The echoes of "Trick or Treat" have faded. The costumes that ushered in the season of Samhain have been packed away. The startling mask of a ferocious demon sits propped in a sunny windowsill, its wearer returned to her grade school studies.
Though it seems masks mark only the Halloween season, or are merely artifacts of a museum, theatre or movie set, they are all around us. They swarm through our every day, there is no avoiding them. We interact with them and use them ourselves with ease. We all have one, maybe two. We wear them all day and set them aside only at night where they return in our dreams.
The word "person" derives from the Greek word "persona," that refers to the mask used by an actor to play a particular role. The persona, or the "mask" that we each wear, mediates between ourselves and society and between ourselves and the Other (whether you define "Other" as divinity, God or universal truth) and has done so since the beginning of human time.
History in Disguise
On the wall of the cave Les Trois Freres in France, there is an image engraved fifteen feet above the cave floor that dates from 13,000 BC. It is an impressive image, known as the "Sorcerer of Trois Freres" and depicts a man dancing upright with the ears and horns of a stag, hands that resemble bear paws and the sexual organ of a lion. He is approximately 2.5 feet in height and is surrounded by a myriad of animals that roamed southern France at that time; mammoth, rhinoceros, bison, musk ox, snowy owls, reindeer and more.
There has been much speculation about this figure, that he is a sorcerer or a god of the hunt. Perhaps the artist was the magician himself, a shaman, who engraved the image there, in a pitch-black cave with an entrance so small that it could be reached only by slithering forty to fifty feet into the earth on one’s stomach to reach it. The mask that the figure wears, if it is a mask, bears a striking resemblance to animal masks found across many cultures throughout history since that time.
The empty form of a mask, though sometimes powerful in its own right, calls for a wearer and an audience. These factors together - society, the mediating influence of the mask and the energies of the natural world - carry vast potential. The Sorcerer of Trois Freres, by virtue of his disguise, created an elevated level of existence that contained himself, the animals and his audience. As his candlelit image flickered high above his Paleolithic audience, the Sorcerer and the animals may have moved as one, returning life to his prey, his prey lending their powerful image and instinctual wisdom to him.
From the Neolithic age come jars that depict the mask of an owl goddess with large eyes and ear tufts as well as pig and bear masks. The nocturnal owl is associated with the goddess in her underworld aspect, the pig a symbol of ripe fertility and the bear a figure of strong and fierce motherhood. Female death masks were found in "mask graves" dating from around 4500 BC. These masks, with a broad homely female face with fangs, were buried in graves without human remains along with quantities of gold, shells, beads and marble dishes.
Still later, Bronze Age vase paintings illustrate female creatures with snakelike bodies, owl eyes, fangs, wings and claws. These forms, like the female death masks, bear a remarkable resemblance to the Gorgon of later Greece. The Gorgon is a female snakelike creature with serpentine hair, fangs, claws and a mask-like face with glaring eyes and protruding tongue. Her image was considered apotrapaic, that is, it was believed to ward off the Evil Eye, or bad luck. The Gorgon mask was found on war shields, town walls, buildings and household goods.
It is likely the Gorgon mask was used to evoke the protection of the goddess in her death aspect, frightening away ill luck and misfortune. Much later, the Gorgon mask became the subject of the Indo-European myth of the Gorgon Medusa whose head was cut off by the hero Perseus, a symbolic slaying of the earth Goddess by a rising patriarchy.
With these examples from early history we find that uses of the mask were many, including the mediation of a personal or societal relationship with the universal, evoking spirits of fertility and utilizing an aspect of the goddess deity for protection and prosperity. Throughout later history, mask-making was employed the world over. There are few civilizations or tribal cultures that did not develop and use the mask for ritual purposes such as protecting and promoting the living or the dead, creating divine "theatre" where the energies of the natural or divine world could enter onto the mortal plain or using the powers of the mask to heal the sick and personify sanctioned authority.
In the Middle Ages, masks were used in mystery plays. While these were plays that depicted events of the Old and New Testaments, there was often an undercurrent of the earlier pagan influences to these spectacles especially in rural settings and at festivals such as Solstice and New Year. During the Renaissance, secular theatre rose in popularity across Europe and the masked tradition became firmly established in theatre. Whispers of the mixing of Christian and pagan influences are still found in the many foliate masks, or "green men," that adorn European churches.
The masks of the First Nations People of the Pacific Northwest reflect a kinship between the owner of the mask and his or her clan’s ancestral animal spirit. When a dancer wears an ancestral mask, he accepts the responsibility to perform the ceremony of the mask’s spirit. The performance feeds the mask spirit, the mask spirit nourishes the dancer and the audience and the ancestral history of the clan is thus honoured, the cycle completed. Here again the mask spirit is the mediating force between the dancer, the clan and the spirit world.
In its quietest moment a mask has the potential to transform. When the wearer dons the mask he or she ceases to be a private individual. Instead, the living energy that is brought to the mask combines with the spirit of the mask and both are transformed, that is, the spirit of the mask is embodied and the wearer of the mask is enlivened with spirit.
To Be or Not to Be
A mask, whether it is made of wood, gold or personality, can reveal god or reveal nothing at all. It depends on what you believe.
If one believes that a mask made of wood, paint and a few feathers can provide only a quick charade then such a person is as likely to believe that little, if any, numinous energy runs through our existence. If, however, you are able to suspend disbelief in the presence of a mask and an earnest wearer, you may experience, if only momentarily, the unexplainable energies that invisibly underpin our lives.
Mythology, like masks, connects us with a condition truer than the everyday. Mythology is a sacred narrative, it speaks to a reality beyond our observable world. Though most would be hard-pressed to accept it, the trappings of this world are illusory. We participate on a day to day level in a secondary reality, one with schedules, buses and projects, and we believe it. When we encounter evidence of the numinous world we too often dismiss it as inferior fiction or attempt to take it literally, as literal religious evidence.
At hand is the question of whether one can play at attending to the divine as if it is real. To regard the world and its characters and circumstances as if they proceeded from a divine source. To play at the world’s illusion, accepting both that a belief need not be taken literally and that reason need not define reality. When you experience the sacred, such as a mythological story or a ritual with mask and dance, discard cynicism, accept the energy that you can feel stirring within yourself and let it grow, without limiting it by definition.
Joseph Campbell writes "such a game of 'as if’ frees our mind and spirit, on the one hand, from the presumption of theology, which pretends to know the laws of God, and, on the other, from the bondage of reason, whose laws do not apply beyond the horizon of human experience."
We have seen throughout history how the mask has been used to successfully bridge the space between its wearer, its audience and the divine. We can feel the middle road, the space where we can use a lightened spirit to play at belief. But how does that work for us? We with masks as plain as the nose on our faces?
The Face-Off
Humans are uniquely attuned to the human face. As infants we react to the pattern of a face and it is to the face that we look as we get older for a myriad of visual clues about someone we meet, such as safety, intelligence, status, age, attractiveness and health. It is with our face that we approach the world, and it is with our persona, who we believe ourselves to be, that we interact with it.
Like the mask, an individual’s persona mediates between its wearer and the worlds he or she seeks to inhabit. Think of the persona as a filter between the individual and whatever and whoever they come in contact with. The persona is honed by the desires of the individual and the demands of society throughout life and, by a certain age, most people have an idea of "who they are." The persona is important in that it protects the individual from being crushed by the opinions and stress of society while at the same time offering a safe place for personal development from the inside out.
It is always chancy to use psychologically specific terms such as "persona" or "psyche" in an article of general interest. But it is important to draw a parallel between our modern use of "persona" and the ancient use of masks. Both the mask and the persona employ the psyche of the wearer to bring the individual into relationship with the world.
As well, both mask and persona bolster the relationship of the wearer with his or her own Self. Looking inward, the persona allows an individual to approach the divine, universal aspect of themselves without fear of the overwhelming power of the psyche. In every sense, the persona is the mask that mediates, that allows the individual to see and feel the glory or wrath of the deity within themselves without immediately burning to ash.
So the persona, it’s a good thing, except when it’s not. By a certain point in life, one has an idea of one’s limits. One might say, "oh, I would never do that", or "I’d like to try something new, but I really shouldn’t." Ideally, a person one day has a realization that "well, I realize what I’m like, but I think I’ll do it another way this time." That is the sort of thinking that allows the individual to play at being who they are, realizing that although they have experience and certain attitudes, that they are also an evolving, differentiating human.
The trouble starts when instead of realizing that they can play with who they are, a person identifies with who they believe they are. Our mask not only includes our likes and dislikes, but it also carries our role, our function and our identification in society. Not only is the mask protective, it can be our most valuable asset. Everyone knows someone like this, a person who is highly successful at their career or commercial enterprise to the exclusion of most everything and everyone else. They have difficulty with personal relationships, are driven by what they "should" do and are lost if they find themselves in an environment that is not supportive of their identity.
Regardless of this attachment with one’s perceived identity, the psyche will battle for wholeness. The energy that is cut off from expression will find its way back, revealing itself in events that conspire to shake the individual out of their mask, through job loss, illness or relationship trouble, all those problems that are "in your face." Sometimes these discarded energies return in the form of dreams where wild animals relentlessly pursue the dreamer, wounded instinct requiring attention.
The persona, like the mask, has the power to transform. It can make us anonymous, it can make us notorious. If we allow our mask its use, it can shed light upon our most deeply desired path. If we hold it too close we find the joke is upon us, an actor on an empty stage.
The Divine Play
The greatest moments in life are those when our ordinary lives are suffused, if only for a moment, with the ineffable energies that lie beyond our perception. It is only in those moments, and in the memory of those moments that we realize that we are part of something so much bigger, so vast, so knowing. And the energy of those moments carries us on, to our next work day and to making that call to find out exactly how much it will cost to fix the car.
To use ourselves, our mask, to play at life is to be open to the tides of wonder that ebb and flow around us. If we identify with our mask, we can never leave the terrain of the day-to-day until we are forced off the edge. But if, like the Sorcerer of Trois Freres, we can accept our place with the natural energies that surround us, then we too, if only for a moment can be one.