First Principles
The mask is the oldest symbol of alienation. Helpless in the face of the enigma of the universe, the perils of life and the inevitability of death, man has always sought for images of hope and emblems of protection. The mask, the other face, hides the wearer, protects and transforms him.
Man transforms himself by putting on a mask: he opens the floodgates of instinct, and the ghosts of his animal origins arise from the depths. The blurring of the borderline between man and animal, in animism, leads to those mixed forms and hybrid figures in which human and animal images merge with each other. The animist concept of an animal as the ancestor of man is an anticipation of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Totemism, the cult of certain animals vital for the survival of hunting tribes, leads to a cosmology based on a consciousness of the common destiny of man and animal… The totem animal, equipped with human qualities and identified with the ancestors, becomes the familiar spirit or guardian of the hunter, and manifests itself when he wears a hybrid man-animal mask.
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From the beginning, says Levi-Strauss, the same forces of logic and thought are at work. In an analysis of the character of early masks we cannot ignore the idea of a supernatural relationship between members of a particular clan, or group of clans, and animals or plants; but we must also consider masks and totemism in the context of their intimate kinship with the primary sources underlying all the religions which succeeded totemism.
When man puts on a mask he changes into another being and establishes the link between image and god, and between the living and the dead. The mask is the instrument of mysteries and esoteric cults. It conceals, frightens, doubles, the face of day, with eyes open, or night, with eyes closed; its expression symbolizes life and death at once. This arcane duality is the basis for all mask design.
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Man puts the mask on his face and transforms himself through invocation and identification: ‘The wearer of the mask is possessed by the sublimity and dignity of those who are no more. He is himself and yet someone else. Madness has touched him – something of the mystery of the raving god, of a spirit of double existence which resides in masks, and who’s last descendent is the actor’ – (Quote not referenced!!)
…man has through the ages been accompanied by the mask of the warrior. The war mask was designed not only to frighten the enemy, but also for the physical protection of the wearer. Its form evolved from the wooden masks of the ‘primitives’ to the visored metal helmet of the medieval knight. Modern troops and police in gas masks present just as inhuman an appearance.
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The mask as expression of man’s dependence on creative and destructive forces is part and parcel in the belief of spirits. It has taken many millennia for man to pass from the world of myth to that of the electronic brain (??). On this road through space and time, masks are the milestone.
Finally, the wheel turns full circle: the people of the twentieth century have experienced a shattering of their image of the world. The legitimacy of their one and only physical universe is shaken by the unknown and perhaps the unknowable laws governing the innumerable worlds in space.
Instinct and experience provide a union of opposites; myth and revelation are two stages of the process of consciousness. In the age of science, the manifestations of reason have repressed those of the instinct; and yet, even under the surface of civilisation, instinct continues to operate.
And masks have come back. They are, as they were before, uncanny: not through magic or sorcery, but because they represent the emotionless precision of cybernetics and the destructive energy of the primeval cosmic forces against which man has to protect himself.
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Man, Spirit, God
The masks of divine beings are designed not on rational basis of individual experience but on the instinctual basis of collective imagination. The myth-creating faculty transposes experience from the subconscious into the image. Masks of primeval art are expressions of elemental experience. Invisible forces take tangible shape; and as they become visible, they acquire a constant identity.
In the same cave [Les Trois Freres] is the figure of a Magdelenian magician and hunter with huge reindeer antlers and large hypnotic eyes between wolf’s ears…All these attributes must be interpreted as portraying animal skins worn by human beings. (Not that simple – See ‘Mind in the Cave’).
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Giedon (The Eternal Present, London, 1965)calls masks and hybrid figures the antennae of invisible forces: ‘The ever changing form of the masks and the hybrid express man’s never-resting search for a definitive form, a condensation of religious concepts, and his inability ever to find or establish them. Primeval man is caught in a miraculous state in which he is unable to distinguish between the sacred and the profane.
Tribal and world religions have left a huge gallery of masks of spirits and gods. These masks were inspired by impotence, helplessness, fear, the horror of death, and the joy of life. Unlimited power and immeasurable force are the attributes which are visible in the divine. An unending series of figures ascends from the depths of being, transformations of the fantastic and the unknown.
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Paul Westheim recounts a legend in which Quetzalcoatl’s adversary Tezcatlipoca gives him a mirror in order to destroy him. When Quetzalcoatl looks into the mirror he is appalled by his ugliness. He has a mask made without which he never again appears. Through the mask he liberates himself from his own personality and becomes another, higher being. The mask as a second half is a characteristic element of magical significance in all Middle American cultures.
As Andre Malraux writes: ‘I hope that on the day of judgement the gods confront the forms which once meant the very spirit of life with the nation of statues. Then it will not be the god created the world of men, but the world of the artists, which will testify to the presence of the gods’. (No reference)
Ecstasy is the state in which man emerges from his inner self into the sphere of the supernatural and divine. The mask is the external, visible symbol of the transformation.
In our age of cybernetics and technical virtuosity, the masks of the gods pale into insignificance: ‘Slowly but surely, humanity is clearing away the psychological projections which filled the emptiness of the universe with hierarchies of gods and spirits, heavens and hells, and is astonished to find the creative riches which lie in the depths of its own soul’ (Erich Neumann, Depth psychology and a new ethic, London, 1969).
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