WRITING: AN ACT CLOSE TO DIVINATION

For the Yucatan Mayás, the center of the world was called Xocen—"Read Me"—and the book was the origin of the world. "It is a natural book and was not made by anyone. The book turns its own pages. Each day a new page is turned, and if someone tries to turn it themselves, it bleeds because it is alive" (myth of the origin of the glyphic book quoted by the ethnologist Henri-Michel Boccara).

Names of gods, cities, dignitaries, sovereigns, dates of enthronements, ceremonies, births, deaths . . . the Mayas, like other Mesoamerican peoples, recorded everything, from the most minor to the most major of life's events, with glyphs or abstract symbols. But their love of signs was part of a genuine aesthetic in which writing was considered an art form in its own right, an autonomous medium in which scribes competed with painters and sculptors, on stone, wood, ceramics, jade and shell.

Bérénice Geoffroy-Schneiter, from Primal Arts vol.2