Several years ago, Frank Dorland aired the story of the Mitchell-Hedges skull and brought it on to the Joe Pyne show. Joe Pyne was an American radio and television talk show host who pioneered the confrontational style of hosting, in which the host advocates a viewpoint and argues with guests and audience members. Quite often, his opinions weren’t all that enlightened or enlightening.
I had my Swanson’s Hungry Man TV dinner in the toaster oven. It must have been sometime after 1969. When Frank Dorland entered, the studio audience gasped audibly at what he carried under his arm. It was the crystal Skull of Doom. Dorland was immaculately attired in a very expensive Pierre Cardin suit that crackled blue hot in the cathode ray black & white TV tube with its simple mounts and tau and gold thread console with knobs and channel changer reminiscent of a sci-fi flick interplanetary device called an interocetor.
My TV tray rattled as I got up to retrieve my Hungry Man dinner. I re-entered the living room just in the nick of time to observe “Mr. Camera” focusing in on the Crystal Skull like the lead in sequeying from the monologue to the Outer Limits. “The signpost up ahead” effectively bode ill as Joe Pyne, a one legged ex-marine drill sergeant with a permanent slot in his bulldog jowl for a stagey which all but muffled his clockwork quips for anything resembling the cut of the ordinary. “Sounds to me like highway robbery or like a pinko commie plot!”
This sure fire fizzled into the size of Pyne’s palpable embarrassment matching the crestfallen part of his otherwise brassy arrogance by a short and curlies hair’s breath, with Dorland regarding Pyne with the patience of a sage grandfather on a museum jaunt with a snot nose nephew firmly holding him by the short and curlies.

Dorland effectively met all of Joe’s verbal uppercuts finally leaning over to tug at Pyne’s sweaty arm to inform him that the skull didn’t take kindly to negative energy and tended to invert same with a magnifying effect on whoever seemed hostile to it.
Joe’s last heckle was interrupted by Mr. Camera #1 crashing into a tripod spotlight while Mr Camera #2 jumped to the dais upon which the Crystal Skull’s exquisitely wrought terrifying countenance had quietly reposed seconds before.
Then, Joe Pyne suddenly turned ashen at what we witnessed and I viewed that day.
The skull erupted from inside like a squid ejecting a cloud of ink which to be visible against the black satiny sheen of its container opened on hinges would have to have been on the halftone grey to color scale of B&W live TV, a nearly burgundy colored purplish violet hue similar to the color of Itz.
Now, this Itz is the “Translinguistic fluid” spoken of by Terrence McKenna as quoted by Daniel Pinchbeck in 2012: The Year of the Mayan Prophecy. The Mayan Wizard-king was considered the chief professor of Itz, the cosmic sap or magical fluid of shamans and alchemists akin or identical to the violet tinged “Translinguistic fluid” sought by the McKennas, which can be used to heal or kill.

When I read of this in Pinchbeck and then read of the Amethyst Crystal Skull, the apparently hitherto mere derivative function that amethyst would afford for example, scrying become crystal clear to wit. The crystal skull had been elicited to manifest the chief function of its evil twin, the amethyst skull, which was probably utilized for death dealing psychic blows to already induced Mayans like the Juju in a bottle wards off West Indian trespassers when displayed on a tree warning potential burglars that the house is the residence of a practitioner of Voodoo, and most probably an Auriesha to a caboe of considerable power as his/her ally.

It took Joe Pyne one year to die. Big daddy Tom Donahue delivered Joe’s epitaph on the KYA radio show. Sadly the live show was before video-tape and I even more unfortunately never realized what was going on until Philip Coppens’ in Nexus 15.3 on Crystal Skulls blindly corroborated Pinchbeck’s citing McKenna and quoting from David Frededel, Linda Schele and Joy Parker’s text in Mayan Cosmos: “For the ancient Maya human beings released their [soul-stuff] from their bodies when they let their blood. Through blood letting they conjured (Tzuk) the Way and the chru the companion spirits and gods.”

My father was a jeweler and if not for my Picassoid stubby digits I would have gone to gemology and become a watchmaker like him. However, being an artist and by inclination interested in art history I caught the splendors of the Dresden Exhibit at the palace of the legion of Honour in San Francisco when it venued there. I was so impressed with the reconstruction of the green room that some years later as an ostensible art agent/art consultant residing in Prague I visited the still visibly war ravaged Dresden, then still in East Germany, in the summer of 1990. I studied the Kunst Kammer in Prague, 114 folios of “every object made by the hand of Plou”, even focusing upon a silvered centaur which I had remembered from the exhibition at SEPL San Francisco Palace of the Legion of Honour. I also began to work on a theory which like a spark under a retort distilling sulphur mercury perennially attended on the back burner of my cognizance transmuted the fabulous, reducing it to the albedo ash of normalcy.

I know from my studies of the Kunst Kummer inventory of 1611 that several or more crystalline objects of a most impressive craftsmanship were listed. However, no crystal skulls! Mostly dismantling my earlier suspicion that the Mitchell-Hedges Skull might have been carved from a piece of Calaveras Quartz traded by Franciscan monks otherwise confiscated by conquistadors and sent to Philip II of Spain then forwarded to the Castrucci brothers, artisans and carvers of crystal for Rudolf II Holy Roman Emperor, was the quote from the Hewlett-Packard follow-up by Larry LaBarre that the quartz is very hard, measuring nine out of a possible ten on the Mohs scale, meaning that only a diamond would be able to cut it.
To my knowledge the Castrucci as employees of the Rudolfine workshops, wealthy as he (Rudolf II) was, did not have access to diamond mines. However, there is a particular grainy sand in the water camp region of the CR, which is of such a quality that is also quartz and it (I had thought) might have been utilized, though I would dispute that it would take seventy years or longer. Whoever carved this crystalline marvel must have obtained diamonds to cut with, especially as there must be a question mark whether there were sand sized particles in sufficient quantity. I think the Castruccis can be safely disqualified. But who can’t?

Keith Hendricks

Posted: 06|7|08 at 3:02 am. Category: The Skull: Reflections.
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