I recently published a post here, called “My life as a tiger”. Since then I have received few e-mails from different people and a phone call from my friend, surprisingly all of them referring to skull trepanation. As it started to look rather like a heated debate, I decided to explain myself a little bit more on this topic. So here I scrambled together whatever I feel like or want to say about it. It’s relevant to me anyway, so why not put it here?
So, I want to make a hole in my skull. I had this dream for a long time, maybe for 5 years or so. It started probably from my early interest in anthropology. There were many references across different cultures to skull trepanation: mainly in Mesoamerica, but also in Pre-Christian Europe, India, Egypt. It is the oldest surgical procedure known to man, as some of the trepanned skulls dated back to 2500 BC. Which is weird, indeed. Why would people just about everywhere, where civilizations flourished, would want to make a hole in their heads?
Whis is how trepanation looks like. Keeping in mind all the dangers of the operation, possible infections and that most definitely such an arduous task as making a hole in the skull was performed without use of any advanced tools or anesthetics, I wanted to know why distinguished people would want to do that? We can certainly come to the conclusion that people with trepanned skulls were of certain distinction, as they were often found in lavishly decorated tombs and surrounded by luxury goods, jewelry and artifacts.
I was interested in this topic for a long time. This interest started some time before arrival of Internet, search engines etc., so I had to look for books and articles in scientific magazines. Information was scarce. At most you could find yet some more references to the trepanation, more descriptions of tombs or some educated hints and guesses. Some people believed that trepanation was made to perform a brain surgery (I wondered how brain tumor could be diagnosed 4000 years ago, without all those hi-tech magnetic field resonance scanners and staff), some would say those people were ritually killed in this way (though evidence showed that those holes were not a result of a single fatal blow in the head, but the result of the operation: skulls were not fractured, but drilled), etc.
Moreover, for such operations in Andean cultures special, sacred knife, known as Tumi, was used:
Beautiful, isn’t it?
Some people said this operation was performed on the ground of religious beliefs. Some relatively modern practices, such as ritual haircut of catholic monks, known as tonsure, disputably could be a symbolic representation of trepanation. I also came across a couple of accounts of a practice in Tibetan Buddhism, known as phova, which is aimed on preparation to death. As our entity in accordance with these beliefs leaves body through one of the natural holes (eg, anus, nostrils, ears), it is supposed to be beneficial to leave it through one of the higher holes. To put it simply, if your entity leaves your body after death through anus, most certainly it’s heading for hell. Leaving your body through one of the “upper holes” on the contrary, can take you to the higher planes and good reincarnation. I have met one person who claimed he practiced it, and the point of the practice was opening the cranial bones, so “the realized person” can catapult his or her consciousness at any moment of life, and send it wherever it wants to. As a proof of this practice accomplishment, he said, some blood could appear at the top at the cranium. Though I’m a bit conspicious about the last bit, the theory of “catapulting consciousness” supported by some accounts of Tibetan monks collectively leaving their body, 20 or so overnight, without any signs of violent deaths.
5 years ago or so while in England I came across yet another point of view, which looked credible for me. Making a hole in the skull is beneficial because of released pressure on the brain. As we make a hole in our brain’s enclosure, the internal pressure drops, and it allows more blood flow into our brain. It supplies our brain with more oxygen and glucose, and brings more blood to some parts of the brain, where blood flow is normally suppressed (and some people believe exactly to the areas of our brain which could be used in the process of rapid self-development, as at the moment by some estimates we use about 10% of our brain capacity and performance). As some more educated people put it, trepanation allows greater blood flow to the brain by altering cranial fluid dynamics, thus revitalizing brain metabolism to its more youthful level, present prior to the fusion of the cranial bones. For further reference try to find “The Mechanism of Brainbloodvolume (’BBV’)” (also known as “Homo Sapiens Correctus”) by Bart Huges. So, fine tuning our brain can improve our learning skills, memory, enhance creativity and overall performance, and probably could help us to discover some new abilities. There were some accounts of people who went through self-trepanation recently, such as Amanda Feilding and Joey Mellen, who even produced a film about it, documenting the process of self-trepanation.
A friend of mine, who worked in “Doctors without borders’” visited a scientific institution, known as Brain Institute in Moscow some years ago. As she knew about my interest in skull trepanation, and became interested in the subject herself, she made some inquiries. Some insiders told her that this institute, lavishly founded in Soviet times, conducted extensive research on the topic. The goal was to prove that lobotomy or skull trepanation could be used in healing schizophrenia (yes, for a while they were drilling quite a few skulls in Soviet mental institutions), but then were appeared that some people who underwent this operation developed certain psychic abilities, such as telepathy. Officially it was never taken seriously enough, as they were already considered mentally retarded, but experiments with cards shown abnormally high rate of correct guesses, in some cases between 30 to 50% out of few hundred tries, which makes the results statistically valid. In this experiment 2 people were divided by wall. One of them would shuffle a pack of cards, take a card at random and concentrate on it for few seconds. Another participant would guess what card it is.
They were trying to develop some technic for mental interrogation and also use psychics as spies; they also experimented with LSD and psychedelic drugs at that time (as CIA and Pentagon did too), but it’s off the point. Eventually the institution was closed down, I don’t know what happened to the archives. But apparently there some other experiments and researches on the subject being conducted in Russia, particularly by The I. M. Sechenov Institute of Evolutionary Physiology and Biochemistry (IEPHB) in Saint Petersburg, Russia, dedicated to research in the fields of biochemistry and evolutionary physiology, which was connected with Laboratory of Evolutionary Physiology of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the previous times. The head of Brain Circulatory lab of above mentioned Sechenov Institute, prof. Yuri Moskalenko, supported by Beckley Foundation, Oxford produced some works supporting procedure of skull trepanation being beneficial for fighting Alzheimer’s disease and brain ageing.
There are also some other institutions online, such as: International Trepanation Advocacy Group and The Trepanation Trust.
A perfect Christmas gift for your kid 
Well, and, of course, I was in a way influenced by some other accounts in modern pop-culture: “The third eye” book by Lobsang Rampa, which I read as a young boy. The story of The Third Eye begins in Tibet during the reign of the 13th Dalai Lama, Thubten Gyatso. Tuesday Lobsang Rampa, the son of a Lhasa aristocrat, takes up theological studies and is soon recognized for his prodigious abilities. He undertakes increasingly challenging feats until he is recognized as a crucial asset to the future of an independent Tibet. Tibetan lamas had foretold a future in which it would be occupied by China, and Rampa is operated upon to help him preserve freedom. A third eye is drilled into his forehead, allowing him to see human auras and to determine people’s hidden motivations, so he could serve as an aide to the Dalai Lama. Drilling the third eye is one of the kinds of skull trepanation. Here is how Lobsang Rampa describes it: …The instrument penetrated the bone. A very hard, clean sliver of wood had been treated by fire and herbs and was slid down so that it just entered the hole in my head. I felt a stinging, tickling sensation apparently in the bridge of my nose. It subsided and I became aware of subtle scents which I could not identify. Suddenly there was a blinding flash. For a moment the pain was intense. It diminished, died and was replaced by spirals of colour. As the projecting sliver was being bound into place so that it could not move, the Lama Mingyar Dondup turned to me and said:” You are now one of us, Lobsang. For the rest of your life you will see people as they are and not as they pretend to be.”
There are some Japanese manga books and cartoons about superheroes with the 3rd eye too. Skull trepanation was made by some of Fakir Musafar and Modern Primitives movement followers, but we can leave them aside as I hardly share common ideological grounds with them. There are some more music references, particulary by Genesis P Orridge of Psychic TV and American Head Charge. And, of course, “A hole in the head: the most wonderful entertainment in the whole wide wonderful world” according to Broadway musical featuring Frank Sinatra:
To finish with it. However exciting it may sound, I never was, and not eager to drill the third eye trying to obtain superpowers. Neither I am trying to rip some sort of spiritual bonanza: I am a bit skeptical about drilling shortcut tunnels to enlightenment in heads. What I want is simple. I want to increase my abilities, and drive through my life on brain’s full throttle, so to say. A hole in the cranial bone I believe could help to do so, and I’m curious to try it. I tried to find a doctor who would do a skull trepanation for me in England, but I couldn’t. There are more accounts of people who done that though, and some sites devoted to self-trepanation. One of the best accounts on DIY trepanation, for instance, you can find here, though I’m not ready to do it myself.
And this is it, more or less. The rest is up to you.
Boris Kislitsin
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