Mask – Replacing

Virtue: Replacing
Domain: Spirit Embodiment

A mask puts a face in place of yours, and whatever that face belongs to comes forward.

The usual lists give masks concealment, protection, glamour, shapeshifting, trickery, spirit work, theatre, and "accessing your shadow self." Concealment is the one everybody leads with, and I think it's the one most clearly wrong. Hiding a face is easy. A veil does it, darkness does it, a hood does it. None of those make you somebody else. A mask does, and every tradition that takes masks seriously is very clear that this is the point.

The evidence, in brief

Yoruba Egúngún. The ancestors as a collective force, and the masquerade through which they come. The masker's body disappears entirely under layers of cloth, and in the tradition's own terms the Egúngún is not a man representing an ancestor. It's the ancestor, visiting. Drewal and Pemberton gloss the word as "powers concealed," and the right to present a given masquerade belongs to particular lineages.

Rome. Polybius (6.53) describes the imagines, wax masks of the family's distinguished dead, kept in the house and brought out for funerals. They were put on men chosen because they resembled the originals in height and bearing. The ancestors walked in procession, in their badges of office, and sat in ivory chairs while the eulogy was given. The audience treated them as the ancestors themselves. Polybius calls the sight of them, all together as if alive and breathing, the most ennobling spectacle a young man could see.

Bali. In the Calonarang dramas, Barong and Rangda aren't played. The masks are consecrated, kept in the temple, and the dancers wearing them go into trance. Jane Belo documented this in detail in Trance in Bali (1960).

Northwest Coast. Kwakwaka'wakw transformation masks open during the performance to reveal a second being inside the first. That's supplanting made mechanical: a face replaced by a face.

Greece. Dionysus, the god of becoming someone else, was worshipped in at least one rite as a mask hung on a pillar with robes beneath it (the Lenaia vases; Frontisi-Ducroux, Le dieu-masque). The god was the mask. Theatre came out of his cult, and every actor was masked.

Four continents, one action. And notice how none of these is about hiding the wearer. The wearer's disappearance is the side effect. The arrival is the point.

What the materium does on its own

The face is the thing we read identity from. Human brains have dedicated face-processing machinery, infants track faces before almost anything else, and we recognize each other by face more than by any other feature. So a mask doesn't cover just any part of the body. It covers the specific part that says who this is, and puts another answer there. That's the identifying signature.

It works on the wearer too, and this is measurable. In a well-known 1976 Halloween study (Diener and colleagues), trick-or-treating children who were anonymous in costume took considerably more candy than they were told to than children who'd been asked their names. Deindividuation research in general says the same thing: cover the face and people stop acting like themselves. The tradition read that as the self being supplanted. The psychology reads it as the self getting out of the way. Those are the same observation.

Other names: mask, masque, Latin persona and larva (the second also meaning a ghost or spirit, which is worth sitting with), Greek prosōpon (face, mask, and eventually "person"), Yoruba Egúngún, aráyé and ará ọ̀run (the masquerade as "people of heaven"), Japanese 面 men (Noh mask) and 仮面 kamen, Chinese 面具 miànjù, 脸谱 liǎnpǔ (opera face painting), Irish aghaidh fidil, Welsh mwgwd. Etymology note: the popular derivation of persona from per-sonare, "to sound through," is ancient (Aulus Gellius repeats it) but rejected by linguists; it most likely comes from Etruscan phersu, a masked figure. Even the folk etymology is a mask.

Scientific name: None. Alterium. Material matters, though, and each is its own body (see Parts Used).

Strength: Strong and immediate while worn, and it largely ends when the mask comes off. That on/off quality is unusual and worth noticing. Few materia switch off that cleanly.

Parts used:

• The whole mask, worn. This is the primary form and the only one that fully expresses Supplanting.
• The mask unworn, hung or displayed. This is a face with no wearer. It still supplants / replaces, but replaces a place rather than a person (see apotropaic masks below).
• Death masks and cast masks, which carry Witness Virtue (History) from the moment and contact of casting.
• Face paint, which belongs to the same body but is weaker and harder to take off cleanly. Chinese opera's liǎnpǔ, where the color of the painted face tells you the character (red for loyalty, white for treachery), is good evidence for the face as identity.

Material is a second membership: wood, leather, paper, cloth, wax, plaster, metal, or bone. A wooden mask is also wood. Choose with that in mind.

Warnings:

• Some masks are not ours. Egúngún masquerades belong to specific lineages. Hopi katsinam are not masks in the sense this entry describes, and the Hopi have asked repeatedly that outsiders not buy, sell, display, or imitate them. Northwest Coast masks are hereditary property tied to specific families and crests. Bali's consecrated masks belong to their temples. Wearing a face from a closed tradition isn't just rude. If the Virtue works the way I think it does, you're inviting a specific being forward into a relationship that being never agreed to with you.
• You will act differently. This is the Virtue, not a side effect, and it's the reason carnival came with rules. Know what you are letting forward before you put it on.
• Take it off properly. Traditions that use masks seriously have formal ways of putting them on, and especially of taking them off. Noh masks are stored wrapped in silk bags and handled with ceremony. Don't fall asleep in one, don't wear one longer than the working, and say who you are when it comes off. I once wore a mask for a long working and took it off casually afterwards, and spent the rest of the evening feeling (and being observed to be) slightly not-myself. Lesson learned.
• Practical. Breathing, peripheral vision, and stairs. Masks narrow all three.

Legal: Many places restrict masks in public: several US states have anti-mask statutes (some dating to anti-Klan legislation), and a number of European countries ban face coverings in public. Exemptions for holidays, religious observance, and health vary. Check where you live. Trade in sacred or cultural-patrimony masks is restricted under various laws, including NAGPRA in the US.

Concord:

• Bone (Reconstituting). The frame and the face. Bone gives the dead something to be rebuilt around, and the mask gives them a face to come forward through. Ancestor work with both is very strong.
• Mirror (Casting). In Noh, the actor puts on the mask in the kagami-no-ma, the mirror room, and looks at himself masked before going on stage. The mirror issues the new face back to its wearer, which seats the supplanting.
• Blood (Giving Life). For animating a mask that is meant to house a being rather than just front a role.
• Cloth. In Egúngún the whole body is covered, and the cloth matters as much as the face. When the supplanting needs to be complete rather than partial, cover more than the face.

Discord:

• Hag Stone (Stripping Away). Directly opposed. The hag stone strips glamour and lets you see what is actually there, so a mask viewed through a hag stone is a mask that isn't working.
• Lemon (Cutting). Severs the wearer from the face. Bad during the working, useful afterwards (see Applications).
• Rosemary (Remembrance). Probably. Rosemary keeps you remembering who you are, which works against the forgetting a mask needs. Untested, but it follows.

Correspondences:

Astrology: No good classical attribution. Modern sources give Neptune for glamour and disguise, which I'd discard as too broad and too recent. The Moon has a better case: it shows a face, changes its face, and was associated with masked and disguised rites in several traditions. Tentative.

Elements:

• Western: Fire, as a result of the transformation. Or possibly Earth for the same reason. Water or Air for change? Your guess is as good as mine 🙂
• Eastern (WuXing): Fire 火. The Neijing says the Heart's splendor shows in the face, and the Heart houses the shén, the spirit. Changing the face changes what spirit is showing. That's my reading, anyway.
• The Nine:
  • Primary: Flesh for embodiment and incarnation. The mask gives a being a body to come forward in.
  • Secondary: Sky for presence and appearance. The application themes put glamour and showing a different appearance under Sky, and a mask is a presence that is seen.
  • Tertiary: Water for reflecting a different form. The yielding side of the wearer, giving way to what arrives.

Powers:

• Replaces the wearer's identity with the identity the face belongs to
• Brings a being forward through the wearer: an ancestor, a deity, a spirit, or a role
• Gives a face to a place, standing in as a guardian where no one stands
• Frees the wearer from their own identity, with all the license and risk that implies
• Breaks targeting, since anything aimed at your face now hits another
• Keeps a face available after death (death masks, imagines)

Tradition and folklore:

• Egúngún, the Roman imagines, Balinese trance masks, Dionysus as mask, and Northwest Coast transformation masks. Independent traditions, consistent action.
• Apotropaic faces. The Greek gorgoneion on shields and buildings, Japanese onigawara demon-faced roof tiles, and gable masks in many places. Here the mask supplants an empty place. It puts a guardian face where none would otherwise be.
• Carnival, mumming, and guising. The license that comes with the mask is the wearer's self being displaced. Venetian authorities passed repeated laws restricting when and where masks could be worn, which tells you how seriously they took that license.
• Tibetan cham. Masked monastic dances where the dancers become the deities.
• Death masks. From Roman wax to early modern European royal effigies.

Weaker than everyone thinks. The idea that Halloween costumes descend directly from people disguising themselves from spirits at Samhain. Guising is real and attested, but the "fooling the dead" explanation is mostly modern and doesn't trace to a collector I can find. It fits the Virtue, which is exactly why I'm suspicious of it.

On the Domain. I'm proposing Spirit Embodiment. The ancestor material (Egúngún, imagines, Etruscan masks) is the densest part of the record, so "The Ancestors" was the other candidate. But Bali, Tibet, Greece, and the Northwest Coast are about deities and spirits as much as the dead, and Spirit Embodiment covers all of it without restating the Virtue.

Applications:

• Ancestor embodiment. The core traditional use. A mask of an ancestor, ideally from a likeness, worn by someone who resembles them in build or bearing. Let them walk, eat, be addressed. Rome did this for the politically prominent dead, and there's no reason it can't be done for any family's.
• Deity and spirit embodiment. Ritual drama in which the being is not played but let in. Prepare the mask as a dwelling for the being (consecration, offering, storage when not in use), make a clear agreement about when it arrives and when it leaves, and have someone present who isn't masked.
• Role and theatre work. Lower stakes and very effective. If you need to be someone you are not (more confident, more severe, more playful) for a specific event, a mask worn in preparation helps the role arrive.
• Guardian faces. Hang a mask over a door, a gate, a gable, or a bed. It supplants the empty place with a watcher. Gorgoneia and onigawara are the models. Choose a face that would actually frighten what you want kept out.
• License and release. Carnival, guising, masked dances. For a planned stretch of time when you set your own identity aside to do what your identity wouldn't let you. Set the edges clearly.
• Breaking targeting. Human's Domain is Targeting: personal concerns work because they point at a specific person. A mask supplants the face that a working is aimed at. For a period when you think you are being targeted, wear a mask during ritual, or keep one on a likeness of yourself, so what is aimed at you lands on someone who isn't there.
• Impersonation. Wearing someone else's face, as a mask or a likeness, to act as them in a working: to speak in their name, to be received as them, or to draw what was meant for them. Rough, and the ethics are on you.
• Ending the role. Lemon (Cutting) to sever the face from the wearer afterwards, then state your name. The removal half of a masking deserves as much care as the putting-on.
• ✦ Becoming. Wear the face of who you're working to become, regularly and briefly, so that it supplants the old self a little at a time. A deliberate version of what the Noh actor does in the mirror room. Untested as a long practice (but holds up in the short term at least).
• ✦ Online faces. Avatars, profile images, and usernames are masks in the full sense: a face put in place of yours that others read identity from. Whether they carry the Virtue is an open question, and I suspect the answer depends on how deliberately they're made. Worth testing for anyone working with online personas.

What I'd most like challenged:

• Whether I've been fair to concealment. Someone will argue it's the real Virtue and replacing or supplanting is downstream. I don't think so, but it's the strongest rival.
• Whether the WuXing Fire assignment holds up, or whether anyone knows of a traditional Western assignment.
• Anyone with collected, sourced material on masks in South America, Melanesia, or West African traditions beyond Egúngún. That's where I'm thinnest.

Sources:

• Drewal, Henry John, and John Pemberton III, with Rowland Abiodun. Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (1989)
• Drewal, Henry John. "Egúngún: Mysteries Concealed in Magical Cloth," RISD Museum
• Babayemi, S.O. Egungun among the Oyo Yoruba
• Polybius, Histories 6.53, and Pliny the Elder, Natural History 35.6, on the imagines
• Belo, Jane. Trance in Bali (1960)
• Boas, Franz. The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians (1897)
• Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise. Le dieu-masque (1991)
• Aulus Gellius, Attic Nights 5.7, on persona
• Diener, Fraser, Beaman, and Kelem. "Effects of deindividuation variables on stealing among Halloween trick-or-treaters," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1976)
• Huangdi Neijing on the Heart and the face