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Science as an intergenerational endeavour
It has been a long time since anyone really knew what year it is, all we know is that civilization collapsed, then someone found this ancient scripture conserved in one of those big buildings in the city. Our most important academics has been working on it for years without too much success.
Do you think that from this blackboard and some other spread pages from physics books they could really understand the true meaning of the symbols presented?
Well that is somehow the problem when our academics try to understand pre hispanic registers (Codex). Take for example the symbol of Nahu iOllin from for example Codex Borbonicus show above.
According to wikipedia, Nahui Ollin is related to the legend of Quetzalcoatl and his journey to Mictlan (at first approach think about it as the underworld or land of the dead) to gather bones from the previous age and initiate a process of re-birthing humanity after its previous catastrophic end. So it could be interpreted that Nahui Ollin as a is alluding to the four preceding suns or ages in history and the rise of the fifth sun “from the remnant matter of an earlier age of humanity.
Ollin has also been described as being composed of four (Nahui) concepts, Tloke (“what is near”) or the principle of generation, Nahuake (“what is closed”) or the principle of congregation, Mitl (“arrow” or “direction”) or the principle of displacement, and Ometéotl (“dual essence”) or the principle of integration.
And Gabriel S. Estrada states it could be understood “as cosmic movement, ollin is all movements at once that are both orderly and chaotic. Paradoxically, it defies human understanding even as it motivates all human movement.”
It is very interesting, poetic and it has even used for Nahui Ollin has been adopted as an educational framework to guide students through a process of “reflection, action, reconciliation, and transformation.” somehow adapting the above mentioned conceptual principles into operative modern ideas.
The main problem is that what we interpret from the actual Nahui Ollin symbol is a projection in 2D from a multidimensional concept, so my colleague Elvia Ramirez call this pre hispanic symbols holograms. So as happens with equations in the blackboard from the…
