THE WHEEL THAT REMEMBERS
Fractal Projection, Holographic Inheritance, and the Evolution of Symbolic Knowledge under TSTOEAO
John Swygert | 17 October 2026
Figure 1. Conceptual model of the Wheel of Time as a rotating cycle that moves forward historically while its changing center projects increasingly differentiated symbolic expressions. The twelve spokes are schematic; the model does not presume twelve divisions in every culture.
Abstract
This paper proposes the Rolling Wheel of Symbolic Inheritance, a relational model of how observational knowledge is encoded, transmitted, differentiated, recombined, and retrospectively reconstructed across time. A wheel simultaneously rotates and advances: cyclical regularities recur, while each historical contact produces a situated expression. Its center is a changing encoding system; its spokes represent pathways of interpretation and transmission; its rim represents observable manifestations; and its forward movement represents successive historical conditions. Branching expressions may display fractal-like repetition and hologram-like retention of ancestral structure without literally obeying mathematical fractal or optical hologram laws. The framework is placed under The Swygert Theory of Everything AO (TSTOEAO), using V = E × Y as a proposed governing relational grammar rather than as an empirically calibrated law. Comparative illustrations from Vedic, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Jewish, and early Neolithic material show why cycles, animals, celestial order, narrative, and numerical divisions should be investigated together. The paper specifies a reproducible research protocol for separating historical inheritance, independent convergence, and later reinterpretation.
Keywords: TSTOEAO; Wheel of Time; relational invariance; cultural transmission; symbolic ancestry; comparative mythology; archaeoastronomy; encodings; fractal analogy; calendars.
1. The question: what survives when knowledge changes its language?
Human societies have long used narratives, images, ritual, calendars, and architectural arrangements to carry knowledge about celestial movements, seasonal change, natural processes, social life, and obligations. Their teaching functions are not at issue. The present investigation asks a different question: how may distinct traditions preserve transformed expressions of earlier relational knowledge, and by what evidence can those pathways be reconstructed?
A symbol may survive after its original function has shifted. A divine name may become a calendar name. An animal may mark a social group in one setting, a celestial region in another, and a theological role in a third. Two surviving representations can be dissimilar on the surface yet linked by a documented historical narrative; conversely, two nearly identical diagrams can result from independent responses to recurring astronomical constraints. Both possibilities require investigation.
The proposal is to turn the kaleidoscope backward. Rather than forcing fragmented records into one presumed primordial system, the researcher begins with surviving encodings, documents their relational roles, traces plausible transformations, and reconstructs candidate ancestral structures. The goal is a disciplined genealogy of relationships—not a catalogue of superficial matches.
2. The rolling wheel: recurrence moving through history
2.1 Rotation and translation
The wheel has two simultaneous motions. Rotation expresses the recurrence of natural cycles: the day, lunar phases, seasonal intervals, astronomical returns, birth and death, and other repeating relations. Translation expresses the passage of history: changing people, tools, environments, languages, institutions, and explanatory commitments. A full rotation need not return civilization to its prior state. The cycle recurs under altered conditions.
The point of contact between rim and ground serves as a metaphor for the present realization. As the wheel rolls, former expressions recede into memory, inscription, practice, and material traces; new expressions emerge under updated conditions. The trail is an archive of earlier contacts, not a continuous, complete recording. Some imprints are lost, overwritten, or distorted.
2.2 An evolving center, not an immutable script
The center represents an active encoding and reinterpretation process. At each historical step, it receives inherited models and new observations. It responds to resource constraints, language, institutions, error correction, dispute, contact with other populations, and material experience. The emerging encoding is then expressed through specialized channels: myth, mathematics, architecture, divination, astronomy, navigation, governance, teaching, or scientific models.
A critical distinction is needed: an underlying natural relationship can remain stable while human understanding of that relationship changes. The wheel therefore does not postulate that all ancient representations were correct, or that one unchanged mythology has been continuously copied. It treats natural recurrences, historical encodings, and the transmission routes among them as different objects of study.
2.3 The outward casting of branches
The wheel does not project a single image in every direction. As knowledge is taught and adapted, it splits into task-specific applications. Calendrical observations contribute to agricultural schedules; the same observations may also support ritual dates, theological narratives, political legitimacy, architecture, or formal calculation. Each branch acquires more detail in its own domain. A subsequent community can combine branches that previously separated. The visible result is a branching-and-rejoining network evolving along the timeline.
Time rolls forward; the center learns; the spokes carry transformations; each contact casts a new imprint; and each surviving fragment may preserve a recoverable relationship to earlier configurations.
3. Fractals, holograms, and DNA: three distinct explanatory analogies
3.1 Fractal differentiation
“Fractal” is used here as an analogy for nested differentiation: a parent representation generates branches, and branches develop further specialized branches. Recurring relationships can appear across scales, yet their expression becomes progressively more specific. The framework does not claim exact self-similarity, scale-free statistics, or a particular fractal dimension without empirical measurement. Such properties would be separate hypotheses.
3.2 Holographic retention
A conventional optical hologram can preserve information about a wider scene in distributed interference structure, so that a fragment may still reconstruct a degraded version of the scene. As a model of cultural inheritance, this suggests that a surviving fragment may retain traces of a larger relational order: not a complete copy, and not necessarily the same resolution or function. No physical holographic storage mechanism is asserted for myths or societies. The analogy directs attention to redundancy, overlapping meanings, and reconstruction from partial evidence.
3.3 DNA and differential expression
Most differentiated cells in a multicellular organism inherit substantially the same genome, yet develop distinct functions through regulated gene expression and interactions with cellular context. Cultural systems can likewise produce specialized expressions from inherited materials. The resemblance is methodological, not literal: cultural information is not stored in DNA-like molecules, and horizontal borrowing between unrelated populations complicates a simple family tree. The useful insight is to compare inherited motifs, meaningful changes, and recombination as well as the final outward appearance.
3.4 Where each analogy stops
4. The TSTOEAO Master Key as a relational research grammar
Within TSTOEAO, the relation V = E × Y is proposed as a general interpretive grammar. Here E denotes available energy/opportunity or a domain-appropriate capacity for action and observation; Y denotes encoded equilibrium, the prevailing conditions, constraints, and relations shaping admissible expression; and V denotes realized value or realized expression. These terms must be operationally defined afresh for each empirical domain. An equation that is not yet calibrated to measurable units must not be mistaken for an established quantitative law.
For symbolic history, a single research cycle can be represented provisionally as:
Vn = En × Yn
Yn+1 = U(Yn, Vn, On, Xn)
Sn,i = Pi(Vn, Cn,i)
Here O denotes new observations, X intergroup exchange, U an encoding-update operation, Pi a channel-specific projection, C the local cultural context, and S a surviving symbolic expression. These symbols define a conceptual schema, not a demonstrated mathematical derivation. The illustrative recursivity is important: yesterday’s realized system can become tomorrow’s inherited encoding, while new opportunities and constraints continue to reshape it.
In practice, the “Master Key” is tested by whether the relational description reveals connections, predicts missing intermediary forms, reduces contradictions, distinguishes rival ancestral pathways, and remains useful when applied to independent evidence. Mere ability to redescribe any result after the fact would not constitute success.
5. Historical anchors for the reconstruction
5.1 The Vedic wheel: cycle, number, and cosmic order
Rig Veda 1.164 includes the striking image of a twelve-spoked wheel moving through the heavens, with seven hundred and twenty paired figures (verse 11). The hymn provides an early source in which the wheel, numerical organization, and recurring cosmic order participate in a single poetic system. It is legitimate to study the calendrical interpretations of these numbers; it would not be legitimate to import unsupported dates or claim that the modern twelve-sign zodiac already existed in the full later form when the hymn was composed. [1]
5.2 Mesopotamia: observations encoded in a celestial compendium
The MUL.APIN astronomical series includes constellations, divisions of the heavens, star-rising dates, and relationships between celestial movements and an idealized 360-day year. Surviving Babylonian tablets document explicit transformation of observation into tabulated, transmissible knowledge. They provide a primary-material anchor for comparing star lists, schematic annual cycles, and later astronomical traditions. [2]
5.3 Egypt: the relationship between months, hours, and the sky
Egyptian timekeeping structured the daily cycle into twelve daylight and twelve nighttime hours; stellar groups known as decans were used to reckon nighttime hours. An astronomical ceiling associated with Senenmut, known through the Metropolitan Museum’s reproduction, combines named months, hourly divisions, planets, stars, and religious imagery. It demonstrates that sacred art and practical celestial organization could coexist in a single communicative artifact. [3–4]
5.4 Josephus: an explicit bridge from tribal stones to the zodiac
In Antiquities of the Jews 3.7, the first-century historian Josephus states that the twelve stones of the high priest’s breastplate could be understood as the months or twelve zodiacal signs. This is unusually valuable evidence: a historical author expressly connects distinct religious and celestial encodings. It documents an interpretation in Josephus’s period, not proof that the twelve Israelite tribes originated as zodiac signs. [5]
5.5 Göbekli Tepe: a much earlier but presently unbridged symbolic landscape
Research at Göbekli Tepe identifies planned monumental geometry and a rich repertoire of animal reliefs. Haklay and Gopher found a geometric relationship among the main enclosures B, C, and D and discuss interpretations involving ancestral and animal identities. These observations make the site a compelling candidate for comparison of architecture, animal distributions, sightlines, and possible celestial practices. They do not themselves establish zodiacal mapping or continuous transmission from Göbekli Tepe to later literate pantheons. The chronological separation demands an independently dated chain of intermediary evidence. [6]
6. Twelve, thirty, sixty, and three hundred sixty: a shared problem, not an automatic common origin
The number twelve recurs for several reasons: the approximately twelve lunations in a solar year; the usefulness of partitions into groups of two, three, four, and six; and historically transmitted calendrical and astronomical systems. Babylonian sexagesimal mathematics made sixty highly useful for subdivisions; the later standardized twelve-sign zodiac allocates thirty degrees to each sign within a 360-degree circle. These facts help explain why related architectures of time and space may recur, but the arithmetic alone does not establish historical descent.
A careful reconstruction distinguishes (a) convergence prompted by the same sky; (b) a shared inherited counting or calendrical tradition; (c) direct adaptation from one known cultural system; and (d) later philosophical or theological reinterpretation. The twelve-spoked Vedic wheel, Egyptian twenty-four-hour division, and twelve zodiac signs should be compared as historically situated systems, not collapsed into a timeless single design.
7. A research method for reversing the wheel
7.1 Construct a symbol-and-relationship registry
Every unit of evidence should receive a source-specific record: artifact/text identifier; date range; provenance; original language; depicted or named object; animal, deity, celestial, numerical, spatial, ritual, or social functions; relationships to other signs; orientation and excavation context where applicable; scholarly interpretations; and the level of certainty. Later meanings must not be backdated into earlier evidence.
7.2 Compare graphs, not pictures
Represent each cultural system as a typed network: nodes for celestial bodies, deities, animals, calendar units, directions, built structures, social functions, and natural events; edges for relationships explicitly attested by sources. Comparing the structure of these networks can uncover equivalences that a name-by-name or image-by-image comparison misses. A lion, star, and king need not carry identical names across civilizations if the particular historical relationship among them is documented.
7.3 Trace both vertical inheritance and horizontal recombination
Ask whether a feature was inherited through generations, borrowed through contact, independently developed from shared observations, or introduced by a later interpreter. Cultural-phylogenetic methods can help evaluate inherited change, but unmodeled horizontal transmission can generate misleading ancestral trees. Published simulations show both risks and contexts in which phylogenetic methods remain informative. [7–8]
7.4 Reconstruct the sky without assuming the answer
For monuments proposed as astronomical devices, obtain measured building axes and local horizons; construct date-specific sky simulations accounting for precession and celestial visibility; pre-register candidate alignments; assess multiple building phases; and compare the frequency of matches against chance and practical nonastronomical orientation models. Avoid retrofitting modern constellation outlines onto prehistoric animals before a transmission pathway is demonstrated.
7.5 Require discriminating predictions
A candidate ancestral model should predict at least one observation not used to construct it: a specific intermediate motif, a paired symbol, a directional arrangement, a timing association, or a textual bridge. Alternative models—including coincidence, ecology, practical architecture, shared arithmetic, and later reinterpretation—must be given comparable opportunities to explain the record.
8. Research questions and falsifiable expectations
If a lineage preserves a meaningful ancestral relationship, multiple independent features should tend to co-occur (for example, an animal with a specific calendrical and directional role), rather than one highly flexible resemblance.
If a proposed transmission route is historical, its intermediaries should appear in archaeologically and linguistically plausible places and periods; the sequence should not require unexplained jumps of millennia.
If the wheel model is useful, the same relational categories should organize evidence across at least two distinct domains without depending on arbitrarily changing their definitions.
If a numerical system is primarily convergent, its shared arithmetic need not be accompanied by shared deity names, stories, or specific iconic forms.
If imagery encodes astronomical orientation, geometrical and temporal tests should outperform credible nonastronomical baseline models.
Negative findings are useful. If a proposed lineage requires anachronism, if its associations change whenever contrary evidence appears, or if independent controls reproduce the same apparent matches, the specific historical claim should be rejected or revised. The broad model remains a research program only insofar as it can discriminate among alternatives.
9. Discussion: a wheel with a memory and an uncertain ancestry
A rolling wheel makes visible a tension often missed by either a purely linear history or a purely cyclical cosmology. The heavens recur; the societies observing them do not recur unchanged. The center of human encoding develops through cumulative learning and transformation. It casts different branches into each era, and those branches may become so specialized that their ancestral relations disappear from ordinary view.
The DNA analogy prompts comparison of inherited structures; the hologram analogy encourages attention to recoverable information within fragments; the fractal analogy draws attention to nested specialization. But ancestry must ultimately be grounded in evidence, not analogy. Shared celestial bodies can generate comparable symbols without a common story, while documented contact can generate shared stories around different animals or gods. The network may resemble a braided river more than a single rooted tree.
For TSTOEAO, the promised value of a Master Key is not that every cultural artifact can be assigned an equilibrium label. It is that precise relational analysis may identify which natural constraints remain stable, which symbolic encodings mutate, which interpretive boundaries change, and how realized knowledge becomes an inheritance that enables the next expression. Those are analyzable questions with observable consequences.
10. Conclusion: Time rolls on
The Wheel of Time can be conceptualized as a structure that rotates through natural recurrence while translating through historical development. Its center evolves as new observations and inherited information interact; its outward pathways produce increasingly differentiated expressions; its points of contact become lived realities, artifacts, stories, and records; and its trail offers an incomplete archive through which earlier relationships may be reconstructed.
The central proposition is not that all traditions originated in one known mythology, nor that a surviving fragment literally contains the entire past. It is that many specialized knowledge systems may preserve relational inheritances whose transformations can be traced. The task is to reconstruct those transformations through dated evidence, explicit comparisons, alternative hypotheses, and discriminating predictions.
The wheel carries the past without repeating it unchanged. It casts the present from an evolving center. Its branches become new languages, while the patterns that survive may still point backward toward the greater whole.
References and source record
[1] Rig Veda 1.164.11, 1.164.48. English rendering and verse text, Rigveda.live (accessed 17 October 2026): https://rigveda.live/rigveda/mandala-1/hymn-164
[2] The British Museum. Astronomical treatise, tablet 1, series MUL.APIN, museum no. 86378; object record: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/W_1899-0610-108
[3] Kamrin, J. (1 February 2017). “Telling Time in Ancient Egypt.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art: https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/telling-time-in-ancient-egypt
[4] The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Astronomical Ceiling,” copy by Charles K. Wilkinson after Senenmut tomb decoration, original ca. 1473–1458 BCE: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544566
[5] Josephus, Flavius. Antiquities of the Jews, Book III, chapter 7; Greek/Roman Materials, Perseus Digital Library (Whiston trans.): https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0146:book=3:whiston%20chapter=7
[6] Haklay, G., and A. Gopher (2020). “Geometry and Architectural Planning at Göbekli Tepe, Turkey.” Cambridge Archaeological Journal 30(2): 343–357. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774319000660
[7] Greenhill, S. J., T. E. Currie, and R. D. Gray (2009). “Does horizontal transmission invalidate cultural phylogenies?” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 276: 2299–2306. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2677599/
[8] Currie, T. E., S. J. Greenhill, and R. Mace (2010). “Is horizontal transmission really a problem for phylogenetic comparative methods? A simulation study using continuous cultural traits.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 365: 3903–3912. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2981909/
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