The magic of written words

Script is a messenger between material and immaterial realms

The Mosque of Shaykh Lutfallah, in Isfahan, Iran: a sublime monument to the sanctity of the written word. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

A few months ago, I came home to find a hand-written letter in the post. My curiosity was piqued: this doesn’t happen very often. I opened the envelope and started reading the script, neatly rendered in a blue ballpoint, but I didn’t get very far. It was a message from the Liberal Democrat candidate at the upcoming election. What I had in my hands was not, in fact, a handwritten letter, but one that had been scanned and reprinted, presumably thousands of times, to give the appearance of a handwritten letter. It was like leaning in to smell a rose and realising it was made of plastic. 

What was the thinking behind this stunt? It would have shown commitment if this politician had written to every potential voter individually (I imagine he would still be writing now), but the letter was obviously a copy. Maybe it was just a ruse to get people to open the envelope. Most likely though, he was working on the basis that a handwritten note feels more personal. He wanted to invoke – albeit in a distant, diminished form – the magic involved in the act of inscription.

Words are so common that we have become desensitised to their strangeness, and their power. These artefacts have the ability to cross boundaries that seem impassable, especially the boundary between material and immaterial experience. Spells can be recorded in writing, but every piece of writing is a kind of spell: a pattern in physical space that, when looked at, controls the semantic contents of your thoughts. Words are inscribed in the material world – on stone, paper, electronic screens – so that they can be reinscribed in the privacy of the mind.

The boundary can be crossed in the other direction too. To inscribe an object with meaningful signs can be a way of making it our own, stamping it with a trace of our inner life and being. Since most of the writing we encounter is typed – and now, increasingly, generated by algorithms – handwriting is better at making us aware of this intimate communion. The contact between pen and paper (I am drafting this sentence by hand) represents the contact of one mind with another. Words are a medium in the spiritual as well as the technical sense.

Signatures and other personal inscriptions are records of our presence. They are demands to be recognised. Though it sits on your shelf, a book with someone else’s name on its inside cover will never truly belong to you. Going back to the ancient world, rulers have used elaborate cyphers and monograms to project their personal authority, as logos are used to project corporate authority today. Conversely, Richard Sennett reports that slaves working on Roman construction projects sometimes imprinted signs of their identity on bricks, a small act of rebellion against political anonymity.

Printed typefaces traditionally used serifs to recall the appearance of manual engravings and calligraphy. Because sans-serif fonts were more easily legible, and therefore more accessible, graphic designers in the early twentieth century regarded them as democratic. Perhaps they intuited something else too: by relinquishing the stylistic traces of handwriting, the removal of serifs depersonalised language, much as democratic ideology seeks to depersonalise public power in general.

But if writing can transgress the bounds of the material world, can it transcend the human one too? With what powers can this medium mediate? In the conventional account, the birth of writing in ancient Mesopotamia was a bureaucratic affair. Cuneiform tablets were used to record contracts, taxes and inventories, enabling rulers to control resources across a wide area, and thereby allowing the emergence of more complex, centralised states. This is a story that secular, bureaucratic moderns can easily relate to. Yet it downplays the role of magic, cultic practices and worship in the development of many forms of writing.

Oracle bones from Shang China, used for ritual divination. (Source: ThoughtCo.)

Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs were used to inscribe spells on amulets and the walls of tombs. The earliest surviving Chinese writing, dating from the Shang period, was engraved onto animal bones and shells for purposes of divination. Questions were posed, and answers recorded, in a dialogue with gods, ancestors and spirits. As Michael Wood notes, the Shang king oversaw these rituals in his role as “mediator between heaven and earth.” Such practices were not mystical window dressing on the state’s administrative functions; they were a core part of those functions.

Islamic civilisation offers an extraordinary testament to the sanctity of writing. In the seventh century, calligraphers developed the beautiful Kufic style of script specially to transcribe the Quran. Reverence for the word of God, together with a prohibition against representing the human form, led to the extensive use of religious inscriptions for public media such as coins and architecture. The Shaykh Lutfallah Mosque in Iran, built by the Persian leader Shah Abbas in the early seventeenth century, is perhaps the most sublime monument to the written word as a visual element in its own right. 

I have little trouble imagining how people have regarded writing as pregnant with otherworldly potential. Even within the confines of our contemporary horizons, with senses dulled by daily interaction with enormous, fragmented volumes of text, the magic is still palpable. In another generation or two, as audio and visual media continue their conquest of daily life, written language may even regain the aura of mystery it held for centuries in the past.