Contenu du sommaire : Livres sorciers

In the second half of the 19th century, followers of a “High Magic” identified with intellectual and religious traditions that had been forgotten, disqualified, and then rediscovered through bibliophilic practices and knowledge. This article examines the constellation of figures surrounding “magician” Stanislas de Guaita (1861-1897), who made this dark side of reason his by edifying an extremely rich collection of Renaissance and Modern texts. All these figures shared a same concern for the re-appropriation of the past of all books, had the same passion for the diversity of signs and graphic codes, and presented themselves as founders of multiple secret orders and societies. Restoring the concreteness of life forms that are placed under the distinctive sign of “High Magic” leads to explore the re-composition of ritual roles awaiting to be interpreted and to question expressive registers as well as the displacing, in literature, of a paradoxical form of religious primitivism.

Between 2000 and 2014, the shamanic practices of Peru's Shipibo-Conibo evolved. In this article, I focus on the emergence of magic books, which were published in Spanish and sold at local markets, in traditionnally oral rituals. This phenomenon of ritual innovation raises the question of the respective value that some Shipibo-Conibo shamans attach to the oral and the written.

In an initiation dream, a yachak shaman, E. Wani, claimed that “God” himself told him to write down the mysterious “voices” he heard during his visions: the supay spirits had appeared to him as bright “letters”. They were tangible mark of an invisible world that was revealed to the shaman. The voices of these little souls were thus literally “transcribed” in alphabetical writing, during the space and timeframe of a dream. When he woke up, the shaman followed his divine initiator's orders and proceeded to transcribe and correct these curious texts-voices. He thus established a “databank” of clandestine magic writings comprising a dozen manuscripts and torn, crumpled sheets of paper with correction marks. They contain secret songs and inscriptions written either by EW himself or by other masters of speech. What happens when societies whose ritual memory seemed to rely exclusively on the oral now have the opportunity to write down revealed voices in the form of a fixed trace, which can be deciphered without its author, a trace of a voice which is taken down after it was uttered? How does shamanism assimilate writing? This article examines the conditions of inscription and the epistemology of these Amerindian shamanic writings. The story of the encounter between the shaman and the anthropologist sheds light on the complexity of inscribing and deciphering these very singular poetic texts. While ikara songs have the power to seal alliances, cure or transform the order of the world, EW considers that the written sign is the trace left by bodies, those of the aya souls and supay spirits. Such a radical approach to translation, which concerns both signs and beings, reveals an ontology of language based on semiotic transformation and permutation.

This article is based on the recent discovery of over a-century-old Maya handwritten notebooks belonging to a bibliophile sorcerer. They are described as nightly texts and related to several genealogies of sacred and subversive texts. In this essay, I study the various meanings of these texts and of writing in general among the Maya who descend from the Cruzo'ob Mayas of the War of the Casts (Quintana Roo, Mexico). I begin with the story of Hilario Chi Canul, who received these texts. His story, which was originally written in his native tongue, Yucatec Maya, was translated and annotated by Valentina Vapnarsky. She is the “I” of the following parts, while the “we” refers to our collaboration, which started four years ago.

In Pharaonic Egypt, writing is used for the recording of ritual knowledge, but it also has some ritualised uses. This contribution focuses on two of these phenomena, in the handwriting script called hieratic: letters to the dead and amuletic papyri. In the first case, writing notes a discourse of the livings and it is mobilized to communicate with a recent ancestor. In the second, writing has to note incantations, the “divine words” that the ritualist had in principle uttered during the ritual. In both cases, this paper tries to determine the relationship of the writing with the uttered speech, the way by which it acquires a special ritual status and the nature of the writing act.

This article examines the relationship between religion, writing and power in colonial context, by analysing a corpus of documents called “passports to Heaven”, used in Kongo prophetic movements during the first half of the 20th century. In the Congo Basin, writing is associated with the two pillars of the colonial order: the State and the missions. The use of these prophetic documents must be understood in this context. The article shows how writing participates in the construction of authority at the junction of the political and religious spheres. Merging messianism and bureaucracy, “passports to Heaven” attest to a lucid understanding of the scriptural aspects of colonial authority. Because Europeans extensively used writing to assert their domination, colonized subjects mimetically appropriated these signs of power in order to oppose it.

In the north of the Yucatán peninsula, from generation to generation, the Maya of the village of Xocén pass on the story of an extraordinary book. This book is alive, it has no human author and appeared when the world was created; but it is also a book containing all knowledge, the exhaustive chronicle of the past as well as the prophecies about the future. The Maya of Xocén say that the book was bestowed upon them by God. They also claim that the book was stolen from them and is now somewhere in the United States. This is how they account for colonial spoliation and lasting imperialist domination. But they also predict that, one day, the book will be returned to them.

While the melded influences of Wifredo Lam's work are known, the relationship with what one may call his «Chinese side» remains unclear. From an aesthetic and historical perspective, this paper examines the links between a certain idea of artistic experience that is characteristic of scholarly painting in the early 20th century and Lam's experience. There are both embedded in the same modernist issues related to the conception of representation and the creative attitude. With this transversal approach, we aim to open new horizons for the interpretation of Lam's painting, particularly The Jungle, which, under this new light, helps determine the exact nature of his “Chinese side” and, thus, the mixed influences at work.

Against the backdrop of the restitution of objects to African countries, this article aims to bring to light a concrete field experience in 1930's Dahomey, which included collecting artefacts for the Trocadero ethnography museum and writing a PhD at the Paris Ethnology Institute. Bernard Maupoil's papers and correspondence show the empirical aspect of his work, the networks he established, the institutional constraints he suffered from, as well as his relationships with local populations and personal commitment. Therefore, the nature of the collected objects depends as much on the field as on the researcher's position.