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Page 4
So what is the nature of this transformation?
As mentioned earlier, tribal societies often hold that a mask is inhabited by a spirit. How else are we to understand this transformation when a given mask elicits extremely similar behaviors from different wearers? Shared cultural ideas about specific characters in the culture's mythology or it's public life may explain this phenomena to some extent, but this explanation starts to look rather thin once we start crossing cultural boundaries. It hardly seems mysterious when an individual, even one from another country, dons a rubber George Bush mask and begins aping the well known mannerisms of the US President. It isn't even that surprising if an American tries on a Hanuman mask and begins acting monkey-like, after all, Hanuman looks like a monkey. But what are we to make of it when a westerner with no conscious knowledge of Balinese mythology puts on a Barong mask, and becomes a noble protector? To the western eye, the wild-eyed, toothy, tongue lolling Barong Ket could as easily be seen as an evil demon.
Perhaps without there actually being a specific "entity" that exists within the mask, there is nevertheless some sort of "energy" in the mask. This may be an actual physical energy, as the Hindus think of Prana, or martial artists of Ki, or may be simply a psychic - in the psychological meaning of the word - energy connected to some archetypal imagery. Perhaps, as Benda suggests, it is the conjunction of the mask's inherent energy, and the energy of the wearer (conscious or unconscious) that produces a synergy leading to the behavior/personality of the mask/wearer conjucted being.
It seems clear that masking is a technology of transformation that works, regardless of the theory or belief system one applies to explain it.
Whether you believe in internal combustion, squirrels in cages, or spirit horses, when you turn the key, the car still goes, and your belief about the source of its motive power is irrelevant to the car's performance.
While I wouldn't claim that this is wrong, I would also suggest that it is somewhat less than a complete statement of the case. Extending the car analogy a bit, while the car will certainly go for the uneducated driver (for whom there may as well be a squirrel cage under the hood), the driver who understands how the engine operates will get much more performance out of the machine. Most people learn to drive a standard by rote - upshift at 10-15mph, and again at 25... and gradually learn to shift by the engine's feel and sound. Some may go a step further, and take the RPM into account, again at first by a rote formula, later by understanding why it might be important to correlate both mph and rpm when choosing how and when to shift. With that sort of knowledge and understanding, a topnotch driver may be able to pull off maneuvers that the novice squirrelcage driver couldn't even consider.
Thus, believing in a squirrelcage may actually prevent the driver from a deeper understanding of the vehicle, and hence, from the possibility of increasing skill, knowledge, and ability.
While the driving analogy may not work perfectly, the basic point is valid: the more we understand about the workings of any process, the more we can get out of it. A novice driver, attempting a sophisticated maneuver, may stall the vehicle, or possibly even crash. The novice masker doesn't risk a spectacular firey death (well, not usually, anyway), but there are magickal stalls and crashes, too. And a deeper understanding of the processes involved is, I think, necessary to a deepening of the experience.
We may use symbols to make mental, emotional, or psycho-spiritual connections, but it is we, not the symbol, that do the connecting. The same symbol may have totally different associations for people from different cultures (one of the most famous examples of this is funeral dress and decorations - black in the west, white in the east. Wear a black suit to a Japanese funeral, and you will be commiting a serious social faux pas).
It occurs to me here that while we're trumpeting the wonderfulness of masks and mask work, it might be a good idea to at least touch on some of the possible pitfalls and disadvantages. It's all too easy, as Campbell has pointed out, to forget that the mask - (whether an actual mask, such as we're discussing here, or one of his "Masks of God", the mental conceptions we hang on the mysterious to make it more accessable) - is intended to be transparent to something else, something much larger and much less limited and definite. A mask can be a potent and powerful doorway, but it's all too easy to become so enamored of the door that you forget to step through it, forget that it's supposed to lead beyond itself.
In this connection, too, one of the double-edged elements of the mask is it's rigidity, both literal and metaphorical. Because the mask does not move or change expression (physically, anyway, in most cases), it remains in some sense one-dimensional. It can express, symbolize, or connect to only one aspect - of divinity, or of the self. It's frozen lineaments "freeze" our attention in one specific direction. This is an advantage when that one aspect has been neglected, needs expression, requires our attention. It can be a disadvantage when we become too attached to a particular mask, and begin to be decieved into thinking that this one doorway leads everywhere.
The transformations which may happen in connection with mask work can be new and exciting windows from which to gain new perspectives on the world, but any single window is neccessarily limited in its view. To really understand the outside world, you have to leave the house entirely.
Earlier, in Part 2, I posed the question of "How do we manage such flexibility of self, without losing entirely our sense of what the self is?"
The true answer is, we don't.
Spiritual teachers from Buddha to Christ, Rumi to Ghibran, Lao Tze to Crowley, have insisted on this, and most of us do not listen, or listen and do not hear, or or hear and do not take them seriously. The "self" is an illusion, a temporary form, a suit of clothes that Spirit finds it convenient to wear. It is a convenience, a tool, a vehicle. Our attachment to a primary Self is as foolish and pointless as my attachment to my old '79 Ford Econoline van. That van was a real trooper, it took me across this country and back several times, but the value, the true meaning in those days of travelling was not vested in the van, but in the experience of the trip - the van was nothing but the medium of travel.
Our primary Self is yet another mask, a window on Reality which we must ultimately forsake, release, and transcend, if we are to understand, on any more profound level, that which exists outside the little windows of perception we peer through. Work with masks can help us loosen our attachment to that particular window. But the true task of the Shapeshifter is not merely to acquire the ability to assume other shapes, but to relinquish attachment to shape altogether.
-- Duncan Eagleson
October 2004
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