Quetzalcoatl And The Irony Of Empire

Davíd Carrasco draws from the perspectives of the history of religions, anthropology, and urban ecology to explore the nature of the complex symbolic form of Quetzalcoatl in the organization, legitimation, and subversion of a large segment of the Mexican urban tradition. His new Preface addresses this tradition in the light of the Columbian quincentennial. "This book, rich in ideas, constituting a novel approach . . . represents a stimulating and provocative contribution to Mesoamerican studies. . . . Recommended to all serious students of the New World's most advanced indigenous civilization."—H. B. Nicholson, Man

Between 1932 and 1934, José Clemente Orozco painted the twenty-four-panel mural cycle entitled The Epic of American Civilization in Dartmouth College's Baker-Berry Library. An artifact of Orozco's migration from Mexico to the United States, the Epic represents a turning point in his career, standing as the only fresco in which he explores both US-American and Mexican narratives of national history, progress, and identity. While his title invokes the heroic epic form, the mural indicts history as complicit in colonial violence. It questions the claims of Manifest Destiny in the United States and the Mexican desire to mend the wounds of conquest in pursuit of a postcolonial national project. In Orozco's American Epic Mary K. Coffey places Orozco in the context of his contemporaries, such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, and demonstrates the Epic's power as a melancholic critique of official indigenism, industrial progress, and Marxist messianism. In the process, Coffey finds within Orozco's work a call for justice that resonates with contemporary debates about race, immigration, borders, and nationality.

Also available in an open-access, full-text edition at http://oaktrust.library.tamu.edu/handle/1969.1/88024 In 1952 C. G. Jung published a paradoxical hypothesis on synchronicity that marked an attempt to expand the western world’s conception of the relationship between nature and the psyche. Jung’s hypothesis sought to break down the polarizing cause-effect assessment of the world and psyche, suggesting that everything is interconnected. Thus, synchronicity is both "a meaningful event" and "an acausal connecting principle." Evaluating the world in this manner opened the door to "exploring the possibility of meaning in chance or random events, deciphering if and when meaning might be present even if outside conscious awareness." Now, after contextualizing Jung’s work in relation to contemporary scientific advancements such as relativity and quantum theories, Joseph Cambray explores in this book how Jung’s theories, practices, and clinical methods influenced the current field of complexity theory, which works with a paradox similar to Jung’s synchronicity: the importance of symmetry as well as the need to break that symmetry for "emergence" to occur. Finally, Cambray provides his unique contribution to the field by attempting to trace "cultural synchronicities," a reconsideration of historical events in terms of their synchronistic aspects. For example, he examines the emergence of democracy in ancient Greece in order "to find a model of group decision making based on emergentist principles with a synchronistic core."

In Aztec Philosophy, James Maffie shows the Aztecs advanced a highly sophisticated and internally coherent systematic philosophy worthy of consideration alongside other philosophies from around the world. Bringing together the fields of comparative world philosophy and Mesoamerican studies, Maffie excavates the distinctly philosophical aspects of Aztec thought. Aztec Philosophy focuses on the ways Aztec metaphysics—the Aztecs’ understanding of the nature, structure and constitution of reality—underpinned Aztec thinking about wisdom, ethics, politics,\ and aesthetics, and served as a backdrop for Aztec religious practices as well as everyday activities such as weaving, farming, and warfare. Aztec metaphysicians conceived reality and cosmos as a grand, ongoing process of weaving—theirs was a world in motion. Drawing upon linguistic, ethnohistorical, archaeological, historical, and contemporary ethnographic evidence, Maffie argues that Aztec metaphysics maintained a processive, transformational, and non-hierarchical view of reality, time, and existence along with a pantheistic theology. Aztec Philosophy will be of great interest to Mesoamericanists, philosophers, religionists, folklorists, and Latin Americanists as well as students of indigenous philosophy, religion, and art of the Americas.

• Traces the course of Atlantean civilization through its three empires, as well as the colonies and outposts formed by its survivors in Egypt, Göbekli Tepe, India, Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean, and North and South America • Shows how pyramids and other megalithic monuments testify to the survival of a “Sacred Science” of Atlantean origin and how this Sacred Science provided the foundation for esoteric traditions and secret societies throughout the ages • Draws on more than 500 ancient and modern sources and the author’s own personal exploration of hundreds of archaeological sites Exploring more than 100,000 years of Earth’s history, Marco Vigato combines recent discoveries in the the fields of archaeology, geology, anthropology, and genetics with the mystery teachings of antiquity to investigate the true origins of civilization. Establishing the historical and geological reality of Atlantis stretching all the way back to 432,000 BCE, he traces the course of Atlantean civilization through its three empires, revealing how civilization rose and fell several times over this lengthy span of time. The author shows that Atlantis did not vanish “in one terrible day and night” but survived in a variety of different forms well into the historical era. He reveals how the the first Atlantean civilization lasted from 432,000 to 35,335 BCE, the second one from 21,142 to 10,961 BCE, and the third Atlantis civilization--the one celebrated by Plato--collapsed in 9600 BCE, after the Younger Dryas cataclysm. The author examines the role of Atlantean survivors in restarting civilization in different parts of the world, from Göbekli Tepe and Egypt to India, Mesopotamia, and the Americas. He personally documents their colonies and outposts around the globe, offering unique views of the colossal network of pyramids, earthen mounds, and other megalithic monuments they le behind. He shows how these monuments testify to the survival of a sacred science of Atlantean origin, and he documents the survival of the primeval Atlantean tradition through various secret societies into the modern era. Drawing on more than 500 ancient and modern sources and sharing never-before-seen photographs from his own personal exploration of hundreds of archaeological sites around the world, Vigato shows not only that Atlantis was real but that the whole world is now being called to become a New Atlantis and awaken into a new golden age.

Studies of rituals in sacred gardens and landscapes offer tantalizing insights into the significance of gardens and landscapes in the societies of India, ancient Greece, Pre-Columbian Mexico, medieval Japan, post-Renaissance Europe, and America. Sacred gardens and landscapes engaged their visitors into three specific modes of agency: as anterooms spurring encounters with the netherworld; as journeys through mystical lands; and as a means of establishing a sense of locality, metaphorically rooting the dweller's own identity in a well-defined part of the material world. Each section of this book is devoted to one of these forms of agency. Together the essays reveal a profound cultural significance of gardens previously overlooked by studies of garden styles.

Since the colonial era, Mexican art has emerged from an ongoing process of negotiation between the local and the global, which frequently involves invention, synthesis, and transformation of diverse discursive and artistic traditions. In this pathfinding book, María Fernández uses the concept of cosmopolitanism to explore this important aspect of Mexican art, in which visual culture and power relations unite the local and the global, the national and the international, the universal and the particular. She argues that in Mexico, as in other colonized regions, colonization constructed power dynamics and forms of violence that persisted in the independent nation-state. Accordingly, Fernández presents not only the visual qualities of objects, but also the discourses, ideas, desires, and practices that are fundamental to the very existence of visual objects. Fernández organizes episodes in the history of Mexican art and architecture, ranging from the seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth century, around the consistent but unacknowledged historical theme of cosmopolitanism, allowing readers to discern relationships among various historical periods and works that are new and yet simultaneously dependent on their predecessors. She uses case studies of art and architecture produced in response to government commissions to demonstrate that established visual forms and meanings in Mexican art reflect and inform desires, expectations, memories, and ways of being in the world—in short, that visual culture and cosmopolitanism are fundamental to processes of subjectification and identity.