The Ancient Future Of The Itza
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The Ancient Future of the Itza
The title of Edmonson's work refers to the Mayan custom of first predicting their history and then living it, and it may be that no other peoples have ever gone so far in this direction. The Book of Chilam Balam was a sacred text prepared by generations of Mayan priests to record the past and to predict the future. The official prophet of each twenty-year rule was the Chilam Balam, or Spokesman of the Jaguar—the Jaguar being the supreme authority charged with converting the prophet's words into fact. This is a literal but poetic translation of one of fourteen known manuscripts in Yucatecan Maya on ritual and history. It pictures a world of all but incredible numerological order, slowly yielding to Christianity and Spanish political pressure but never surrendering. In fact, it demonstrates the surprising truth of a secret Mayan government during the Spanish rule, which continued to collect tribute in the names of the ruined Classic cities and preserved the essence of the Mayan calendar as a legacy for the tradition's modern inheritors. The history of the Yucatecan Maya from the seventh to the nineteenth century is revealed. And this is history as the Maya saw it—of a people concerned with lords and priests, with the cosmology which justified their rule, and with the civil war which they perceived as the real dimension of the colonial period. A work of both history and literature, the Tizimin presents a great deal of Mayan thought, some of which has been suspected but not previously documented. Edmonson's skillful reordering of the text not only makes perfect historical sense but also resolves the long-standing problem of correlating the two colonial Mayan calendars. The book includes both interpretative and literal translations, as well as the Maya parallel couplets and extensive annotations on each page. The beauty of the sacred text is illuminated by the literal translation, while both versions unveil the magnificent historical, philosophical, and social traditions of the most sophisticated native culture in the New World. The prophetic history of the Tizimin creates a portrait of the continuity and vitality, of the ancient past and the foreordained future of the Maya.
Extracting The Future from The Present
Mapping accurately the future is no longer a storytelling fantasy; rather, a workplace of data scientists, programmers or analysts. With a background in engineering and as an estimator, Ion Storland presents a book that explores in the present, a future scenario of human civilization on Earth and beyond, based on information and observations from the past. The interdisciplinary content gathered and described in the book seeks to build a panoramic view of how the various domains and sectors of economy, technology, and society are interrelated and interact with peoples’ day-to-day lives; and also to picture the consequences of actions that frame the events of the future. An inevitable future of interlinked brains will form a mindociety — a society of people whose minds are connected through brain implants. What can we expect from such an outcome? How should we prepare? From describing confined norms and mindset (from Storland’s point of view) on planet Earth, to the astonishing, universal, philosophical burden of existence, Sorland raises the hypothesis of Existential Infinitylock, which makes it impossible for anyone or anything to be able to define the origin of existence; not today, not in million or billions years. The argument is based on and takes into account the properties of infinite order.
Raising the Dead
Author: Sharon Patricia Holland
language: en
Publisher: Duke University Press
Release Date: 2000-03-29
Raising the Dead is a groundbreaking, interdisciplinary exploration of death’s relation to subjectivity in twentieth-century American literature and culture. Sharon Patricia Holland contends that black subjectivity in particular is connected intimately to death. For Holland, travelling through “the space of death” gives us, as cultural readers, a nuanced and appropriate metaphor for understanding what is at stake when bodies, discourses, and communities collide. Holland argues that the presence of blacks, Native Americans, women, queers, and other “minorities” in society is, like death, “almost unspeakable.” She gives voice to—or raises—the dead through her examination of works such as the movie Menace II Society, Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits, and the work of the all-white, male, feminist hip-hop band Consolidated. In challenging established methods of literary investigation by putting often-disparate voices in dialogue with each other, Holland forges connections among African-American literature and culture, queer and feminist theory. Raising the Dead will be of interest to students and scholars of American culture, African-American literature, literary theory, gender studies, queer theory, and cultural studies.