Long before the rise of the global faiths that dominate the modern mind, a transformative moral vision emerged from the Iranian plateau, dividing the cosmos into an eternal struggle between light and chaos. This was the

Deep in the swampy lowlands of modern-day Veracruz and Tabasco, a people emerged around 1200 BCE whose true name has been lost to time. We call them the Olmecs—a Nahuatl word meaning "rubber people"—due to a twentieth-ce