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MAGIC

[Click to view picture.] THE first mask and the last--the mask of the aborigine and the mask of the debutante--is face paint. But somewhere very close to the beginning of all this mummery of false faces is the mask of the animal. Man starts as the hunter. His first business is to get close to the game, or to bring the game close to him. In the forest this is easy. Out upon the plains or in the pitiless publicity of the ice floe he must have a decoy and a disguise. If he is an Eskimo in quest of a seal, he flops across the ice in his fur garments and pointed hood, imitating the clumsy movements of his prey. If he is an Indian of the plains, he throws a buffalo skin over his back, crawls on his knees, and bleats like a bull-calf. Imitation and disguise have begun. It is short step to masking. Back in camp, celebrating his exploit, he acts out the story of the hunt. With immense detail and astonishing fidelity he pictures himself as both hunter and hunted. Soon he is wearing the skin of the animal he has killed. Soon his own head is thrust inside the head of his quarry. Nature has supplied him with a ready-made mask. Before he carves out of wood such a mask as this antelope from the Ivory Coast of Africa--a thing of superb grace in its curves of yellow, black, and brown--a new idea must enter his head. It is the idea of Totem.

[Click to view picture.] SOME peoples are too primitive to make masks. None are too wise to believe in magic. The abysmal bushmen of Australia do not carve themselves false faces; they do not even use animals' heads. Their speech is so debased that they cannot understand one another without the use of gesture; therefore they cannot talk in the dark. But the bushman sees spirits in all things, and works magic upon these spirits for his own ends. He acts long symbolic dramas to let the spirits know his wants. If he fears a dearth of kangaroos or grasshoppers or whatever else may furnish forth his table, he acts a little play in which these things are shown coming to be killed. The kangaroos will naturally do likewise. Man has cast the spell of sympathetic magic upon them. In much this fashion the Mandan Indians "danced buffalo" when Grant was the White Father in Washington. Covered with buffalo hides, and with their heads where the skulls of the bison once were, they pranced and chanted in a circle, and shot and skinned one another before they ventured forth upon a hunt. When the fishing season begins in New Guinea the Papuans dance in masks weirdly emblematic of the saw fish. This fish-mouthed mask from New Britain doubtless served a similar purpose in increasing marine life and making it tractable to the hook.

[Click to view picture.] PRIMITIVE man has other uses for animals than to eat them. They make a fairly safe resting place for his immortal but often troublesome soul. A man's body is a fragile thing. The malignity of some other being may spill his spirit out. What is simpler and wiser than to adopt the indomitable lion, the gigantic elephant, the wily serpent, or the terrible gorilla as a sort of spiritual safe deposit box? That is Totem. So long as the animal lives, the man is safe. If he puts a taboo on his totem-animal, and forbids himself and his totem-brothers to kill or eat it, his life and his happiness may be long. And if he dances and makes plays to increase the numbers of his totem, his prosperity will be truly extraordinary. Thus totem is the basic religious idea of the hunting man. It is his way of making the spiritual life work. The Greeks had totems before they knew Dionysus, and their girls danced in the masks of bears before Thespis smeared his face with purslane and "invented" the mask. Hebrews and Britons once traced their descent from totem-animals. All America was the land of totemism before the Spaniards came. This gnarled gorilla mask from the Ivory Coast once hid and nourished the spirit of some forest clan when a medicine man danced in it.

[Click to view picture.] OUT of the animal comes morality. Sin--murder and incest--they spring from the totem. Sons and daughters of the same ancestral bear may not marry, neither may they slay their brothers. And out of the animal arise the secret society and the fraternal organization. Cutting across the totem-clans are brotherhoods united not by blood but by initiation and pledge, and named for some patron animal. The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks stems off from the Human Leopard Society of Sierra Leone, and the goat of the lodge may claim relationship with the masked wolves who bring back the Indian initiate from the land of make-believe death into which the blank cartridge of the chief of an Alaskan Wolf Society has sent him. Thus animals bind men together and keep them apart--even before the coming of the gods. Sometimes, indeed, the animals are the gods themselves. This ant-bear from the Congo is no ordinary totem. In its left ear is the sun, and in its right the moon. When the Bushongo dance with such masks upon their heads they are not so far removed from their ancestors who came up out of Egypt, land of Horus with the hawk's head, and of Ibis-crested Thoth. Totems grow up into gods.

[Click to view picture.] THE totem-animal can draw social lines quite as nicely as moral ones. If it is wicked to kill your clan-brother, it may be almost as reprehensible to eat with a man whose animal ancestor is less ancient and powerful than yours. The pride of the leopard men speaks in their mask. The totem defines the clan, and establishes blood relationship. And blood relationship is the beginning of family pride. The warrior paints his totem-animal on his shield, or he may even wear his mask into battle. The Homeric Greeks bore devices on their bucklers, and medival knights elevated their totems to the crests of their helmets. Social exclusiveness is never the fetish in the democracy of primitive man that it is in civilized communities. Yet out of the lines drawn by the totem comes the snobbism of the coat of arms. The crested lion on the notepaper of the marquis, and this mask from New Guinea are sisters under the skin.

[Click to view picture.] ANIMAL worship ends in play. Initiation breeds drama. The African Negro who makes a god out of an antelope ends by dancing in his mask just for the pleasure of dancing. The Indian who carves forty-foot totem-poles, and acts out epic legends of his tribal animals in order to populate land and water is soon the proprietor of a sort of mechanical wax works. The native Americans that fringe the Pacific coast from Vancouver Island to Alaska make wooden and copper masks with a beauty that sometimes suggests the masks of Japan; but their specialty is a type of mechanical headdress operated by strings and hinges. The mask and the marionette meet in such a contrivance as this killer whale of the Kwakiutl Indians of British Columbia. The head of the dancer is hidden somewhere in this four-and-a-half-foot length of hollowed wood, while his hands are busy with strings which move the fins, tail, and mouth of the creature. Endlessly occupied with such marvels of mechanism, the Indian devotee loses the thread of the ancient totemic legend, and finds himself playing with an amusing dramatic toy.

[Click to view picture.] IF there is time enough and if the mind of the worshipper is sufficiently flexible, an animal can become totem and god, ancestor and demon, and his mask can end by holding a place, twenty centuries later, in religious processions and pantomimic dances designed to attract, amuse, and edify the people. In ancient Tibet, before the faith of the Hindu Buddha had penetrated to the north and turned Chinese, the land was plentifully supplied with animal gods who were little better than demons. The raven, messenger of the supreme spirit, stole holy offerings. The tiger, feared and worshipped all over Asia, somewhat mitigated his offenses by assisting at the New Year expulsion of demons, doubtless on homeopathic principles. This Rakshasi, one of a family of female giants, began as a man-eating demon of India. Through the infatuation of a sacred monkey the Tibetans are able to claim descent from this demon, and thus, presumably, to keep her demonism in check. Her mask now plays a part in a holy admonitory drama.

[Click to view picture.] THE luxuriant forests of the tropics, thronging with man-eating animals, poisonous plants, venomous snakes, and unwholesome insects, are naturally the haunts of multitudes of demons. There are jungles in Africa through which it is considerably more than a man's life is worth to pass without protection against devils. Now masks are peculiarly efficacious. To change your face is even more baffling and potent than to change your name. Among a myriad of evil spirits, however, it becomes difficult for the layman to know the personal qualities and prejudices of the particular devil in hand. Certain carvings and colors on the mask, certain words and chants, above all certain dances, are effective against unusually obstreperous spirits. To know these things calls for specialization. The medicine man, or shaman, arises, skilled by much learning and long practice. Even a particular kind of shaman develops to cater to the demon-trade. Devils are notoriously jealous. Rather than tolerate competition, a well-established demon will decamp. An astute Negro appoints himself a pseudo-devil. Masked in some such face as this from the Congo, with magical vermilion squares upon its white temples, dressed in a suit of nicely fitting net, and followed by a boy with a bag to collect gifts of food and money, the fellow goes fearlessly about the country banishing the evil ones.

[Click to view picture.] IN Melanesia demons grow so bold that they leave the forests, and take up their abode in the native houses. When they make their presence felt by famine, earthquake, epidemic, or other disaster, it becomes necessary for the whole town to rise and drive them out. Communal activity must replace individual initiative in the business of vanquishing devils. In Australia, where the bushmen are backward in this as in most matters, painting the face with stripes of red and yellow, and daubing the body white are considered protection enough for a battle with the demons. In Celebes, however, as many natives wear masks as can do so, and the rest paint their faces even blacker than nature has done. Then, having removed their belongings a little distance from the village and dwelt there for some days, they dash into their old houses armed with swords, spears, and clubs, and belabor the demons until they are glad to cry quits and flee. The Papuans of New Guinea are even more systematic. They make an annual event of devil-chasing, a sort of spring-cleaning of the village. They dance for the spirits--perhaps in such masks as this striking one of carved and hollowed wood--feast them upon the souls of pigs, yams, and fowl laid out on tables by the roadside, and then drum them out of town by beating on the house posts.

[Click to view picture.] DEMONS are by no means an exclusive feature of the tropics. North America and Europe have known them, and they trouble the Arctic Circle. The Eskimo of Point Barrow have particular difficulty with a mischievous spirit called Tuna, and those of Baffin Land are sorely troubled by Sedna, mistress of the underworld. Since it is only the western branch of the Eskimo that has acquired the use of masks from the Pacific Coast Indians, the inhabitants of Baffin Land are at a disadvantage when the crash of ice floes and the moan of long winds carry the voices of spirits out of the sea. Demons are not the only supernatural beings against whom it is wise to guard. The Aleuts of westernmost Alaska fear even their gods enough to mask the eyes of men who dance before them with false faces whose eyeholes show them only the ground, and to leave such masks at burial places for the use of their dead in the other world. Farther south, among the Indians of Vancouver Island, we find this huge wooden face with its unblinking tinny eyes, perhaps the mask of some village against the evil spirits that sweep out of the Pacific on the western winds.

[Click to view picture.] DEMONS of a peculiar sort used to trouble the Iroquois. Doubtless they still annoy the more straight-laced of the tribe. These were the Ga-go-sa or False Faces. They were spirits that had no arms, no legs, no bodies. They existed simply as terrible heads which might be seen jumping from tree to tree in lonely places. They plagued mankind with all manner of ailments. To rid themselves of the Ga-go-sa the Iroquois organized a secret society called the False Face Company. During the first part of the last century it was headed by a woman, and she was the only one who knew the names of those in the society. Once a year these Indians, dressed in tattered skins, shaking rattles of turtle shell, and wearing hideous red masks with crescent noses, twisted grins, or horribly protruding mouths, career through the villages evacuating the demons as the last act in a kind of feast of sin which recalls the Saturnalia, the Hilaria, and other masked revels of the Roman world. Today in the Tyrolean Alps peasants wearing fur garments and twisted masks, some of which are astonishingly like those of the False Faces, invade houses and scatter ashes upon the inmates, insuring fecundity to the women, expelling demons, and curing various ills. This mask of one of the False Face Company of the Seneca is more jovial than most.

[Click to view picture.] IN Burmah the treatment indicated for cholera is to expel the demons by scaring them out of the houses with noise, and then beating them with sticks when they reach the roofs. This may prove efficacious, but it is hardly so attractive as the more scientific method of the mask. At Fuchow in 1858 masks of white and black devils and of animals were used extensively in curbing the cholera, and even tiny children in China can frighten off the demon of measles by wearing the proper paper masks at sunset. But Ceylon is the land in which the cure of disease by the laying on of masks has been brought to perfection. There are nineteen masks of nineteen devils of the nineteen diseases in the official pharmacopceia. When a medicine man treats a patient he usually erects an altar in the sick room and decks it with flowers and foods. Then he dances in the mask and the disguise appropriate to the demon causing the disease. Repeated three times, at sunset, midnight, and dawn, this lures the evil spirit out of the sick man, and into the devil-dancer. By proceeding to the edge of the village, and feigning death for a short time, the medicine man is able to rid himself, as well as the invalid and the town, of the baleful demon. Here we have the wooden mask of Naja, demon of leprosy. The faces of all nineteen devils are sometimes displayed on a single huge mask for use in cases of doubtful diagnosis.

[Click to view picture.] GODS, rather than demons, are employed in the therapy of the southwestern Indians. These tribes are little troubled with evil spirits, and rejoice in an extensive pantheon of ancestor-gods who can be called upon to cure wealthy chieftains and bring rain by taking part in elaborate ceremonials of dance, legend, and symbol. In one of the cures administered by the Navaho medicine men the younger war god, Tobadzistsini, is an assistant. He is materialized in this mask of soft red leather ornamented with white scalp knots. Because the Navaho are roving herdsmen, they use a mask that is easily folded and packed instead of the stiff and derby-like dome that the Zuñi and Hopi employ when calling out their own deities or borrowing Tobadzistsini. In the Navaho mythology, the first three worlds were most unsatisfactory. They moved a great deal and made the people sick. Later versions of the cosmos cannot have been much better, for, while the first was destroyed by a whirlwind, the second by hailstones, and the third by smallpox, it is recorded that the fourth was destroyed by coughing, and the fifth had to rid itself of monsters through the agency of Tobadzistsini and his elder brother.

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