black beret and trenchcoat, Nick Nocerino turned out to be the world’s foremost expert on crystal skulls, a man who had spent a lifetime researching the subject and director of the Society of Crystal Skulls International. After the Second World War he had been sent to Central America to carry out intelligence work on behalf of the US government. It was in a remote village in Guatemala that he had seen a rose quartz crystal skull with a detachable jaw-bone and heard of another fitting Max’s description. He was told that this other skull was used for healing, was not as beautiful as the rose quartz skull and didn’t have a separate jaw. It was made of crystal that was both cloudy and clear and had a white patch, like a cap, on the top of its head. This skull was believed to have been found in a Mayan tomb in Guatemala in 1924 and to have been given away by a local shaman for unknown reasons.

Nick was delighted to have finally tracked Max down and JoAnn was flabbergasted to find that the man that Max had been telling her to find was not just a figment of her imagination. In fact, it was a great relief to her to finally get confirmation that she had not gone completely mad.

Nick Nocerino assured JoAnn that the crystal skulls did have the ability to communicate telepathically with people they were close to. He explained that during the course of his research he discovered that the skulls did have many attributes that did not seem to make rational sense and that seeing visions in the skull or hearing the skull ‘speak’ was perfectly normal. He said he knew how frightened people were by the idea of psychic experiences, or any interior, non-rational experiences. But he believed that psychic phenomena had actually been experienced by the vast majority of the population. For instance, many people often ‘get a feeling’ that something may be about to happen just before it does. As Nick explained, such experiences often frighten people, who usually dismiss them for fear of going mad or being thought ‘abnormal’. But such experiences were very normal to Nick and he was not afraid to say so.

Nick suggested that perhaps the best way for JoAnn to realize that she was not crazy was to see other people with the skull, to see what their experiences were. He assured her that Max talking to her was nothing besides what other people would experience with him. Nick himself was something of a veteran when it came to weird experiences with the skulls, as we were to find out for ourselves. So JoAnn opened her home to people who were curious about crystal skulls. First of all, only one or two came, then over time, more and more arrived, until people were coming from all over the world to see Max, just as with Anna Mitchell-Hedges’ crystal skull.

‘Max has brought me such joy,’ says JoAnn, ‘and he also brings happiness and laughter to others.’ JoAnn now regularly tours around the USA taking Max to different cities to ‘meet the people’, which she says he ‘absolutely adores’, adding, ‘You could say that he has become a bit of a star.’ She has heard many people say that they have extraordinary experiences with him. What is most often reported back to her by people who have sat with Max is the feeling of well-being that he gives them. JoAnn feels that at last she understands the words Norbu Chen spoke to her just before he died. Now she says she thinks she has found out what Max is for and, ‘He is doing what he should be doing.’

So, was healing the real purpose of the crystal skulls? Was this why they were created? After all, JoAnn claimed that the crystal skull had helped her daughter and both JoAnn and Anna Mitchell-Hedges had many letters claiming that their crystal skulls had had healing effects on those who had spent time with them. JoAnn feels that this is primarily spiritual healing, while Anna Mitchell-Hedges believes her skull works directly on physical ailments. She is sure that it has not only kept her in good health but has also healed others.

We were somewhat sceptical about the skulls’ healing powers, but one thing we did notice was that we came away from JoAnn’s house in an exceptionally good mood. Was it something to do with the healing power of the skull or simply the power of suggestion? We just couldn’t tell.

Either way, it was now time to make a trip to the outskirts of San Francisco to meet Nick Nocerino in person.