Unfortunately, there isn’t a great deal to say on the mayan glyphic system. First off, it would be mistaken to call it an alphabet. It had no such structure or interrelationship between glyphs. The glyphs themselves can’t even properly be compared to modern alphabetic characters. If anything, their linguistic structure would be better described as a logographic mathematics.
It seems they had symbols for syllables that they combined to make logographs? Actually, the individual glyphs were complete logograms, syllabic characters were add ons, like our prefixes and suffixes. More a way of disambiguating the intended form then of the word intended by the character, than actually playing any sort of primary or formal role.
Example, walk would be a glyph, walk-ed would be two glyphs, and often the syllabic glyph would be conflated, integrated with the main glyph or contracted like shorthand english text. So their language was as a rule holistic, more akin to dream interpretation than the abstract conceptual articulation we use, more expressive than lexical.
An example, dreaming of shoes has different meanings based on the setting, the situation the shoes are framed in. Dreaming of shoes seen on the street means something very different than shoes seen in a store front or on a shelf. Well, the same method of deriving meaning was used to read mayan glyphs. You might say it was one of the worlds most natural languages for expressing prophetic visions, and most of what we have left of their writings consists of that very thing. They are discovering even now in their exploration of the human mind through neuroscience, that most of our brain functions actually follow a predictive format. Rather than being an unnatural obsession or strange cultural preoccupation, our brains neural pathways are set up and route their signals through a system based on space and movement. So Mayan writings were set up as a way of encoding headspace, as well as the space above our heads. The glyphs were arranged in dual columns, like the twin hemispheres of our brain.
Computers started the same way…to calculate missile trajectories. Yes. The Mayans calculated natural and psychological (or if you prefer spiritual) trajectories. They were quite invested in tracking the deeds of their cultures warlords and specifically when they happened, not even necessarily telling the story of the event. The stories more often were depicted in murals than encoded in the glyphs themselves. They would have something like a picture of a sacrificial ritual and then a list of sacrifices and dates. They seemed to be trying to anticipate when trends would conclude and restart, more like a form of cognitive computing than the trashy noise we have in our popular media today.
So yes, two paired columns and then the continued text was spread out in rows, again more like a mathematical spreadsheet than say musical notation. Their glyphs even had mathematical values, almost as if they were deliberately setting up their writings for later numerological examination. Just as we sometimes have meaningful Freudian slips, say things we weren’t planning “between” our words, new words could occur between their glyphs as each glyph had both a word and a syllabic meaning.
Recently, they have even discovered that in general we don’t know what we are going to say before we say it. They can even intervene and alter how our brain registers our speech and we will process it as if we actually did say that. We listen to what we say for feedback on what it meant more than consciously choosing and directing our speech, and based on the meaning of what we said or what we heard our brains become primed to respond with further speech. Something very similar likely happened to the mayan priests and the egyptian priests as well on the other side of the ocean.
They have found that every word you even think is actually represented both spatially and kinesthetically, somatically if that makes sense.
Ah yes true…your brain mirrors it. So words are late in the chain, but arise. They parallel the other processes that go on in the temporal lobe. We track much more than words in that system, but that system can’t activate and leave language unactivated.
As the priests were reading one of their codices, as imagery rich as theirs was as well as concept heavy, their temporal and visual lobes were likely heavily activated. They were also in the habit of engaging in prayer before consulting the sacred texts which would prime them even further. The visual lobes are the largest region in the human brain, and also one of the most heavily networked. We are primarily visual creatures. Even in the case of brain damage, it can happen that the person can communicate in written language but can’t speak or process spoken language as well as they should.
Prayer? Well, the prayer is just a coupled preparation in this situation.
Many seem to start drawing. Yes. The mayan glyphs were in a sense just well rehearsed and commonly held drawings.
So yes, they would pray then consult one of the codices, and as they did so they would begin to free associate. They have discovered one of the big reasons the Chinese and Japanese do so well at math… Do you know what they discovered?
The structure of their math meshes with the structure of their language rather than being alien to it. So a math problem is, in a sense, conversational. Remembering their math tables would be like remembering something we hear regularly in conversation. Well, the same would have occurred for mayan priests. As they consulted the codices, their brains would begin to free associate and cross connect what they were currently reading with their preparatory prayer leading to intuitive or predictive insights into whatever they sought to understand.
I think this is about all that can be said about the topic, unfortunately. I hope it was interesting or helpful, maybe both.
Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~