After gathering in the room, participants were encouraged to place their own crystal skulls (and bottles of water or other power objects) on the table where Max would sit, so they could absorb his energy; there were also some smaller skulls carved from various gemstones and minerals that had been charged with Max's energy for purchase.
JoAnn Parks, Max's keeper, first gave us a history of Max, including how she became the skull's manager: the Red Hat Tibetan monk Norbu Chen was in Texas in 1973, and Parks' husband did some work on his home. Chen worked with the Parks' daughter, who was dying of bone cancer; when Chen died in 1980, he left Max to JoAnn Parks. (Chen himself had been given the skull by shamans in Guatemala, but he never told Parks much about Max's history.) Max sat on a shelf in a closet for several years before Parks realized his purpose: He wanted to be shared with the world, and he wanted her to share him.
Max's history is still a real-life mystery; he's been mentioned in several documentaries and was studied by the British Museum, along with several other crystal skulls that were all determined to be "contemporary" -- created with machinery over the past couple of hundred years. The official British Museum comment on Max, though, was ... no comment. This is because of Max's quartz crystal makeup; he is carved from a piece of quartz crystal that is actually a fused piece of five different crystals. (You can see the matrices on the back of Max's head and running through and around his face.) The long and the short of it is this: If you tried to carve a piece of quartz crystal like the one Max is made from using a dremel or another modern-day, rotary-style tool, it would completely shatter the crystal. That means Max was probably carved by hand -- but nobody really knows. Nor has there been any conclusion on exactly how old he is (thousands of years, most likely) or who first carved him or where he came from.
After Parks shared some of Max's story for about 45 minutes, we were lead in a guided meditation, and then each attendee was invited up to touch Max. (He got quite a few kisses on the forehead!)
Max has his own Facebook group; join it to learn more about him and find out what his traveling schedule looks like. We'll be sure to keep you posted if he makes it back to Denver!
