Livia Gershon via JSTOR Daily:

‘The writers of the Beat generation adopted ideas and images from cultural traditions ranging from Buddhism to jazz. William S. Burroughs repeatedly turned to another source: the ancient Maya. As independent scholar Paul H. Wild writes, Burroughs drastically reshaped Maya culture for his own purposes, but his stories were grounded in ideas about the civilization that were common in academic circles at the time…

Wild writes that, somewhat paradoxically, given his profession, Burroughs railed against the “Word Virus” as a tool of control. And so he was fascinated by the hieroglyphic nature of Maya writing, which he claimed could convey ideas more directly, avoiding the need for words. This followed a common scholarly notion that Maya hieroglyphics were not tied to spoken language.

Many of the ideas about Maya life that Burroughs had access to in the 1950s were turned on their head in the next decade, when epigraphers realized that Maya writing was, in fact, partly phonological, and could be directly translated into speech…’