7. THE TOLTECS.
Generally those who have written ancient Mexico history are foreigners, who from an eurocentric point of view and an inexplicable and presumed cultural superiority, have always judged our differences with the European culture as shortcomings. What is not like them is less than them, in their opinion. This biased study of our history has been "plotted" as personal scientific booty for each of the foreign researchers and their Mexican disciples. This is why concepts such as "the Aztec civilization, the Mayan civilization, the Zapotec civilization", etc., are maintained, as if they were different cultural structures and civilizations.
“It is forgotten that a culture forms an organic unity and that, therefore, should be studied from its center and not from one of its peripheral aspects. The concept of life is the "center" of every culture. Above all the ideas about the origin, the meaning and the lasting value of human existence, is what reveal the special genius of a culture. These ideas are the result of a form of existential consciousness of man in the cosmos; this is the reason why time erodes them only superficially." (Mircea Eliade. 1962)[1]
The dominant culture has not tried to comprehensively explained itself, not only the Anahuac civilization, but all native cultures throughout the Americas as a single continental civilization, multiplicity of cultures in time and space, but all firmly bound by a philosophical-cultural matrix. Thus they have been studied by foreign scholars and their Mexican disciples, each researched as an isolated culture and not, as a macro civilizing project that
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- ↑ Mircea Eliade (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈmirt͡ʃe̯a eliˈade]; March 13 [O.S. February 28] 1907 – April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most influential contributions to religious studies was his theory of Eternal Return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them.
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