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INITIATION

THE mask is not to be carelessly assumed or lightly put off. Primitive man knows that there must be initiation and a certain ceremony. If he puts on a false face without the proper incantation, there will be no power in it. It may be the same with books--or at any rate with a book about the mask.

There are certain things that one should know before looking at a mask. They have to do with the mind and the faith of primitive man. This book, with its pictures and its words, is intended to tell the man who looks at a mask drawn by Craig or a mask made by Dulac, Stern, or Benda various facts that he should know about their ancestors, the holy masks of simpler men. This foreword is intended to initiate him into those mysteries of medicine men and demons which he must know before he can put on knowledge of the mask.

Now the mask is older than the idol. It is as old as democracy--that state which existed before armies and kings, writing and science, and which has never existed since. It was in a democracy, not alone of men but of spirits, too, that you lived, primitive man who invented the mask. Your faith was animism. Everything about you, living or dead, was possessed by a spirit. So were you. You dreamed, and your soul went hunting while your body lay in a hut. Everything that moved--the bush, the river, the smoke--must have a spirit, too. The spirit went out of the body when it died, but it could go into some strange-shaped stone or a piece of carving. Such a thing had power. The spirit in a tree or the spirit in a stone--which is fetish--had no more potency, perhaps, than the spirit in a man; but it was more mobile and illusive, harder to get at. It could shift about and take another form. It could injure you even when you were most alert. You might guard against the attack of a living enemy. But his spirit, especially his dead spirit, was another matter. Some way must be found to control so powerful a thing.

This is the beginning of the kind of science we call magic--and the beginning of religion and priesthood, too.

As a primitive man you recognized no limitations to your own power. Spirits, you knew, could be fooled, frightened, or coerced. Men could be injured, demons appeased, animals could be made plentiful and easy to kill, or rain could be made to fall, and crops to grow, if only you knew the proper way of going about it, the charms and actions and substances that control spirits. Partly by accident, partly by inspiration, you learned these things. You learned, for instance, that if you imitated an event, the event was sure to happen. If you stalked about like a deer, munching leaves, deer would be plentiful. If you climbed up a tree, and poured water on the ground, rain would follow. This is sympathetic magic. If you made a little mud figure, named it for your enemy, and stuck thorns in it, your enemy would die. That is witchcraft, too. If you made certain offerings to the spirit in a tree, it would stop plaguing you. If you burned sweet-smelling herbs and warm flesh in front of the strange-shaped stone, its spirit would obey you.

Magic and the coercing of spirits are not such ancient things that we cannot find them in Europe or America today. The anger of a patriot when someone stamps on his flag or burns it, goes deeper than any Maeterlinckian passion for symbols. He sees magic. A racial memory recognizes an attack on the very body of the State. In Sicily in 1893 there came a great drought, and prayers for rain, blessed palm leaves hung in the orchards, and church dust thrown on the fields had no effect. So the congregation punished the saints for their neglect. They put St. Joseph out in the fields to see for himself, and they stripped, threatened, insulted, and ducked other holy statues.

Now in the beginning magic is the business of every man. But soon he recognizes that a peculiar kind of intelligence is needed for the job. One savage proves particularly successful as a magician. Specialization and division of labor begin. The shaman, the medicine man, is created. He is on his way to being king and priest.

It is a habit of modernity to imagine the medicine man merely a crafty fellow deceiving his tribesmen for the sake of power and gain. Since the medicine man is probably the inventor of the mask, it is worth explaining that he is the first dupe. He begins by believing in magic as fervently as any savage. If he did not, he would never assume the risks of his trade. For, if the Catholic will insult a saint, a disappointed savage will kill an unsuccessful wizard.

Success only increases the difficulties of the medicine man. The potent shaman becomes a sort of priestly king. His person, his life, his health, and his spiritual power are of the utmost importance to the tribe. He must live a regimented life. Magic can work upon him, and prohibitions, or taboos, are set up to protect him from harm. He can't put his foot to the ground, or look at the sea, or eat the most popular fruit, or live anywhere but chained in the crater of an extinct volcano. On top of such disabilities, the people may decide that, since the whole prosperity of the tribe depends on the perfect health and power of the priest-king, he must not die by illness or old age. At the first sign of feebleness, they kill him--or perhaps at the end of so many years. Respect for kingship breeds regicide. Small wonder that prospective kings in certain parts of West Africa must be elected by secret ballot, and caught and enthroned before they can take steps to escape the honor!

The murdered king has the satisfaction, however, of becoming a most powerful spirit. When man graduates from animism into a kind of primitive polytheism, he makes his gods out of his ancestors; and great chiefs, great medicine men, become great spirits--saints we would call them. Their life stories and their deaths are of tremendous importance in their worship. Particularly their deaths, for gods that die always seem the most popular. The death of Dionysus and his rebirth, and the similar death and rebirth of an endless string of other deities share with sympathetic magic--of which they are a part--the centre of the stage in primitive religion. Both are of vital importance to man when he begins to eat the seeds of grasses as well as the flesh of animals. Other factors in the religion of early man vary greatly, but rain-making magic and the story of the earth's resurrection in the resurrection of a god are constant.

The mask is one of the variable features that arise out of the spirit-traffic of primitive man. It is a sort of animated fetish through which he works magic and controls the spirits. Some races are too low to conceive of the idea of a false face into which a god will go when a man wears it. No races are too high not to have some trace of it in their history, and even in their present customs. Today the mask is used by savages in New Guinea, by barbarians in Africa, by half-civilized Indians in South America, Ecuador, New Mexico, and Alaska, and by what we call civilized men in Thrace, Siberia, and the Alps.

The origins of the mask are dark and dubious. It may have come out of the hunt; it may have been a magic for controlling game. It may be a product of totemism, man's personal relationship to an animal into which he has sent his soul for safekeeping. Some Negroes say it started as a device for frightening children; other Negroes, with unconscious irony, trace its invention to a Ku Klux Klan for escaping publicity while punishing marauders. A distinguished ethnologist got up a fanciful story about the evolution of the mask from the shield. War paint is a better ancestor.

If the beginning of the mask is as dubious as it is fascinating, its end is even more fascinating and not at all dubious. For the end of the mask is Drama. When a man puts on a mask he experiences a kind of release from his inhibited and bashful and circumscribed soul. He can say and do strange and terrible things, and he likes it. When Al Jolson puts on black-face he becomes a demoniac creature, privileged in his humor, insensate in his vitality; without the burnt cork something of his possession is gone. When a primitive man fits a mask on his head, he begins to imitate, and he finds this histrionism a kind of sport he cannot give up. Imitation develops into story telling. Story telling breeds legend. Legend is Theatre. And the greatest legend of all, the legend of death and resurrection, carries man on into the greatest drama, Greek tragedy.

The point at which masked ritual becomes commercial theatre, the point at which masking for the spirit's sake passes over into paid mummery for pleasure, is hard to trace. Sometimes it marks the decay of religious drama, as in Greece. Sometimes it occurs before religious drama, and then the higher art is never born. Medicine men find gifts thrust upon them, and they exact more. Masked secret societies become blackmailing plunderbunds. At some point in the development of civilization methods of terrorization, either psychic or physical, become impossible. Then the masker must begin to please, to amuse, to excite. The masked May Spirits of England and Germany still gather gifts while disguised in green leaves--there is magic in that. In Philadelphia and many eastern cities children go about on Thanksgiving Day in masks and crazy costumes begging pennies. All the mad masking of Europe, from the miracle plays to the carnivals, and from Venice to old London, lies this side of magic, and very close to the theatre.

It is the purpose of the following pages to try to bridge by just a little the gap that lies between the primitive man who puts a sort of idol on his face, and the Greek tragedian; between the Duk-Duk dancer who regulates morals and acquires riches in New Guinea, and some artist of the theatre who wishes to bring the mask back to the stage.

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