Printing in the New World

Printing in the New World
by
Bobby Derie

For several centuries now it has been the opinion of scholars, despite mounting evidence, that no printing of any sort took place in the New World before contact with Europeans. Adherents to this view point out the lack of surviving examples, or if any such works are put forward insist they must be post-Colonial works of native manufacture using European techniques; they point with disdain to the general technological development of the native peoples, particularly the lack of sophisticated mechanics and metalworking which are considered essential to the development of the printer's press as put together by Gutenberg in Mainz. Moreover, some of them allege that given the alternate path of societal development, the intricacies and peculiarities of the native written languages in particular, that the native peoples of the Americas were particularly ill-suited to the development of printing. All of these allegations and misconceptions are, of course, false. While never so widespread nor so developed as printing in Europe, the artisans of the New World did see the first flower of their native printing technology - only to lose it to disease, disaster, and destruction due to European contact.

The earliest written materials of the native peoples would have been wood-bark scrolls, such as the wiigwaasabakoon of the Ojibwe. This early paper development was not particularly developed in the north, where the extensive trading networks of the mound-builders was maintained primarily through oral contracts. In Mesoamerica and South America paper-making reached an apex in the form of huun or amatl-paper, which was a sturdy, attractive and high-quality form of bark-cloth. Amatl paper manufacture is believed to date back to at least 300 CE, and by 1427 when the Triple Alliance was formed, over forty villages were engaged in papermaking as part of the Aztec Empire by 1427. This paper was used for a number of documents related to religious and administrative duties, and gradually transitioned from the prototypical scroll form to a folded book or codex form by at least the late 1300s. Bookbinding as such does not appear in pre-Colonial native bookmaking, notwithstanding some copper plates with holes drilled in them that might have been bound together in that fashion.

These Mayan and Aztec codices were products of skilled human labor; indeed the Aztecs had an entire specialized painter-class to producing and illustrating them, the tlacuilo, as well as separate tradesmen for the production of paper, though the exact division of labor has since been lost to us. Educated painter-scribes were needed because these early codices were primarily pictorial rather than written, and often required interpretation by a skilled priest or noble, an outgrowth of the Aztec written language not being a true script, which no doubt proved to be one of the major hurdles in the development of printing. The Maya script, however, was a complete writing system which combined the logograms with syllabaric glyphs in a manner similar to Japanese, and as we shall see this proved very important later on.

The advent of the Triple Alliance in 1427 resulted in a book-burning that would not be equaled until the coming of the Spaniards over a century later. Tlacaelel ordered the burning of the traditional codices to make way for the reinterpretation of Aztec history and religion, giving a more central role to the Mexica and consolidating the political and religious dominance of that people over the region. Rapid dissemination of the new approved codices was accomplished by the use of printing - specifically a human-labor intensive form of block printing, using carved wood or stone blocks pressed down onto sheets of amatl-paper. None of these early presses survive, so there is little archaeological evidence for how they were built or used, but archaeologist and artisan print-maker Gabriel Xavier Encandeza has found the remains of an ancient printer in the Yucatan, and believes that the system was something along the following lines.

First, the block would be carved in relief. This would involve a particularly shallow form of engraving, similar to much Mayan or Aztec work. Then the block would be set into a wooden frame and inked. Analysis of existing inks show that they are carbon-based, and probably consist of a mixture of ashes from burnt plant matter mixed with animal glue; this gives a durable blue-black ink that would fade to reddish-brown with time, though it could also be washed off and would suffer in the humid tropical environment of Mesoamerica. The block and frame would then be set above the press, on which the amatl would be laid, and lowered down - a process which probably involved several workers acting together to properly position paper and stone. The actual impression would then be achieved by piling weights, probably carefully-measured bundles of stone or pottery fragments, atop the inked block. After a few minutes the weight would be removed, the block raised, and the paper folded over - perhaps using a lathed stick or frame - to form one page of the book. Then the block for the next page could be brought forth, and in that way a codex that might take weeks to paint by hand could be printed in a matter of hours, perhaps a single day - and copies could be brought forth very quickly indeed. Encandeza believes that the final product was still probably painted by a tlacuilo, who filled in between the darkened lines to create a more familiar and colorful finished product.

While not a "true" printing press in some respects, the entire operation is strongly similar to other early printing efforts recorded in Asia, and aspects of it might date back to as early as 600 CE, the first appearance of the so-called "flat Mayan glyph blocks" in the archaeological record. However, it is with the rise of the Aztecs that Mesoamerican printing begins to truly advance. Contemporary records of the Spanish Conquest speak of "sheets of gold and silver" etched with "the whole history of the world" which they viewed on the streets of Tenochtitlan, and we know from other evidence that the route they took through the city led them through the scribal district, where they viewed "bales of paper" being unloaded into warehouses - tribute from paper-making villages in the Aztec Empire. It seems likely given the evidence that these "sheets" were really engraved metal plates intended for printing - probably not of gold and silver, as the Spaniards thought, because those metals are too soft to be suitable for printing, but likely a copper-alloy like tumbaga or a silver-lead alloy such as certain contemporary Incan artifacts. Whatever the case, the advent of engraved metal printing plates would set the stage for the next great evolution in Mesoamerican print technology: movable type.

An inscription dating from about 1450 CE on a small temple in the modern state of Morelos, the main Aztec paper-making region, shows Amateotl, god of paper, blessing a scribe named Xitzatl. According to local legend, Amateotl came to Xitzatl in the shape of a fish, and "taught him to make the letters dance." Several partial codices from roughly the same period and region around the temple show a remarkable degree of uniformity among some of the texts - in several instances, the mathematical notation in each is nearly identical, despite the fact that the notation has been set in completely different pictorial context. Excavations of the temple in the 1960s turned up a number of unusual artifacts, including a rotten rectangular wooden frame taken to be a bed or drying-rack, and a "wealth of broken clay and stone tablets covered with characters, some faced with metal." Re-examination of these artifacts in the 1990s revealed that there were not fragments of larger texts, but deliberately carved stone blocks each of which consisted of the impression of a single Aztec logogram - in other words, either type, or the casting-blocks for type. The type-blocks would have been set in a wooden frame, much like the one used for the larger picture-blocks, and pressed down on the paper in the same way.

The Aztec language, as it has been noted, is not a full script. It is quite suitable for record-keeping and mathematics, but otherwise is primarily a logogram system to aid in the memorization of long narratives. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that the largest use of this basic movable type system was for mathematical notation, particularly among the Aztec merchants, the pochtecas. The pochtecas maintained the vast trade network that brought wealth to the Aztec empire, their porter-caravans carrying parrots, maize, copper, gold, silver, cacao beans, obsidian, cotton, salt, colored cloth, and many other goods as part of the trade network running from the Pueblo in the north to the Inca in the south, and by the early 1500s the greatest pochtecas rivaled the nobility in wealth, and had warehouses and trade contacts in many cities, communicating between them using runners bearing letters - often simple letters of account, informing the receiver of the number of goods at hand, or an order to move certain goods to another village or city. Metal was a novelty to the Aztecs, and the wealthiest pochtecas might have used metal type as a way to emphasize their elite status, but the pochtecas were also an insular lot, who lived apart and worshipped their own gods, and unlike merchants in Europe did not capitalize on printing - perhaps, again, because of the unsuitability of nahuatl's written language to that process.

This may be why Mayan printing began to advance considerably in the same period as the Aztec expansion under Ahuitzotl and Moctezuma II. Evidence of small block-printing in Mayan villages exists beginning in the 1500s, and according to records kept by early priests in the Yucatan, many villages contained "hundreds of books" to be fed to the flames, and "with them their blocks and inks to make them" while "the good metal was melted down." The latter could refer to the Mayan fonts, of which certainly several sets must have existed - it being entirely possible that each "village printer" carved or made their own, though certainly the best and most durable sets would have been made by specialist metal-workers. Because of this holocaust of letters it is difficult to say exactly how advanced Mayan printing became, but several late examples that survived into the early colonial era show that, at least, the Mayans had moved away from the half-painted books of the Aztecs and were printing directly on the page and presenting the result as a finished product - much as European printers would cease to employ illuminators to color in letters and illustrations in their own books. The content too, changes from the accounting and religious/historical texts to secular or near-secular works intended for a non-priestly audience. We have, for example, four pages of a Mayan codex complaining against the tyranny of the Mexica, and six fragments of a medicinal codex on the use of certain plants.

All this, however, ceased with the coming of the Spanish - although not everywhere, and not all at once, just as knowledge of the native languages did not cease entirely simply because Europeans set foot there. However, Mayan and Aztec printing did enter terminal decline, if not with the conquest of Tenochtitlan than with the spread of disease among the Aztec trade routes and path of Spanish conquest and conversion, which quite wiped out the bulk of the native peoples and led to the economic collapse of many major population centers where the printers would have been located. Likewise, most of the valuable metal types and printing plates appear to have been melted down for their copper, silver, or lead content - Cortez himself accounts how all the "golden tablets" in Tenochtitlan were gathered up and melted down, only to find that they were only bronze, which infuriated him. Deprived of both the means and motive to publish, with generations of technical expertise probably falling victim to disease, it is little wonder that Mayan and Aztec printing fell off.

European printing did not come to the Americas until 1539, four years after the formal establishment of New Spain. By that time, native printing was largely defunct, just as literacy in native languages was in decline. Still, x-ray analysis of early Colonial-era Christian documents on amatl-paper show that they were written on top of former printed documents; the carbon-ink of old codices was washed off so the paper could be reused, but the impressions of the block-press left behind remain.

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Dear Kamog

Dear Kamog
by
Bobby Derie

Dear Kamog,

While following up on some additional sources on “Sex & the Lovecraftian Occult,’” I came across references to a supposed Lovecraftian occult text or work called The Book of the Forgotten Ones while browsing through the chapter on Lovecraftian magick in Robert North’s New Flesh Palladium (2006, 4th edition), which in turn appears based on some extensive quotes from the work in Kenneth Grant’s Outside the Circles of Time (1980), both referring to the Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick, a mid-to-late 70s publication of the ‘Bates Cabal,’ a group of thelemic practitioners in the area.

Supposedly, The Book of the Forgotten Ones is a received text by Soror Andahadna, AKA Nema, a priestess of Maat. The first chapter is published in the CJoCM vol. 1, no. 2 (1977) as “The Forgotten Ones”; Nema then expanded on this with “Return of the Elder Gods” in CJoCM vol. 1, no. 3 (1978) - a ritual discussed in The Necronomicon Files (2003, 120-1) (the paragraph in The Book of Lies 145 seems based directly on The Necronomicon Files). The brief second chapter was published as “The Second Book of the Forgotten Ones” in The Cincinnati Journal of Ceremonial Magick vol. 1, no. 6 (1979), with a much longer exegesis by magician-artist Allen Holub, and it is this which Grant quotes from fairly extensively and is of the most interest as it goes into greater detail about the beliefs and practices involved with this group and their workings.

In content, these snippets of The Book of the Forgotten Ones are both disappointing and interesting. Yes, it is OTO/Kenneth Grant-style sex magic - refreshingly clearly discussed in Holub’s piece - but despite the similarity of names these are expressly not Lovecraft’s creations set in a magical framework. There influence of Grant’s The Magical Revival (1972) and Cults of the Shadow (1975) seems quite strong and obvious, and the sex magick rites described by Holub seem to be taken more or less directly from standard thelemic practices. It curiously parallels some bits in Donald Tyson’s Necronomicon series, though I take that more as sharing similar sources than any direct borrowing.

Curiously, I have found some correspondences for the Book in the oddest of places: Lovecraft's letters concerning William Lumley, the aged and deluded seeker who, like Grant, thought that Lovecraft's fictions touched on occult truth. Consider this fragment, from a letter I purchased online at an exorbitant sum:

Perhaps I’ve mentioned him—William Lumley of Buffalo, N.Y. He is very crude in some ways, though amazingly erudite in the lore of mediaeval magic, & possessed of a keen & genuine sense of the fantastic. He is slowly evolving a strange tale of mystical adventure to be called “The City of Dim Faces”, & what he has quoted of it to me sounds astonishingly promising. There is a place in art and literature for the delination of reality in its sternest phases, but that does not detract from the value of phantasy—the literature of escape. Some writers take naturally to the one phase, while others inclined toward the other. It I always the unreal and the marvelous—the vague and expectancy-fraught world of dream, wherein anything is possible—which have primarily fascinated me. The idea of a land of darkness is excellent, and one footnote telling of ancient MSS. Which even the Egyptian priests could not read excited my imagination tremendously. That kind of thing resembles my own (purely mythical) “Pnakotic Manuscripts”; which are supposed to be the work of “Elder Ones” preceding the human race on this planet, and handed down through an early human civilization which once existed around the north pole. We may think we’re writing fiction, and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves—serving unwittingly as mouthpieces of Tsathoggua, Crom, Cthulhu, and other pleasant Outside gentry. Indeed—Bill tells me that he has fully identified my Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep He also speaks often of a mysterious friend of his—“The Oriental Ancient”—who is going to get him a forbidden book (as a loan, and not to be touched without certain ceremonies of mystical purification) from some hidden and unnamed monastery in India. I shall try to straighten out the text, & may type some of it—but I think I’ll ask for charitable cooperation in the latter process. Lumley has no machine.

That is the end of the relevant portion. Needless to say, "The City of Dim Faces" was never published and the manuscript is non-extant, but the bare hints have strong correspondences with the places described in the Book. I know you and I have argued many times on the truth of Lovecraft's occult abilities and education - whether he was as he claimed the dedicated materialist, a mere dreamer on the nightside, or a conscious or unconscious adept of mysteries older than Egypt and Atlantis. We know from his grandfather's masonic connections that some material transmission was at least theoretically possible, and the circumstances of his conception were never satisfactorily explained - you've seen the horoscopes that Price and the others cast. 

I don't mind telling you that Grant was scared of him, and not just at the end. All that stuff he wrote, the truths buried in the numbers that never added up, wrapped up in doggerel and traps that only one reader in ten thousand could decipher...yet at the end, he made the same claim that Lumley had made forty years before; and Soror Nema channeled the same current after that...well, I may not be ready to believe, but I will keep an open mind. Even after all these decades, all that has been written of him, Lovecraft retains some of his secrets.

Yrs. in anticipation of the New Aeon,

Frater Typer

Punchline

Punchline
by
Bobby Derie

It was a quarter past three, and James had started in on his 4 o'clock scotch. His guest, on the other side of the desk, sipped a glass of water. Outside was the sweltering heat of summer, the bustle of men and women and cars, even the occasional clop of a mounted policeman, for they were not too far from the park; inside, down the narrow steps to the offices beneath the level of the street, it was quiet, cool, and intimate.

"So, Miss..."

"Ms."

"Ms. Futhark. What is this entertainment you propose?"

"An extraordinary endeavor, Mr. James." she said "But a daring one, as well. One to flog the jade out of the tired masses, who have grown so bored with common obscenity."

James nodded, and with one hand topped off his glass.

"So go on. Give me your pitch."

*

They will awake in an unknown room. A classical nuclear family - father, mother; daughter, son. The room is empty for them, except for a slot in one wall. And of course, one of the walls is transparent, so that the audience may see them, and they can see the audience.

Imagine if you would, their sudden terror on awakening, the drama, the confusion. To see themselves trapped in a zoo, mere objects for the amusement of others. I for one could watch the begging and pleading, the slow torture of days and weeks as they rant and rave, living like animals, shitting and pissing in the corner, going slowly mad as they starve...what madness might overcome them, you think, as they grew close to death? Cannibalism, perhaps. Murder, almost certainly, if only to spare the children suffering. But few have such patience for such fair; Oscar-bait, they'd call it.

So they will discover the collars. A short, electric shock. Enough to light up their spines, to elicit a scream, to get their attention and the audience on the edge of their seats.

Then the first order will come through the slot.

The idea is a descent into debauchery. To make the players perform. Sexual license, at first. Have them strip. A small thing, to see the family naked, but it's an important surrender. Then, the next request will come in. Has she ever had a fist up her ass? Would she get down on all fours before her children, and scream as he pushed it in past the first knuckle? She would eventually, of course. The collars will see to that. To save the children, if nothing else. Bloody and sobbing, what do you think her response will be when the same order comes through for her husband?

Ah, I see that you begin to see it. Betrayal. Unending sacrifices might be made for love, but you can find snuff films and child porn on the internet. What we want to see are a series of betrayals, the family violating each other, the arguments coming, one after another. It could go on for quite some time, before you reach a point where they say no - perhaps the father won't fuck his daughter, perhaps the mother won't suck her son. Perhaps the father simply refuses to take it up the ass.

Then the next order will come through. Except it isn't an order, but a series of photographs. Perhaps the father, molesting a little boy. Or the children, having sex with one another. The mother, coming out of an abortion clinic with her daughter. Numbing evidence. Tinder for the fire. Because we knew...we always knew...that it would end with violence.

Now the next order will come - with a knife and bandaids. Small sacrifices are demanded: the littlest finger on the left hand. Will the mother heed her husband's cries, when she's just seen a polaroid of him splitting a 12-year-old Thai boy on his cock? Or will the father care what his daughter says, after he seen the evidence of her sucking off the family dog? Whose shit has the wife got in her mouth, in that one photo, blown up and cast against the wall?

The finger is only the beginning of course. There will be blood, and crying. Then the next order will come, with tools. More complicated instructions, for the entire family to pierce their nipples. They will have to take turns holding each other down, the parents getting to work on the children first, who by now have probably retreated to a corner. The shared suffering will go on...it could go on forever. But by degrees the cosmetic agony must give way to a bloody finale; the torture must grow to true mutilation. To pierce his cock. To cut off her labia in bloody strips. To sacrifice one of the children's eyes. To dangle out the hope, that one of the children will be let go, if the other is raped. The tools become ever cruder: a lighter, firecrackers, a trio of gerbils, crude dildos spike to rip and tear at raw, ragged holes...

And the room will grow hot and heavy with their sweat and exertions, and their blood and piss and shit will pool on the floor, so that they are kneeling in it, rolling in it, wading in it, the tiny bodies writhing under the grunting, screaming adults; the mother screaming and sobbing, angry as a lioness protecting her cubs, or else cold-eyed and dead inside as she holds them down so that her husband can fulfill the next order from that devilish slot...

*

The street had gone quiet, or as quiet as it dared to get, and James sat at the desk, glass long empty, one hand still grasping the bottle. Chill sweat dripped and ran down his ribs, and beneath the desk a painful erection press against his pants. He swallowed.

"That's a hell of an act. What do you call it?"

Finally, Futhark smiled.

"The Aristocrats: A Prologue."

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Summoner Shots

Summoner Shots
by
Bobby Derie

It was not much of a bar, but neither was it much of a place. Rusted tin let in every breeze and black fly, but the wooden frame of the cowshed was sound enough, and someone had carted out the valuable manure so long ago only a trace of the smell clung to the old walls. The Russian had laid a plank on a pair of oil drums, and that was the bar. Patrons wandered in, following the chemical smell of the distillery, and brought their own cups and glasses.

No credit was given, or asked for.

In such a place, entertainment is rarely complex. No fine tables marked with runes, no handsome glasses edged with gold, no rare vintages. For them, the gameboard was an old wooden square set out for checkers, the outer rim scratched with the most basic, muddled inscription imaginable - probably useless, but it was the form of the thing.

The sun hung low, and by ones and twos the customers drifted in. Some paid, others bartered; none drank for free. Some had camp stools, the others stood or sat on whatever crates were available. Even the board was set up on an oil drum, and the players stood in front of it.

Andolei had been winning too much, he knew, and he should move on, or else lose a match. A player who was too good upset the nature of the place; a player who could not be beat was boring to watch, and frustrating for those who lost. So the stakes would be raised again and again, until they broke.

So tonight Andolei stood on one side of the board, and three other players crowded the board. Four shots made a cross in the center of the board. Normally, in this setup, it would be a partners match. But Andolei had been winning too much. Three on one. The only chance they'd given him was a double-shot, a glass twice as tall as the others, to help the betting.

The bettors hushed, and as one the four reached down and raised their glasses, clanked them together, to spill a little in each. The others muttered their mystic toasts, but Andolei just raised his chin and slugged it down.

Clear fire hit the back of his mouth, and washed down his throat to sit in his stomach and burn like a pool of acid. Cold, clear, medicinal: vodka was a drink for those who could not stomach an honest cocktail, or could not afford it. The good stuff had some flavor to it, but this was closer to neutral spirit, raw and shapeless, probably brought over as aftershave and filtered out.

Andolei held it as long as he could, letting the others place out. Misty shapes covered the board, little columns of cloud in a square of fog. Three players, three columns, defined only by the hint of horn or claw.

Then Andolei opened his mouth, as if to whistle. A breeze blew down onto the board, and it cleared the fog away in a circle on his part of the board. Something heavier than air oozed from his lips, nearly invisible, but it gained color as it dripped, and by the time it hit the gameboard it was a small, swirling column like a miniature tornado, spinning clockwise.

As one, the three cloudy spirits moved forward as Andolei's vortex spun faster and faster, growing smaller and smaller. Misty claws slashed at the edges of it, but the other players were on edge; they had not seen this before, were not sure what Andolei was doing. But as it shrank, they grew closer, bolder, their forms gaining a little more definition - arms tipped with claws like a bear on the left arm, like a lobster or crab on the right. They tried to tear at the denser substance of Andolei's little vortex, tearing droplets from it.

Perhaps they thought they were winning.

Then, the spark. A column of blue flame shot up ten centimeters from the board as Andolei's spirit took light. It was a batlike-thing with vast thing wings of pale fire, and it moved with the speed of a fuse. In less time than it took to tell of it, those wings surrounded and engulfed the nearest cloudy spirit, which vanished with a pop like a firecrackers; it's player falling back with blistered lips.

The other two tried to run, but it was too late, and soon the board was cleared, the fiery spirit melting into the air as its substance was consumed.

Andolei collected the money, and did not look at the three men with blistered lips, but knew there was murder in their eyes. He had won too much, it was definitely time to go.

A woman waited for him outside. He face was unpainted, but there were strange geometrical scars etched into her skin, around the lips dipping down to her chin. An iron cup dangled from her waist, where it was tied by an iron chain. Andolei stared at her hard.

"I cannot accept a challenge." he said. "Not tonight."

"Not a challenge," she said, the accent was clipped and strange to his ears. "An invitation."

She held up her hand, revealing a small scroll wrapped around a small bottle.

"A contest of champions."

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