The Spirit of Ma'at — December, 2011 — THE SEDONA CRYSTAL SKULL CEREMONY: True Confessions

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THE SEDONA CRYSTAL SKULL CEREMONY: True Confessions (Deutsch)

By Cal Garrison

Before we get started on this, there are a few things I want to make clear. Much of what's here was written before, during, and immediately after the Sedona Skull Ceremony. It is a true account of what I experienced on that day. If you decide to go ahead and read it you will soon see that I was in such a bad mood, I couldn't get over myself enough to shape up and be there for an event that I had spent at least three months looking forward to, like it was Christmas.

Don't ask me what happened. All I can say is, at the time, it was like I was watching my own private train wreck. Because of this, and because there's no way to whitewash the truth, my original article about the Sedona Ceremony reflected nothing but my own reaction to a set of circumstances that totally pissed me off.

If all of this has caused me a good deal of self-reflection, after the fact, I have discovered a number of things that have helped me to see what really happened at the Sedona Crystal Skull event, and that have helped me to understand why I couldn't be there for it. In order to come up with a report that reflects some portion of the truth, since I can't lie about my own experience and I can't pretend to have taken part in any of the amazing things that happened without me, what follows is an attempt to tell both sides of the story by annotating my original piece with what I found out about the ceremony, and myself, after it ended.

Here we go. The original article is in plain type. My lessons, and the real story, are written in italics.

November 6th

Notes from the night before:

My living room window faces north, toward Hopi land. At the moment, I am looking out of it, thinking about the Mayan, and the Hopi, and the Tibetan elders who have been doing ceremony up in that direction for the past twenty-four hours, wondering if they are responsible for the fact that it snowed last night. A mass of clouds still hangs suspended over Thunder Mountain.

Let's hope it's a good sign — because Hunbatz Men is heading down from the mesas, along with a group of spiritual pilgrims, all of whom have travelled twenty-eight-hundred miles to fulfill a prophecy. By the time the sun comes up tomorrow morning they will gather in the sacred canyons of Sedona to perform a ceremony whose ultimate purpose is to reawaken the Spirit of the North American continent and open the ground in whose soil will be sown the seeds for the enlightenment of all mankind.

Close to 500 people are coming from all over the world to be part of this experience. I am very happy to be one of them; it feels huge. You can tell that the Spirits mean business, because the atmosphere is full of — I don't know what. Something's in a state of suspension. The clouds are still up there blanketing the sky. There's no wind; no sound. The sun went down two hours ago. Maybe it's time to stop reading too much into the signs and try to get some sleep. I gotta be up at three.

(This is typical Cal Garrison, living in her head. You can see that I was already weaving up high expectations, wondering about the meaning of it all and thinking that it meant I was preparing myself for the next day. I meditated, went into my heart, got my beams all set up, and prayed before I went to bed. On some level I was doing the best I could but in retrospect I am totally clear that even at that point I was more concerned with what I would write about the Sedona Ceremony than I was with "Being there" for it)

Talk about insomnia. I laid awake all night listening to the rain turn into tiny needles of ice. Weather is never an issue here; why today, of all days? How were hundreds of people going to find their way down the two miles of back road that leads to Angel Valley in the pitch dark, in the freezing rain? I wondered if Hunbatz Men actually made it. As much as the precipitation reminded me that Mother Earth and Father Sky were talking to each other, I am too old to play Woodstock, and the prospect of getting soaked and freezing my ass off in the mud didn't turn me on.

(I am a total baby when it comes to the cold. And rain? Forget about it. These things make me want to stay home. Like I said, it never freezes or rains in Sedona. The fact that the weather looked like it was going to put an edge on the day really bummed me out.)

The reason I got up so early is because I needed a little extra time to collect the three other 'old ladies' who were hitching a ride with me: Thelma, my 92-year-old friend and veteran skull freak from Glastonbury; Elizabeth a friend of Hunbatz and would be skull guardian with a broken toe; and Jan, Drunvalo's and my publisher who came to talk to us about books and wound up staying long enough to catch the ceremony. After stopping at the "SuperK" for a couple of cups of the worst coffee on the planet we took off to go hook up with Sherie, who has terrible night vision and wanted to follow us down in her car.

(Getting up early didn't bother me. What I didn't like was; having to be the driver. My night vision is worse than Sherie's, and I was worried about not being able to see. The bad coffee didn't help. I was agitated to begin with, and as aware as I was of the way I felt, I never stopped long enough to clear it.)

I think I was expecting to see balloons, or a sign, or a guy with a flag, or something to mark the Angel Valley turn off — but there was nothing. Even I, the one who knows how to get there, felt like I was entering a black hole when I took a left, and aimed the car onto the rough road that winds into the Valley. By the time we got to the bottom of the hill the main gate was locked and I was like; "What the f---!" Pardon my French but I couldn't figure out why it wasn't open. Kelly McCabe was parked in front of it with one arm out the window, poking away at the control panel, hoping that he might hit the right button and come up with the password. I got out of the car, walked up to the gate and tried to open it manually but it wouldn't budge. I was just about to jump the fence and go looking for whoever was in charge when my eyes caught sight of a string headlights twinkling through the Creosote bushes, as the line of cars that was building up behind us trickled down the road.

(This is where I noticed I was soaking wet and where I didn't catch myself wondering how bad it would make me look if this ceremony didn't come off. I was the one who wrote the PR for it, after all. Christ, I would never be able to live it down. What would people think if this whole thing turned out to be a farce? My ego was having a ball getting me all worked up about public opinion! Nothing in me knew enough to say; whoa! Snap out of it girl. Who do you think you are?)

Well on my way to getting pissed off, the effects of a nearly full, Aries Moon lit up the part of me that has no patience to begin with. Why was the gate locked? How come the fires weren't going? Where the hell were the Angel Valley people? God how I hate it when things are half-assed — and for something like this; Christ, you'd think they'd at least open the gate.

(The Aries Moon may have actually been the fly in the ointment. This is no excuse but; I was born with the Moon in Aries, and while all this was going on, the transiting Moon, along with a simultaneous transit from Uranus, was lighting up a combination of influences that would piss anyone off. On the day of the ceremony, especially during the early morning hours, the Uranus-Moon combo had as much to say about my mood as it did about the weather and the SNAFU conditions that were only beginning to drive me nuts.)

While I was busy making things worse, I couldn't help but notice that everyone else was happy as a lark. Thelma was chirping away, laughing and joking about swimming to the ceremony; Jan was totally in love with the moment, psyched not to be at the office sitting in front of her computer — and Elizabeth was zoned out, buzzed from the codeine she had taken to placate her toe. As I sat there watching the windshield wipers go back and forth, an image of my perfect pictures sizzling in the rain got interrupted by the appearance of a young hippie kid, who if he didn't already know the combination, popped out of his car to use his magical abilities to unlock the gate.

Once it opened it was so dark we took a wrong turn and wound up circling the entire retreat center, followed by a string of vehicles that finally found its way to the parking area. By that time I was having a nicotine fit, and I wanted to see what was going on, so I left the girls in the car with the heater running and stepped outside to survey three huge, white tents, one bigger than the other two. Other than the caravan that was filing into the parking lot there was no sign of life — until the guy who parked next to me got out of his car to have a smoke, and we started chatting about the ceremony, the darkness, and the weather.

I liked this guy right off the bat; a Leo named Ken, he said he came down from Montana. Halfway through the rest of his story I got distracted when my eyes drifted over to a row of Jiffy Johns that happened to be situated directly upstream and less than fifty feet away from what looked like it had to be the ceremonial tent. I've spent a lot of time "sweeping the altar" on many different levels, and I couldn't believe this. It would have made more sense to put the toilets downstream, even in sunny weather; with all this rain, by the end of the day — Jesus Christ; what were they thinking?

In a last ditch attempt to try to remind myself that everything is divinely ordered it occurred to me that maybe the energetic overflow from the Porta Potties was part of the ceremony. Would flushing the shamanic toilet under the ceremonial tent be just the thing to extract the remains of James Ray and the infamous Sweat Lodge deaths out of the soil at Angel Valley? From a homeopathic perspective it made perfect sense. God, let's hope that's what they had in mind because anyone with half a brain could see that the Feng Shui sucked.

(As it turns out, I was on the right track about the Porta Potties: more on that later)

Meanwhile back at the car; Thelma needed an escort to the "lou" so she and I held hands and had a great time laughing our way across the parking lot. Looking at her I couldn't help but ask myself why I was having such a hard time with things when at 92, this old gal had no complaints and was totally OK with all of it. By the time she got out of the john, her old friend Michael, the man who runs the center, came out of the mist with a golf cart and whisked her off to go wait for things to start up at his house.

(This was when I realized that Thelma's chirpy little attitude had created warmth, and comfort, and a hot cup of tea in a situation where there was none in sight. It was a miracle. Bearing witness to it, I could no longer deny the fact that my attitude was manufacturing a completely different set of circumstances. The minute I saw that I was the one who was hatching my own unpleasantness, I started flagellating myself for being an un-spiritual, unconscious idiot. It only made things worse.)

By 6 AM people were milling around everywhere, squishing their way through the mud. Torches had been lit, making it easier to see. In the staff tent I found a lot of people who knew less about things than I did, trying to get their bearings. Diane was there. When we finally caught sight of each other she rolled her eyes and motioned me over to tell me that the ceremony wasn't going to happen. She didn't know why.

Before I could go ballistic she reminded me that we were there to keep the light on, and take care of business, and trust that it would all be OK. Looking out at the cars sliding single file down the road all I could think of was; Oh my God. I hope that they can find a way to feel good about this.

(Do you believe it? After three months of preparation Hunbatz Men wasn't going to show up! If I was worried about my reputation what do you suppose this piece of news added to the pile of BS that made me think it mattered? I couldn't believe my ears, and I couldn't believe how well Diane was handling it, until I remembered that she can handle stress and pressure better than anyone I've ever met.

However...

I couldn't bring myself to ask her how she was going to break the news to the crowd that happened to be lining up in front of her, totally stoked to be there, waiting for their wristbands, and looking forward to the ceremony. Keep the light on and trust that it would all be OK? I knew I had already flunked that test when, a moment later, an Indigo, Waspafarian style dude walked up to me, put his hand on my chest and told me to "Breathe" and instead of taking his advice I told him to shove it.)

As I headed back to the car to see how the girls were doing, I remembered that every time we do any type of ceremony with the Elders, no matter where they come from, if there is a plan, nothing goes according to it. The indigenous people have a very fluid, in the moment relationship to their ceremonial work that doesn't ever seem bound by time or by what is expected. Jan and Elizabeth are way more relaxed about life than I am and they, like Thelma, had no problem with the fact things weren't moving along like a German train. Me? I had completely forgotten how nuts it makes me when nothing is clear and I was having a tough time accepting the fact that I was unable to open my heart to the perfection and beauty that had to be hiding, somewhere in mud. After I told them that Hunbatz was nowhere in sight and that Murphy's Law was at the wheel, we took a vote and decided to check out the situation under the Big Top.

Lo and behold, everyone was smiling and happy to be there. Not one of them had a problem; at least that's how it seemed, and this flat out amazed me. From the back row, next to the entrance we could see everything from a wide angle. Lots of people in high spirits, and an array of crystal skulls were lined up near the stage, where Drunvalo happened to be. Who knows how many of them were aware that Hunbatz wasn't going to show up at sunrise and that any plans for a ceremony were on hold? If they knew, these people were so blissed out it didn't even matter.

Elizabeth was totally out of it. The codeine wasn't working and the cold damp had her teeth chattering; but she was hanging on. Jan looked to be warm as toast and happy, all bundled up with a big smile and a Sagittarian attitude. Sitting there trying to make sense of it all, as friends from all over the place filed into the tent, each one of them gave me a hug and laughed at me for being so bitched out.

After a lot of milling around the Directions were called, a couple of people spoke, and then Drunvalo got up on the stage to speak. Between the weather, the weirdness, and no Hunbatz, from my limited perspective it felt like the ceremony was riding around on a flat tire from the get go and that it would be Drunvalo who would have to spend the rest of the day, pumping energy into a situation that stood a good chance of going nowhere without him. I stayed long enough to listen to him explain the mystery of the missing Elder and the prospect of no ceremony — which went something like this:

He told the crowd that Hunbatz was exhausted from the journey. After 2,800 miles, thousands of people, the recent side effects of cold temperatures and high elevations, and no back up from the Elders who would have been there if their Visas had been granted in time, the Mayan Daykeeper had indeed arrived in Sedona, but he was on his way to getting sick. Upon checking into his cabin at Angel Valley he realized that he needed a little more heat and comfort, so he checked himself into a hotel to rest and warm up. Drunvalo said that he thought that things might get going later in the morning but he didn't know for sure, when or if Hunbatz Men would show up.

I might as well cut to the chase and tell you that Jan had to catch a plane, and I was her ride. Happy to have an excuse to leave, I took a quick spin around to check on Elizabeth and Thelma and was out of there by 10AM. What happened after that is a good question. I trust that something took place at the Sedona Ceremony but I wasn't there for it. Climbing out of the Valley, while Jan brought up the subject of bacon, eggs, and a decent cup of coffee, I came to the silent realization that if the Spirit of the North American Continent was going to awaken, it would have to awaken without me.

Cal Garrison
November 13, 2011
Sedona, Arizona

(I also came to the realization that Cal Garrison is an uptight, judgmental control freak who is too old to hang out in the mud and do ceremony with the kids and who could very well be totally deluded about herself and everything else. Believe me when I tell you this experience brought up more than I bargained for in the way of 'stuff'.

As it turns out, Hunbatz Men showed up about an hour after Jan and I left. The details of what happened next came to me through others, who in sharing their stories reminded me that these ceremonial gatherings always have two components; the 'Outer Mysteries', or that which those in attendance mainly focus on, (The Skulls, the speakers, the words, the ritual, etc) and the 'Inner Mysteries', or that which happens when no one is looking and which the majority of those present are not even aware of. If I had decided to stick around I would be able to describe what took place after Hunbatz arrived with more feeling — as it is, I will have to rely on what those who were there have told me about it.

Everyone I spoke to had nothing but good things to say about Hunbatz Men. Something about his presence, and his authenticity, and his sincerity moved people. I was told by some that he looked like he was glowing. During a talk that centered less on the Crystal Skulls and more on awakening the hearts of the people, unbeknownst to him, Jerry and Vernon, two Elders from the Third Mesa, had hitched a ride down from Hopi Land to greet their Mayan brother and pay their respects. Their serendipitous arrival at exactly the right moment put them up on the stage with Hunbatz, who after welcoming them to the ceremony, invited them to speak.

Everyone who listened to Jerry and Vernon deliver their message spoke about how moved they were by what they had to say. Several people mentioned that they could see and feel a different kind of light fill up both the tent and the space around it with an 'other-worldly' force. My friend Gisele said that she could feel the presence of 'something else' speaking through Jerry. It was as if he was an instrument for whoever, or whatever was doing the talking — and according to her, everything he said came through in a shower of golden light. Gisele wasn't the only one to describe this.

The saying, 'don't believe anything you hear and only half of what you see' is something I would have done well to keep in mind while I was listening to people recount their experience of what happened next. Since I wasn't there, believing half of what I saw wasn't a problem; unfortunately, because some part of me wanted to have something meaningful to occur, my original article described all of the miraculous things that I heard to a "T" — and this has put me in the position of having to eat my words.

On the day this piece went up on the web the section of article that is no longer here roused a response that made me wish I had known enough not to write it. My sincere apologies to the people who have asked me to remove all reference to them from the story. Please forgive me for being so stupid and thank you for the lesson.

If this was the only thing to come out of the day it would have been enough; but there was more work to be done. After the Hopi finished, two Lakota men appeared to resolve an issue that had been spoken of earlier but that up until that moment, had not been fully addressed. They were there to drum their prayers into the soil that had been blackened by James Ray and the infamous Sweat Lodge deaths that occurred a few years back. This widely publicized travesty killed three people and desecrated one of the most sacred traditions of the Native People. Ever since it happened there has been a lot of inter-tribal conversation about the best way to repair the damage and bandage the wounds that have not healed; that the powerful Lakota would be the ones to show up to set things right made perfect sense.

These were big men, with big drums. I was told by some that they could feel an ocean of energy coming off both of them, as if their spirits were making waves that rolled out into the atmosphere, moving everything in it. Everyone sensed that something out of this world was going on. The sound of their hearts echoing through their song went into that beautifully deep, masculine wail that gets the tears flowing; it went on for a good ten minutes with the drums going, steady and hard.

After drumming their prayers inside the tent, they went out on to the land. By that time the sun was out and the sky was blue. Without making a big deal out of it, the two Lakota men took their drums and went down to the river that washes through the Valley and sang their hearts out to the earth and the sky. With the drums going and only a few other people, ones who decided to leave the tent, following them from place to place, they spent the rest of the afternoon healing the land. My friend Cindy said she never saw anything like it. Strong, no bones about it, wailing by two men who came to extract every ounce of darkness, and all of the shame that had been falsely heaped on their traditions, out of the blood soaked soil.

There is more to this story. There always is. I have a feeling that everyone who hung in there for the whole thing would tell you that it was well worth it. I didn't hear too much about the afternoon festivities, or anything about the dancing that took place in the evening. Enough people stayed to turn it into a good time. Drunvalo and Hunbatz spent the entire day there, talking with everyone and mingling with the crowd. In the end, the work got done and even though I had nothing to do with it, I have finally forgiven myself for going AWOL and I am eternally grateful to all of the happy, shining people who had to heart to stick around.

Cal Garrison
November 26, 2011
Sedona, Arizona

To get an impression from the Sedona Ceremony in Angel Valley check out this Video at YouTube

About Cal Garrison