OLIN

Olin constitutes one of teotl’s three principal patterns of change, becoming, and transformation, and one of teotl’s three principal modi operandi or how’s. Olin motion-change constitutes a specific kind of motion-change: one defined by a specific pattern and one implicated in specific kinds of processes. Olin and ollin are commonly translated in the historical sources and in contemporary scholarship as both “motion” or “movement” and as “rubber, rubber ball.” John Sullivan contends this is fundamentally mistaken. He maintains that the appropriate words are olin and olli (respectively) and that they are linguistically unrelated. In contemporary Huastecan Nahuatl, for example, olli means “rubber, rubber ball,” while olin means “the agent of the movement exhibited by an earthquake or a building’s settling.” Such settling movement may be singular or repetitive.8 In what follows I observe Sullivan’s distinction by using the olli linguistic family to refer to items related to rubber or rubber balls, and the olin linguistic family to refer to items related to movement. However, I also follow the linguistically imprecise scholarly convention of using olin to refer to a specific kind of movement (rather than to the agent of this movement). Since I believe olin includes both physical and qualitative change, I use the phrase olin motion-change.

Fray Diego Duran tells us ollin is a tree resin greatly prized by the native peoples of Mexico as a potable medicine, as a religious offering (splattered on pieces of paper), and as the material from which the bouncing balls of the Mesoamerican ballgame are made. Native peoples cook the liquid resin, causing it to become “stringy.” When formed into a ball, “Jumping and bouncing are its qualities, upward and downward, to and fro.”9 The word “ollin,” reports Duran, means “something that moves or goes about, Motion, and is identified with the sun.”10

Duran’s remarks offer us some early insights into the nature of olin motion-change since they highlight key characteristics of the stuff, ollin, and of olin motion-change. First, the stuff, ollin, is a tree resin. This is significant because the Aztecs viewed tree resin as a tree’s blood. The stuff, ollin, and blood are conceptually related. Second, ollin resin possesses medicinal and sacred properties. Third, ollin resin is also used to make the bouncing balls that are both the literal and symbolic heart of the Mesoamerican ballgame. Fourth, olin motion-change consists of a specific pattern: up and down, back and forth, to and fro - in short, the pattern exhibited by bouncing rubber balls. Last, Duran explicitly identifies olin with the Sun of the Fifth Era. In sum, his remarks suggest an association between ollin resin, blood, heart, life-energy on the one hand, and the olin-defined up-and-down, back-and-forth, to-and-fro movement of bouncing balls and of the life-sustaining Fifth Sun, on the other.