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[Click to view picture.] IT happens sometimes that even a mask will not succeed in making a sick man well. It need not, however, desert him at the door of death. With certain peoples it follows him into the grave. In the ruins of Mycen there were gold masks upon the dead. Funeral processions in Rome included men wearing portrait masks of the family's illustrious ancestors, while a wax mask of the dead man was placed upon his statue in the home. In Cambodia and Siam golden masks covered the faces of dead kings, and masks of gold, silver, bronze, and terra cotta have been found in burial spots from Mesopotamia and Phoenicia, through the Crimea and the Danube valley to Gaul and even Britain. The Alaskans buried masks with their dead to protect them from seeing the gods, and false faces figure in Japanese funeral ceremonies. The most notable use of the mortuary mask was upon the mummies of Egypt, but in Peru, where mummification was also practiced, each huddled bundle of bones was crowned with a mask placed upon a false head or cushion fastened to the top of the mummy. In Peru masks were worn in many religious ceremonials, and it is far more than probable that the animal-headed deities of Egypt were represented by such masked priests as appear on Babylonian carvings. This mummy mask from Egypt resembles in general shape and materials the papier-mâché masks of the Chinese religious drama.

[Click to view picture.] MOURNING for the dead of New Ireland is conveniently concentrated in the month of June. At this season the natives of the most easterly island of the Bismarck Archipelago gather together under the guidance of a secret society, to wear display carved masks representing the departed. These masks are, in fact, the incarnate dead, and, as each relative is recognized, the crowd shouts his name, and makes wild lamentation. There are three kinds masks at the mourning festival. This crested mask, carved with almost the distinction of an African false face, is the only variety worn by the dancers of the secret society. In origin, at any rate, it is not spiritualistic. The crest, which suggests both the Greek helmet and the feather helmet of Hawaii, represents the hair of the dancer as it used to be arranged for the mourning ceremony. Bleached with lime and dyed yellow, it stood up in a great ridge above the shaven sides of the head, upon which stones and various bright objects were plastered for decoration. Men who felt they could not attain the ideal of manly beauty, or who disliked the labor of preparing such a coiffure, made a mask instead. In this they expressed with utter artistic freedom the classic perfection of mourning. A lugubrious parallel to the powdered wig of Georgian days!

[Click to view picture.] PRIMITIVE man is wise enough not to depend on spirit photographs for evidence of the return of the dead. He fashions a solid and absolutely recognizable spirit in the shape of a wooden mask--the spirit literally materialized. In the yearly mourning ceremonies of New Ireland, while members of the secret society execute pantomimic dances in mourning masks, the crowd laments over such well-remembered faces as this two-foot creature of carved and painted wood. Here in the twistings of red, white, and blue frets, in the gleaming eye of snail shell with its bright green pupil, in the beard of white, brown, and orange cotton, and above all in the emblematic bird perched upon the top--personal totem of the departed--the mourners recognize the beloved ectoplasm. There can be no scoffers. Materialists cannot protest against the flimsy character of the evidence. The spiritualistic manifestation is perfect. At the end of the séance it is retired with the rest of its fellows to the club house of the society, and there rests quietly in the spirit world until the next May comes round.

[Click to view picture.] A MASK need not be worn to be a mask. And it need not take the ordinary shape of the human head in order to harbor a departed spirit. Here, for example, in this hollow column of red and blue and white and black carvings is a kind of animated totem pole which is not only inhabited by a spirit but can be instantly recognized by a native of New Ireland as "poor dear Uncle John." Towering structures of this sort, sometimes equipped with carved wings or ears quite as tall, are supported and, if they are not too heavy, worn upon the head by relatives of the dead during the annual mourning ceremonies. They are seldom carried through the village, but are stationed near the enclosure that protects from the contaminating eyes of the women the house in which the masks are made and kept from year to year. The identification of these masks--which the mourners recognize instantly and loudly hail--is accomplished largely through the symbolic totem animals carved upon them. Each native has a bird of one sort or another for its "manu" or private guardian spirit. All other animals in the carvings are evil. Triumphant victories of the birds over snakes and lizards--the most malignant of spirits--are depicted on these spiritualistic masks.

[Click to view picture.] SPIRITUALISM dominates the masking of most primitive peoples. It cannot be otherwise with men who see a ghost in every tree, and look for good deeds and bad from the departed. The dead, intangible and powerful, must be worshipped and kept contented. The Egyptians, far beyond such mere animism, sent part of this world into the next to serve the departed. Food, clothing, dogs, models of boats or graneries belonging to the dead are found in the tombs. African and Aztec savages have not balked at human sacrifice to send servants along, as well. More naive people like the Melanesians see no division between this world and the world of spirits. Therefore they are content if they can bring back the dead, and offer them service and homage in their villages. Masks serve in many ceremonials--initiations, war dances, magic for the increase of crops and animals--but at the heart of all of them is the spiritualistic notion that a spirit that was once a man has returned in a mask. The dead neighbor is only a lesser spirit; the demon, only a greater. This four-faced thing of bark cloth and mud from New Hebrides may be used in one ceremonial or another, but it is the mask of an incarnate spirit, whether some East Indian Janus or a chief terrible as a Hydra in battle.

[Click to view picture.] SPIRITUALISM overshadows demonology on the dark continent so far as the mask is concerned. The business of bringing back the dead is one of the major industries of West Africa--and not the least profitable. Private enterprise has replaced the official activities of the medicine man, and companies of young Negroes keep themselves busy impersonating the dead, and levying taxes on the living. The older and more respectable form of the ghost dance is connected with burial. Among the Ibos of Nigeria, between the first interment of a corpse and the second, when a wicker coffin is buried beside the dead, spirits appear twice a day supporting the figure and the mask of the departed. At first they find it necessary to brush much grave dust from his person, and to give the poor weak creature a shoulder to lean on. In the course of four or five days, however, he regains his strength, walks alone, calls on relatives, and finally retires well provided with presents. The spirits appear completely, covered with grave clothes even to the hands and the feet. They speak through a reed instrument which gives the voice a kind of comb-and-paper quality. The masks betray the fact that African spirits enjoy a white complexion and features not at all negroid. Not all of them are so beautifully ornamented, however, as this ghost-mask from Liberia.

[Click to view picture.] SPIRITUALISM flourishes very like a sport in West Africa. It takes the place of baseball among the young bucks. No funeral need be staged as a preliminary to raising the dead. Companies of youths "make ju-ju" on the slightest impulse, presenting the community with as many "maws," or returning spirits, as there are masks and disguises to be had. There is always some ectoplasm or other wandering through the villages of upper Nigeria, Dahomey, and Togoland receiving what are called gifts from the living relatives. The prevalence of ju-ju making in most of Africa, and the profits it produces need not argue that it is not a serious and sincerely moving thing to the young men. The mask is still potent in West Africa; Negroes have been known to bolt out of a Christmas celebration when the missionary came in masquerading as Santa Claus. If the jazz dancing and coon shouting of a colored musical show works our Negroes up to a pitch of excitement, it is not at all difficult to see how the business of making ju-ju would release their taut spirits in Africa, especially after a liberal taking of gin. Sometimes the mediums materialize the dead in the forms of the animals that were their totems. Thus this elephant mask with a human face in each ear roamed a Congo village, inhabited by a restless spirit.

[Click to view picture.] OUT of the Congo--slavery and Ku Klux and jazz, ivory and dollar-votes and the finest masks in the world. An Archipenko in the ashes of voodoo, an Epstein in ebony. The jungle artists have carved in their false faces a beauty they could not find in their own. It is never a natural beauty. The eyes and nose and mouth are not spaced in realistic terms. There is proportion, but it is not the proportion of life. The Negro mask-maker uses nature only as a scaffold. The thing he builds has emotional freedom. Yet the imagination of the witch-doctor does not carry him off into the bizarreries of the South Sea Islands, into elephantine snouts and eyes that are giant ears. He has always the solid sense of the true sculptor. In Africa we catch the artist just before he meets the seductions of realism, just before he discovers the arts of accurate reproduction and spends all his energies on technical display. He has the sense of form and its necessary relation to life; but he is still free to drive directly at the expression of his emotions. He is not trying to imitate man. He is trying to imitate God. He reproduces emotions instead of people. He is the creative artist, not the fecund animal. It is hard to believe that so grave and beautiful an image as this from the Slave Coast can be concerned with ju-ju and demonology. Yet the service of the dead in any form may be as real as this beauty.

[Click to view picture.] ALL masks have some curious and oppressive sense of the dead made living, the spirit given flesh, the god or demon brought into physical contact. It does not much matter whether the Negro carves a masterpiece of wooden sculpture or hides in a flapping cylinder of white cotton ten feet high. The mask is a symbol per se. The Negro feels this. He feels the immanence of something mystic in the very head itself. He is not apt to paint or carve surface symbols into it. The Melanesian, working with bark cloth and rattan, falls back on decoration for significance. Even when he carves in wood, a passion for symbols pursues him. He ornaments his spirit mask with all the devices which add meaning to painted cloth. The Negro may make a masking-suit of cotton, and give his grandfather's spirit the general appearance of a headless giraffe; but he prefers to carve a vision of his meaning into a solidly sculptured head. The Melanesian wanders off into eccentric detail. He is like a white man with a pencil filling a blotter with vague patterns rooted in unconscious ideas. Here, for instance, is a towering mask from New Britain which has proliferated from a face of leaves into a headdress seven feet wide that seems half bird and half umbrella. From the little carved figure at the top to the last painting on the wings it luxuriates in symbols that not even its maker can penetrate.

[Click to view picture.] THE skull of a dead man is naturally a most significant object to his survivors. Many tribes, from Ecuador to Borneo, preserve the heads of their enemies as trophies. In New Guinea and on the islands of Torres Strait, north of Australia, the skull of the dead is severed from the body, and preserved in the house, much like the coffin plate in New England. It is in this skull that the spirit of the dead man resides when it is not roaming up and down the world. The natives of the neighboring island of New Britain push this idea to its magical conclusion by making a mask of the front of the skull. The essence and the power of dead medicine men and warrior chiefs are preserved in this fashion, while the skulls of even women and children are often found as masks. The nose is built up with clay, and hair and color are added. A stick runs from ear to ear for the living man to grasp in his teeth as he dances twice a year by moonlight. The Aztecs had a similar practice, and this skull mask is one of those that the Spanish conquerors brought back from Mexico four centuries ago. Like the wooden masks of the Aztecs, it is inlaid with turquois mosaic, and also, in this case, with lignite in alternate bands. The eyes are pyrites. If the nose was built up it has fallen away. At the back are holes for thongs.

[Click to view picture.] IF a man may wear a mask, why not a god? Or, rather, if a mask can bring godhead to a man, will it not do something quite extraordinary for an idol? After all, primitive man makes little distinction between a powerful living priest and a powerful dead one--which is all a god amounts to at the beginning. If a mask is to be hung on an idol instead of on a dancing man, lightness gives way to durability as the desirable quality. Hence, beside the mosaic masks of the temples of old Mexico we must place such maskoids as this green stone carving from Guatemala. Similar masks of terra cotta, jasper, and jadeite have been found in Central America, curious shell masks in the monuments of the mound builders of the Mississippi valley, and true maskoids without eyeholes upon the trails of the Delawares farther east. When such a false face as this hung upon an idol, the god lived. Today in India certain Jain idols cannot see until small eyemasks, with precious stones for pupils, are placed upon them. When the Aztec king fell ill, masks were hung on the idols of the gods until he recovered or died. A public disaster required similar treatment. These masks were highly valued. When Columbus landed, such faces were among the gifts he received. Cortes, whose coming was taken to be the return of the old culture-hero and god, Quetzalcoatl, was welcomed with holy objects including masks of the gods.

[Click to view picture.] BECAUSE of the serpent's mouth in which the face appears, this mosaic from ancient Mexico may be a mask of the old Toltec god Quetzalcoatl. Like most gods, he had once been a living chief. Legend said he had "gone away" into the east, and out of the east came Cortes nicely timed to satisfy a prophecy of the Mexican priests. Now it was a custom of early man not only to deify his priestly chiefs after death, but to see that they were in a proper state for deification by murdering them before their vigor failed. The chief's murder was often described more pleasantly as a "going away." It is no great feat of the imagination to presume that the skulls of Mexican heroes on the way to godhead may have been preserved as magical masks much after the fashion popular in New Britain. Such a skull mask would be hung in front of his statue to animate it, just as the ashes of a dead Alaskan chief may be put into an abdominal hole in his ancestor-post to give it life and potency. Later, when such a mask had become broken, a mosaic substitute like this would naturally have been made to replace it. Annually the god-king Montezuma appointed a living substitute who was worshipped as the god of gods, Tezcatlipoca, and killed at the end of the year in place of the ruler. These holy substitutes doubtless provided materials for skull masks, since it is recorded that the priests danced in their skins.

[Click to view picture.] FROM the idols of old Mexico masking spread up and down the Pacific coast of ancient America reaching Alaska and Peru, and it journeyed eastward as far as the pile-dwellings of the Florida Indians. And from these same idols the mask was borrowed for dances and festivals that passed into purely theatrical performances. This wall-carving from Yucatan, cut at the height of the Mayan civilization in the sixth century, probably represents a masked priest, armed with his flint-edged knife, facing the captives whose hearts he is to tear out upon the sacrificial stone. But what is the little figure, curiously like a dancer, which he holds with his left hand? It reminds one that drama in blank verse flourished under the Incas, and that the first Spaniards in Mexico found bizarre theatrical performances going on in the public squares and upon the steps of temples. Sahagun, the Spanish priest whose curiosity preserved some record of the early ways, wrote of "the finery the lords used in their dances . . . masks worked in mosaics, and having false hair such as they now use, and some plumes of gold coming out of the masks." Brasseur de Bourbourg, reconstructing Aztec life from old records, writes of theatrical performances in which there were spoken comedy scenes, and actors were masked as beetles, toads, birds, and butterflies, and also as mythological figures.

[Click to view picture.] THE mask is as full of mysteries and terrors as fetishism itself. The greatest, the simplest, and the grimmest is the grip of fear in which the mask holds even the most enlightened of men. George W. Babbitt, master of phonograph and radio, looks with a certain disquietude upon a mask. What is happening behind the wall of grotesque features? Back of a mask man becomes inaccessible. His eyes and his mouth cease to betray him. The sensitive jelly of his face is no longer exposed to rude and galling estimate. He is suddenly free of self, hesitant, weak, or blustering. He loses his fears, his embarrassments, his responsibilities. What will this thing do? The white man wonders. The child--savage at heart--flies before it. And there, in the frightening of children, one of the legends of the Congo finds the origin of the mask, crediting its invention to a queen with a little daughter who followed her mother to the spring each day in spite of threats and punishments, until the desperate woman painted a horrid face on the bottom of her water gourd. All times, all races know the bogey, and most of them have masks for it. The Romans, the Delawares, the Eskimo, the Zuni, the Bushongo, and the Papuans all say: Spare the mask, and spoil the child. These wooden masks from southwest New Britain are fearsome enough to become the turning point in the life of any little boy or girl.

[Click to view picture.] WOMEN and criminals are classed together by primitive man as people who, like children, may be kept in order by a vigorous application of the mask. Towering false faces, screaming giants on stilts, leaf-clad creatures with a black cloth for a visor, help to keep Negro wives in order. Mumbo-Jumbo hears a whisper of domestic friction, and comes screeching out of the woods to inspect the women of the village. By some uncanny sense, Mumbo-Jumbo picks the termagant out of the line-up, and strips and beats her. Peace reigns. In the Congo justice masquerades Ku Klux fashion. Tradition tells of a king who grew old and feeble, and of a young marauder who defied punishment. The king took thought, gathered a company of husky henchmen, provided them all with identical masks to hide them from the vengeance of the marauder or his friends, and sent them out to do justice. Today justice is made by white men, and the secret society of the Babende which grew out of the king's maskers, devotes itself to dances and initiations. But somewhere in the Congo such a mask as this black thing of carven wood may be sitting in mystical judgment on criminals brought into its presence for sentence.

[Picture defaced.] WHEN primitive man wants to uplift the morals of his fellows he hides behind a mask instead of a certificate of incorporation. In the islands north of New Guinea the Duk-Duk finds it necessary to appear once a month and discipline his crinkly-haired flock. Sometimes there is one Duk-Duk; sometimes there are two. At certain places they come out of the dawn dancing upon canoes that have been lashed together; at others they rush out of the brush. Huge of stature, with faces five feet high, and body-dresses of leaves, these ungainly creatures supervise feasts and initiations when they are not engaged on the business of morals. For it is a business, there as elsewhere. A native who feels aggrieved by the actions of some tribesman presents shell-money--as well as his case--to the Duk-Duk. Policeman, judge, and executioner, the Duk-Duk visits the dwelling of the accused, demands justice, and, if the reply is not satisfactory, burns or breaks down the house. The cult of the Duk-Duk takes other forms, religious and medicinal, in these eastern islands; but graft mingles ever with the high moral tone of the proceedings, while in certain sections these offshoots of the sacred cassowary--Duk-Duk and his wife Tiburan--have become strolling players. Doubtless the masks of these comedians are ornamented with a more jocund face than this monstrosity from New Guinea.

[Click to view picture.] OF all masked gods the strangest and most engaging is that kindly, grotesque creation of the Delaware Indians which goes by the name of Misinghalikun--the Living Solid Face. When Egyptian priests appeared, as Apuleius pictured them, masked as Isis or Horus, they represented a deity that had his proper human form as well as his disguise as an animal. But the Living Solid Face is what it says it is--a mask, a living mask. When the Indians first saw Misinghalikun riding a buck, and herding the deer, it was simply a fur-clad figure with a wooden face, the right half red, the left black. Following a disaster, the Living Solid Face taught the Delawares to make a mask like his, and promised that when they wore it his spirit would go into it. Every year Misinghalikun appears at the ceremonies of the tribe, and on the third day sees them off upon a hunt; the twelfth night he dances in the Big House, where his face is carved upon twelve pillars. His mask, his black bearskin clothes, his turtle rattle, and his stick are kept by a family that burns tobacco before it now and then. The Living Solid Face is a bit of a moralist at the Big House meeting, and, when a parent finds his child weak, sick, or disobedient, Misinghalikun is ready to attend. But his main function is general beneficent guidance over the tribe and the hunt. There is no demon here.

[Click to view picture.] AN ingenious theory makes the war shield the ancestor of the mask. The warrior, holding his leathern or wooden buckler in front of his face, found it convenient to have eyeholes in it in order to see his enemy. Then he found it still more convenient to tie his shield onto his head with a thong and fight a hand-to-hand battle in blinders. The truth is more likely to be that primitive man, observing the fear a mask produced in his frends, began by painting a mask on his shield, and then went as far as he dared in disguising his own face with horror. Paint was the first war mask, and it is still the most popular. It weighs little. It doesn't restrict the vision. The result of a painstaking application of colored earths to the face is often fearsome indeed. Simply because war masks are dangerous to the wearer, their actual use in battle is rare compared with their employment in war dances and in religious and ceremonial rites. If a man is fully armored or mounted upon a horse and safe from attack by foot--a later development in conflict reserved to the mediaeval knights of Europe and Japan--the face mask and helmet are common. Crusaders wore strange, afrighting faces upon their visors. The Japanese hammered such demon-grins as this out of iron. They also made half-masks ornamented with an almost kaiserlich mustache of horsehair.

[Click to view picture.] PERHAPS it was the difficulty of doing business with an enemy at close quarters in a mask provided with only one pair of eyeholes that led the Africans to design a helmet with two faces. Or perhaps, like all aborigines, they counted most on the fear-inspiring nature of the carven mask, and thought it wise to have a face to work in retreat as well as one for the charge. Since a fearsome magic, rather than physical protection, is the virtue of the war mask, it is not unnatural that in New Britain masks are sometimes made from the skulls of departed chiefs in order that their spirits may lead the tribe into battle and dismay their enemies. The primitive inhabitants of the New World found an efficient way to use the power-giving mask of a totem-animal without permitting the enemy to take advantage of low visibility. In the armies of Montezuma the Spaniards observed a kind of helmet-mask overshadowing and protecting the face. The Aztec soldier looked out from the mouth of a puma, a mountain lion, or a wolf, wearing the hide much as Hercules--along with other Greeks no doubt--wore the famous lion's skin. In Alaska the Tlinkit Indians still preserve a kind of wooden helmet which seems to be a relic of a war mask grown too embarrassing to the vision, and pushed up on top of the head. This specimen was doubtless painted as well as carved.

[Click to view picture.] DANCING is speech to primitive man. He prays, teaches, threatens, and brags with his body. Before the battle he dances a war dance to heat the blood and to work a piece of disastrous magic on the enemy. Even when he is face to face with the foe, a little dancing is often in order. Roland's trouvère stepped out before the Frankish army to slang the troops of Islam, and to brag of the valor of his lord; but in Java they say it with dancing. Before a conflict two gorgeously robed figures, often crowned with masks, were wont to step out between the rival armies and execute a song and dance reflecting the glories of their arms. The mask of brag is naturally a most important feature of the potlatch of British Columbian Indians, a feast at which a chief demonstrates his wealth by giving away his riches. Here is one mask of four used at such a celebration to represent rival chiefs, who may have looked on during the uncomplimentary proceedings. Half of the face of one of these red, white, and black masks was supposed to have been burned away by the extraordinary heat when the boasting chief was burning up some of his valuable property. It is easy to imagine that, though a ceremony of this kind did not begin as a war dance, it might readily end in one.

[Click to view picture.] THE peace mask is an ingenious invention of the natives of New Ireland. It is diabolically martial. Upon the first of each May tribes that have been deadly enemies for the past twelve months meet and feast and dance together. Considerable preparations precede the love-feast. In the time available from tracking and murdering one another during the fifty-two weeks of active warfare between gatherings, the warriors make themselves masks of as varied and terrible a nature as their genius commands. On the morning of the feast, dressed in red shirts and skirts of ferns, the masked tribesmen paddle to the scene of the feast blowing on conch shells and pounding tom-toms. The day is pleasantly divided between dancing and eating. Enemies sit down to dinner side by side with no more than a passing thought for the possibilities of poison. Peace reigns till evening. Then, perhaps, someone laughs at a mask. And soon there is sufficient casus belli to last the next year through. This mask of painted bark cloth is from the neighboring island of New Guinea, but in what one might call its freedom of execution and its wealth of decorative illusion it is probably very like a peace mask of New Ireland.

[Click to view picture.] FOR twenty centuries and more, the mask rioted through Europe in licentious carnival. Far behind the Fetes of the Kalends, far behind the Saturnalia and the Hilaria, pagan peasants revelled in false faces at the seasonal festivals of planting and harvest. Rome and all her empire, from Spain to the forests of Germany, and from Asia Minor to Britain, drank and masked, loved and worshipped, in celebrations that have come down to us in the festivities of Christmas and Mardi Gras. Holy Church frowned and forbade, but had to end in giving the pagan rites a decent name. Christ's birthday sanctified one, the coming of Lent excused the other. Even the clergy masked. At the Feast of Fools, which replaced the Kalends, the lesser churchmen turned their vestments inside out and held in the very church itself the jocund rites of the Boy Bishop, the Lord of Misrule, the Pope of Unreason. In 1207 Innocent III forbade the clergy to wear masks. But holy pronouncement availed nothing. The mediaeval miracle plays, with their demons and dragons, had fed the flame of mimicry, and when the mask was driven out of the church at last in the fifteenth century, it luxuriated in the carnivals that have persisted to our own day in Rome and Venice, Paris and New Orleans. Under the shadow of the Alps and within ten miles of Oberammergau, peasants still wear such demon masks as this.

[Click to view picture.] IN the little valley of Lotschental, which lies half way between the Matterhorn and the Jungfrau, Swiss peasants have held revels which carry us back through the whole history of the mask. They bring us memories of Walpurgisnacht and of the Kalends, of child-scaring and neighbor-robbing under the protection of the false face, of feasts to banish demons and make nature fruitful. Three days before Lent the chimneys are cleaned, and the demons come forth. Doors are locked and only mature men venture out. Wearing special vestments, with their clothes turned inside out, and their faces covered with the masks of men and animals and demons, the unmarried men--some disguised as women--career through the villages. They strike and besmooch passers-by with bags of ashes. They bellow like bulls and burst into the houses, frightening girls even as they drive out counter-demons and cure such ills as barrenness. Tradition has it that these masks were used by robber bands, secret societies like the masked fraternities of Africa. This dragon's head with its moveable jaw comes from the neighboring Tyrol, and is typical enough of the eccentric masks of the Alpine people. It recalls the folk festivals of St. George which must have pained good Queen Victoria as late as 1876.

[Click to view picture.] AESCHYLUS preserved in one of his plays a relic of the earliest rituals of Greece, the masked figure who is half horse and half rooster. And in the carnivals of Pinzgau and Pongau in the Austrian Tyrol, a descendant of the curious and classic beast appears in this antlered deer with the beak of a bird. This mask represents a Perchten--one of the "echt" Perchten, in fact. Twelve of these demons--old as time--appear in the procession of fifty or sixty young men who pass through the villages on the first Sunday after Twelfth Night masked as dragons, devils, and all manner of monstrosities, human and bestial. They riot down the streets, striking with whips, cow tails, and other phallic switches, the women that line the way. Young wives, anxious for offspring, gaze upon the potent symbols of fecundity depicted on the masks. From such ancient festivals, demoniacal and comic, developed that masking madness which spread down Italy, and carried disguises through carnivals that lasted six months. In the eighteenth century, from October to Christmas, from Twelfth Night to Lent, and indeed on the slightest pretext thereafter, people went about grotesquely disguised. In a scrap of a half-mask or elaborately helmeted, they shopped and called and danced, invaded church and palace, did business and pressed law suits. Under the mask all was democracy and license.

[Click to view picture.] AMONG savage peoples the boy goes to school when he becomes a man. Until puberty he is classed and treated as a woman. Puberty brings initiation into manhood and into secret societies at the same time. Initiation is a time for learning secrets, secrets of men and gods. Some of these secrets are told by word of mouth, some are taught visually. By means of little dramas which show what not to do, the bushmen of Australia teach adolescents the rules of life provided by the gods. Everywhere there is some test of bravery in the ceremonies, some element of the terrifying. The boys of New Guinea, who go about during all the time of initiation dressed in a special costume and mask, are made to walk into the mouth of a whale-like monster, which is a hut disguised. Mothers and sister mourn until the monster spews them up. Or sometimes they are sent out into the woods to meet and talk with such a demon-god as this mask from the Fly River. At this time they learn that the gods they have seen were only masked men--though men animated for the moment with the spirit of the gods--and they swear to keep the secret from the women and the children. Connected with every initiation is a great mass of legend, told, sung, or acted out. From such legends comes the drama of civilized times.

[Click to view picture.] COMPARED with the other Indians of the southwest, the Apache is poorly supplied with gods and legends. Yet the medicine men and dancers who would take part in their ceremonials must know some fifty songs with the accompanying dances and pantomime, and must know them in the proper order. In contrast to the huge pantheon of the Pueblo Indians, the Apache have only four gods of their own. These are the Gans, and they make their appearance at very important ceremonies held in a time of war or pestilence, and at a frequent and very odd puberty rite--a kind of initiation for girls. The four Gans--each of a different color and dedicated to a different quarter of the earth--originally dwelt with man. They grew fearful, however, when they saw death about them, and decided to depart. Not wishing to leave men alone, the head god hid one of his little daughter's playthings, and while the child was searching for it, the Gans escaped. For a time these gods returned at stated intervals, and when they returned no more, the descendants of the girl and her Indian husband learned to make masks of the Gans, and to dance their dances from sunset to dawn. The mask itself is a shapeless bag with three holes, at first made of deerskin but now of cotton. Above the mask is a pattern of painted sticks made from the Spanish bayonet. A clown without a mask accompanies the Gans.

[Click to view picture.] THE tribal legends of primitive man lead backward into buried history as well as forward into the theatre. Some race-memory of a terrible man-eating chieftain is doubtless preserved in the Great Cannibal Spirit of the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia. Today he protects the Hamatsa secret society. The candidate for initiation disappears into the forest in summer to meet the Great Cannibal Spirit, and to learn the songs and rites of the order. At the time of the winter ceremonies the Great Cannibal Spirit dances the earthquake dance in the house of Hamatsa to bring back the initiate. The front of this house is painted to represent a raven, and it is through the open mouth of the bird that the candidate enters, much as the boys of New Guinea enter the whale-house of their society. The hint of death and rebirth in this initiation is elaborated in many Indian and Eskimo ceremonies having to do with those twin offshoots of the totem--the clan and the secret society. In one case, for example, the candidate is most realistically killed. The women wail over a decapitated dummy. There is a funeral, a banquet, a burial. It is not till a year later that the initiate reappears, brought back by a man masked as a totem animal.

[Click to view picture.] THE mind of the North Pacific Indian is astonishingly fertile in dramatic legend and in methods for embodying these stories in masked beings. The initiate of the Hamatsa secret society, becoming the slave of the Great Cannibal Spirit who protects the lodge, dances four times about the room disguised in this bird-head and costume, snapping his three-foot wooden jaws at everyone in the house. In this initiation the Kwakiutl Indians make use of many stage properties of wood, including lightning sticks and serpents made with moveable joints much like the Japanese toys.

[Click to view picture.] THE bleak northern winter, empty of activity, which leaves our farmers immured with the Sears, Roebuck catalog, turns the Indians and the Eskimo of the North Pacific coast towards the most fantastic play with wooden masks and the dramatization of legends. Summer is the time for the potlatch--great feast and giving away of property in a gesture of braggadocio. Early in winter, before the secret societies hold their initiations, the clans recount their legends in long dramatic sequences. From Vancouver Island to the Aleutians at the farthest tip of Alaska, Indians and Eskimo are carving, painting, and using masks such as this of Dsonoquoa, the Black Man. Although some of the masks in wood and copper bear a striking resemblance to the work of the Japanese, and are used by Eskimo upon islands stretching close to Asia, the fact that the eastern Eskimo are without false faces argues that masks were borrowed originally from the Indians to the south, who in turn probably got them by easy stages from Mexico and Peru. The religion of these northern tribes, unusually rich in totems, coupled with the leisure of long winters, has produced an elaboration in the use of masks not to be found elsewhere in the world.

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