Michael Owen

MA, MNZAP, MNZP sS

Registered Psychologist Psychotherapist ACC Approved Counsellor

109 Kaitemako Road South, R. D. 3, Tauranga, New Zealand 3021 Ph 07-544-0989 Fax 07-544-1789 mjowen@ihug.co.nz

Permission is granted for this article to be published on the www.livingnow.com.au website. Please link to www.tuitui.co.nz and korero@tuitui.co.nz Word count: 2,130 Crystal Skulls and 2012: Standing under the Cliffs of Possibility and Breathing Starwater on the Scattered Beads of Spiritual Memory. Abstract: The crystal skull is the marriage between spirit and matter that takes place in the human psyche and the human capacity to remember what is not here any more. As we near the close of the fifth age and the year 2012 the stories of the crystal skulls allow us to remember our spiritual amnesia and remind us to feed a time beyond our own. The skull universally symbolizes what survives after death. It is the eternal part of the human psyche that is the Give-away, the residue that is left behind in the collective unconscious, of a life lived consciously. At a time when the Holy Female who Suckles All Life has been taken for granted by the terrorists of annual growth and progress, when those who still hear her Heart with their indigenous ear have been strip-mined of their ceremonies and doings that keep the Body of the World in good health, when matter has been enslaved for human consumption, our culture needs a remedy for the amnesia that keeps us crazed with longing and bring us in from the cold of our spiritual Ice Age. We can but hope to fail magnificently at this impossibly grandiose New Age task but in so doing we can perhaps feed the world for a time beyond our own so that it can jump up and live for a moment longer. This is the Hope of the ancestors who have gone before us that will allow to be the ancestors of life that comes after us. One of the many legends and stories about crystal skulls says that the Council of Crystal Skulls contains the Hope and Knowledge needed for the evolution of Two-leggeds on this Planet of the Children. Hope is the capacity to dream a better future for all Children, the winds, whales, the waters, the spores, the sands and the invisible salt of the sea, and was brought here by the Star Nations People from the Twelve Worlds, the other planets in this universe that have human life. They dreamed themselves here and imaged their knowledge into matter, into quartz skulls made in the image of what is quintessentially human. Quartz is one of the hardest minerals known and the second most common in the earths crust. All crystals are the brain cells of Grandmother Earth and as lightning-in-theground they hold a key to the spiritualization of matter and the materialization of spiritin other words, the marriage of spirit and matter which creates life that lives in balance and harmony. This harmony is not the peacable garden of the tofu-eaters, where everything has the same nature, the lion lies down with the lamb, George and Saddam hug tenderly, and everyone loves everyone else. This is white light fascism and only brings about it opposite, which we are living now. But it is where all things live according to their own nature, spiritual and instinctual, where all things walk with the terror and beauty of their own wildness. The crystal skull is the conscious human being who uses the free will of fallible human judgment in alignment with the laws of both substance and spirit and brings about the lightning bolt of death and change that allows new life to be born. It is the nature of the Holy Female, All of Life, to keep herself veiled. Like the indigenous soul within each of us it keeps itself dappled in the bushes, glimpsed but not seen until the holiday-maker, the wage earner, the mother, the student, the seeker, the anthropologist within us is ready to ask the right question, to find the right attitude, to kneel,. Then our indigenous soul smells us, and only after long years of sniffing, does it reveal its wildness to us and sometimes never, and sometimes in piecesa hint here, a thought now, a failure then, a disappointment there, and even when see the pattern in the

talking leaves we miss the meaning. These rain clouds of meaning gather as we approach the year 2012the end of the Maya calendar. The Maya calendar does not actually end in 2012 but the current 5,125-year age of 13 baktuns (a baktun is 400 years) does end and another one begins again at the Long Count date of 0.0.0.0. About 2,500 years ago the Maya priest-astronomers in their far-seeing way created a calendar that was based on the knowledge that the dying sun would be reborn from the Great Womb of the Milky Way over 2,000 years into the future in the year 2012. The important date was not when the calendar started but when it ended. This is quite the reverse of our Gregorian calendar that is based on the birth of a sunchild in the past. But this current 13-baktun cycle is different than the othersit is the last of five ages in both Mayan and Aztec mythologies. The number five is the quintessencethe summing up at the centre of what has happened around the four directions of the circumference. The Aztec calendar stone indicates that each sun or age lasts 100 calendar rounds (5,196 years). This is very close to a complete calendar cycle of the Maya Long Count. So five Aztec ages make 25,980 years, five Mayan 13-baktun cycles are 25,625, and the time it takes for the earths axis to rotate through the heavens (the precessional Great Year) is 25,868 years. The year 2012 will see the sun born from the Great Rift (the dark part at the centre of the Milky Way) near where the ecliptic (the path of the planets across the Milky way) intersects the Milky Way to form what the Maya called Wakah-Chan or the World Tree. There are also a number of other significant astronomical phenomena in that year. The Dresden Codex refers to the The Birth of Venus in 3114 BCE which was the rising of Venus on one horizon at the same time the Pleiades was setting below the opposite horizon. In 2012 we shall witness The Death of Venus when Venus will be setting while the Pleiades will be rising. Maya prophecy also holds that the world of new consciousness will be born on the occasion of the second in the pair of Venus transits on June 8, 2012. Finally, on May 20, 2012, the sun, the moon and the Pleiades (Quetzalcoatl the Redeemer was a symbol for the sun-Pleiades-zenith conjunction) will pass through the zenith at the Maya site of Chichen Itza. The winter solstice in 2012 is the knot on the Loom of Time that holds all these physical and spiritual events together in the Dreamthe rebirth of the sun from the darkness, the human hope of resurrection, the hope that love and the warmth of human life will prevail against the coldness of the galactic night, the hope that the universe is on our side and that we are not just an accident lost amongst the stars, and that there will be life in a time beyond our own. On the morning after the longest night of the year (in the northern hemisphere anyway) on December 22, 2012 an event will occur that has not happened for 26,000 years. As the sun dawns and the Milky Way sets behind it on the horizon the suns will rise out of the centre of the Sacred Tree, the Heart of Heaven. First Father, our sun, will be reborn from this Cosmic Womb of the Milky Way, the Great Mother. But December 22, 2012 will dawn just like any other day, no different from the millions of days before and the millions of days after. The literalists will dismiss the event when the year 2013 comes along. Its true, it doesnt matter whether these astronomical events occur on that specific day or not life will go on. In star time a day or a year or a decade does not make much differenceit is the process not the event. This is because the archetypal rebirth of the sun, what gives life and joy to the People, is happening in the Dream all the time. However this spiritual potential (which is what an archetype is) can only come into being if there is a human container to hold it, if there is human consciousness to give it witness, if there is human longing for it, and if there is human grief when it dies. This is why spirit loves the embrace of rough matter, it longs to by touched by human hands. So, yes, 2012 does matter. The moment, which is just like any other, is like the alchemical earth that is the common dirt that is everywhere and yet from it gold can be made. It is a point in the time and space where the two worlds can touch through the actions and choices of humans. We can align ourselves with the greater rhythms of the cosmos and both can be changed. Every ending or beginning resonates with all other deaths and births past and future. This is why Maya rulers conjured and ceremonialized at the katun and baktun endings (every

20 or 400 years) to plant seeds for a time beyond their own, and to help the sun to rise again. In all the great world myths the end of an age is accompanied by destruction. However humanitys relationship to the earth is now vastly different than in previous ages. Earthquakes or floods in ancient myths did indeed have a literal meaning but were more a sign in matter of a coming psychic death in the collective unconscious of humanity. The catastrophe happened in the Dream not in matterbut now things are reversed. It may be first time in human history where sufficient human consciousness has accrued for safe passage from one great age to the next without psychic or spiritual destruction. But the danger in this age, the Fifth Movement of humanitys Book of Life, the age of Assuming Authority that we see with the crystal skull in the Maya (Xultun) Tarot, is that we have become estranged from matter and so suffer the opposite problem to those at the beginning of this Great Year 26,000 years ago, or at the beginning of this Age 5,200 years ago. From 30,000 to 15,000 years ago there was a vast blossoming of human art (painting, jewelry, carving)the capturing of spirit in matter to feed the other world, and the adornment of spirit with the beauty of matter re-formed by our human hands. In the third millennium BCE, at the beginning of the Fifth Age, humans began to enslave matterpyramids, walls, henges, temples, tombs, menhirs and we live today with that hankering after permanence and immortality in the construction of things that will lasttall buildings, temples, legacies, eternal heavens and hells. But our spiritual progress may have been won at great costthe colonization, the despiritualisation, and the enslavement of matter. Monotheistic religions have never done much for the earth and now matter is no longer holy, it is a commodity. The cars, the toasters, the lampshades and the shopping mallsno-one sings to them now. We have incurred a debt we may never repay and, unless we repay consciously, Nature will extract repayment. The cost of this transition into the new age, the death-caul that accompanies this birth, may be the literal destruction of life as we know it. Over the past few decades the signs have become clear to all but the blindglobal warming, loss of indigenous forests, world-wide drop in sperm counts, collapse of fish stocks, or the emergence of new diseases, to name but a few. Our denials are signs of spiritual Alzheimers. Just as a dream takes months or years to come into consciousness, this passage from one age to the next will take not a day but decades. Over the next century it will become clearer whether the Dream of the People will survive. The 260-day tzolkin calendar of the Maya is based upon the 260-day period of human pregnancy, and in the greater round it is the 26,000year period of human spiritual pregnancy. The long swell of time that we ride nownailed to time and matter as Father Suns rebirth from the Heart of Heaven on December 21, 2012is the seeding of what will be born in the next 26,000 years. The crystal skulls, made with the permanence of the hardest matter, invisibly transparent with spirit, and in the form of what is irreducibly human, keep alive the Memory of the First Breath of what is not yet born. ----------------------------------------------------------

Michael Owen is a writer, teacher and psychologist. He has worked with indigenous teachers in Canada, USA and Mexico since 1980 and has studied at the C G Jung Institute, Zurich. He is author of Jung and the Native American Moon Cycles and The Tarot Codex: Love Songs of Spirit and Matter. He lives New Zealand.