Fate, Free-Will, Prophecy, Something

Consider a video recording of a football match. As the game was actually played the players have absolute freedom to act of their own volition. However, watching this later their actions obviously will not change, which is not to say that they were deprived of free will as they acted. Similarly we could talk of a kind of  observer of life existing free of our notion of time, knowing exactly what happens within our time, but this not contradicting the freedom within the moment of the actors of the drama.

In this light, phenomena like prophecy are interesting in that the particular human actor glimpses future time from outside or beyond time, & this vision from without becomes embedded within time. One could argue that one is now amongst the elusive entanglements of the self-fulfilling prophecy, and many I presume would say that any 'true' prophecy becomes true simply because of this self-fulfilling nature. However, the truth or accuracy of the vision doesn't exclude the effects of the vision itself as an integral part of the unfolding of time & as a contributing factor in the coming to pass of what is foretold.

A fascinating episode is the Quetzelcoatl legend of the Aztecs which prophesied the return of this fair-skinned God on a particular day to the land, who had left because of his abhorrence of human sacrifice, & who on his return, would cause the Aztec culture to end. Cortes’ ships landed on April 22, 1519, the very day that the Aztec calendar calculated for Quetzelcoatl’s return "at the end of the 13th Heaven and the beginning of the 9 Hells." Unlike the Aztecs, but like the Quetzelcoatl figure, Cortes was light-skinned & bearded. In the prophecy he was to be dressed all in black, & because the day was Good Friday Cortes was indeed in the appropriate attire. We don't have to pretend Cortes was a benevolent soul but unlike the extremely violent Aztec culture he was, like Quetzelcoatl, opposed to human sacrifice, & as the prophecy foretold this did mark the end of the Aztec culture.

The vision did serve to fulfill itself - the Aztec leader, Montezuma, believing Cortes to be the expected god didn't repel the invader as his enormously superior forces would have very easily done had they the will - but the 'coincidences' involved show that the prophecy cannot be simply dismissed as being self-fulfilling; this understanding being in the service of a simplistic materialist philosophy & its attendant purely linear notion of time. The prophecy was a true one and this unfolding of time included the prophecy itself and its effects as an integral aspect of this unfolding.