and artists books, in 1975. The workshop is a kind of testament to the promise of cultural exchange on an intimate level and is now headed by a largely Maya board of directors. The women, who deserve most of the credit for Incantations, could not be interviewed for this article because they live in the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico's poorest state, where the indigenous Zapatista rebellion that began in 1994 is ongoing. Telephones are scarce, privacy is prized, and many do not speak Spanish but rather Tzotzil.

Past has lived among the Maya since the early '70s, when she began establishing relationships in remote villages where she recorded (and in some cases reconstructed) rapidly disappearing recipes for making the colorful natural dyes that had characterized Mayan weaving for centuries.

The drawings exude the raw intensity of petroglyphs scratched into rocks by early human ancestors. Some echo weaving patterns so old they can be traced to pottery and reliefs found in ancient Maya cities such as Palenque and Yaxchilan, the publisher explained. Loxa Jimenes Lopez writes:

Long ago women made thread as today we make
our children:
They spun them with the strength of their bodies.
When the earth began, they say, the moon climbed a tree.
There she was weaving, there she was spinning in the tree.
"Learn to weave," she said to the first Fathersmothers.
"Learn to spin!" That's how weaving began.

"The book contains songs, spells, and incantations written by contemporary Mayan women in Tzotzil, one of the 20 still-living Maya languages," explained poet Ambar Past from her home in San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. Past wrote the book's prologue and a postscript. She founded Taller Lenateros, a collective known for its handmade paper, silk-screen prints,

In the process, she learned Tzotzil and fell in love with the language's possibilities. "I was living in rural highland villages where three or four generations of a family share a mud hut with their pigs and chickens," she explained. "They have no possessions, no change of clothes, maybe one pot and one spoon - but poetry is considered essential. Among the Maya the two most important arts are weaving and being able to speak in sonorous couplets, often breathtakingly beautiful, sometimes recalling verses created more than 500 years ago. The vocabulary of the Incantations is very old.

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