Masquerading: Head of the Matter
by Evelyn C. Rysdyk
Becoming more of our exquisite self is one of the most important quests in our human existence, however on that road there are times when we merge our path with “another” to make the journey more splendid. Our interweaving with other beings teaches us more about ourselves. It’s rather like looking into a multitude of mirrors to be able to glimpse the entirety of our Self. Loving a partner is certainly one such merger. We learn much about our strengths and our foibles in relationship!
Consciously taking on a persona for the purpose of reverence or even revelry may be another way to learn. There is something liberating and somewhat unnerving about assuming another face for a time. Often in donning a mask, we reveal something inside of us that was hidden not only from others, but from ourselves.
Many of us celebrate Halloween with a masquerade. This familiar custom has its origins hundreds, even thousands of years ago so let’s start at the beginning. The roots of our Autumnal spooky fun, date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain Night, or "Oiche Samhain," a celebration of the dead as well as harvest and renewal.
The Celts were a group of tribes that inhabited the British Isles, Ireland, Northern France and areas in Northern Germany, Belgium and Holland over 2,000 years ago. While they didn’t have a completely unified culture, these people honored their New Year on November 1st. This time of year when the darkness begins to overtake the land again in earnest was a time that the Celts associated with the dead. The Celts believed that on their New Year’s Eve, the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead became permeable. On the night of October 31, they believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth. While these ghosts could cause mischief, the Celts thought that the otherworldly visitors could be accessed by the Druid priests to make predictions about the future. In so dark a time of the year, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction to sustain them over the Winter months.
To honor the spirits and keep the light “alive” during this time, Druids built huge sacred bonfires, where the people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to their deities. During this celebration, the Celts wore costumes, typically consisting of animal heads and skins, and attempted to tell each other's fortunes. When the celebration was over, they re-lit their hearth fires, which they had extinguished earlier that evening, from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.
The ancient Celts saw the head as the seat of the soul. Like other Northern European tribes, they also believed that heads of the wise or those taken in battle, could become oracles. That is, the disembodied head could speak and foretell the future. Another example of this is the Norse myth of Mimir. When this primordial giant was killed, his head was delivered -- "Godfather style"-- to the lead god, Odin. He placed wise Mimir’s head in a high place and consulted it for its wisdom. Magical heads, such as these, are very much still with us, even if relegated to the metaphoric.
The Irish and Scottish who are descendants of the Celts, brought Halloween to the United States in the 1840's. Fleeing the Potato Famine, the Irish came to these shores in huge numbers while the Scots came for their own economic reasons. The Irish give us the tradition of the jack-o-lantern. Made from a hollowed turnip with a candle, this is supposed to be the lamp Satan uses to wander between the realms. However, before a lamp, the jack-o-lantern’s turnip was a head! In Europe, hollow turnips were used as the heads of scarecrows. This custom of creating effigy figures to protect the fields from birds grew out of a need. Originally, crows were frightened from the crops by children! Since the Black Death decimated more than a third of the population of Europe in the 1300’s, there weren’t enough children left to protect the crops. Farmers had to improvise and so the scarecrow was born. On this continent, our native pumpkin stands in for the turnip, carved into the disembodied heads that ghoulishly decorate our doorsteps.
Scottish tradition involves Dirge Loaves, which are similar to the European soul cakes. These cakes were offered to those that went from house to house. They were also offered to say prayers for the family's departed. Into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were given to the costumed entertainers known as mummers, who made their merry rounds at Halloween time. Today's trick-or-treaters are thought to be their descendants.
According to the Online Etymological Dictionary (www.etymonline.com) the word "mask" has several possible origins. When the more recent Middle Ages language layers are pealed away, the oldest reference is to the earlier pre Indo-European language roots which refer to the action "to darken" or the word for "witch." We can certainly see a correlation to the Halloween time but the wearing of masks is not a tradition limited to this time of year.
For many centuries people have donned masks as a part of working with the spirit world. It is thought that the earliest use of masks was in connection with hunting. Apparently, disguise masks were used in the early Stone Age in stalking prey. However, unlike a contemporary hunter’s camouflage clothing which simulates the environment, the Stone Age hunter sought to blend in by looking like what he was pursuing. This would entail not only assuming the animal disguise, but behaving like the animal as well. This action of becoming the prey coupled with the spirit already in the animal mask, would in shamanic terms empower the disguise. In effect it would make the mask “alive.” The mask would then not simply represent the animal, but become it and transfer that “becoming” to its wearer.
Tibetan deity mask
Indeed, there are several reasons for wearing a shamanic mask. One reason is that masks affect a transformation of the wearer into another being. The power of this is two fold. Not only are the observers being signaled that someone or something else has made their presence known, but also the wearer him or herself, is assisted into the transformative trance by the “living” object. In essence, the shaman becomes possessed by the spirit that the mask both represents and embodies.
While entranced, the shaman can bring hidden wisdom from the spirit world into ordinary reality. In other words, the shaman becomes an oracle. I find this particularly interesting when we look again at the Iron Age Celts and their oracular heads. Perhaps that Iron Age tradition has its roots in the older shamanic idea of the transformation mask. In the earlier tradition, the “head” of a spirit is overlaid on a human being so that the spirit can enter this world and interact with us. In either case the head/face holds the soul of a being. This head/face has the power to bridge the veil between the living world and the world of the spirits so that the wisdom of the Other world could be brought into this one.
These ideas of blurring the worlds and the merging of two or more beings are also a typical theme of both shamanism and the early mythic traditions of European tribes. When characterized by a transmogrification of humans to animals and/or animals to humans it is referred to as zoomorphism. Finding traces of its existence strengthens the evidence that early Indo-European tribes practiced shamanism, however these practices must certainly go even further into prehistory.
The shaman figure Paleolithic people painted on the walls of the cave at Trois Freres is depicted as being caught somewhere in the middle of a transformation--neither completely one being or another. I believe this zoomorphic representation is meant to convey the fact that something profoundly powerful is occurring. That is, the transformation of a human into another being/spirit. These images catch the shaman “in the act.”
Insert Trois Frere The "sorcerer" of Les Trois Freres. Painted about 15,000 years ago, the drawing on the right shows the details of the figure.
Celtic deities such as Herne/Cerunnos have their origins in that earlier image, but with a difference. By the time of the Iron Age, the Indo-European influence that brought “gods” to Europe, shifted spirit transformation out of the hands of human beings and solely into the domain of the divine.
With gods came priests and the potency of the sacred energy was harder to access for the “common” person. One had to go through an intermediary person in the form of a druid/priest or high person who kept an oracular, severed head. This became the societal norm.
This image from the Gudesrup cauldron is an excellent example of a Cernunnos figure.
There were, however other times when one could access the wisdom directly. Tribal lore suggested that these rituals were terrible and dangerous. I suspect the idea that a “mere mortal” could be threatened, or even annihilated by such an act was probably encouraged by those who strove to keep control of the power for themselves. Origins of those tales of humans being taken way by fierce spirits, never to be seen or heard from again, undoubtedly arose at the same time for a similar purpose.
But the older way of perceiving the world, nature and the spirits seems to always leak through. Even when overlaid with later Christian demonization, the power of the people/shaman’s relationship with the ancient spirits of nature tries to reveal itself.
In her book, Shaman: the Wounded Healer, Joan Halifax writes: “To the heavens, to the well at the end of the world, to the depths of the Underworld, to the bottoms of spirit-filled lakes and seas, around the earth, to the moon and sun, to distant stars and back again does the shaman-bird travel. All the cosmos is accessible when the art of transformation has been mastered.”
Using this context, let’s look at the phenomenon of the Wild Hunt as related in Medieval folklore. The tale is of a group of fierce beings flying through the sky. These characters are in search of something. Sometimes the tales say they swarm across the sky to gather the spirits of the dead and take them to the Other World . Other times it is said the Wild Hunt threatens the living.
While some traditions suggest that the one leading the hunt is a male figure, the people in alpine Germany believed that the Wild Hunt was lead by the goddess, Perchta or Berchta. Her name means “The Shining One.” (The words peraht, berht and brecht mean bright, light and/or white.) She is “The Lady of the Beasts" and was a guardian of the animals and nature in ancient Germanic hunting cultures. She is like her counterpart, Frau Holda the supernatural matron of spinning, childbirth and domestic animals, who is associated with the dark time of the year, witches and the Wild Hunt. Her name is related to Scandinavian beings known as the Huldra --faerie women with an animal tail who live in the forests of Scandinavia. Here again, we see the overlayment of the shaman’s zoomorphic transformations. It is Huldra who gives her name to the great female shaman/völva Huld of the Icelandic Sagas. She is said to be the god Odin’s mistress, which is a rather overt way of saying she consorted with the numinous power of Spirit!
Pertcha rituals took place into the 16th century. The people who donned masks to become Pertcha were the Perchten. This name is also given to the animal masks worn in parades and festivals in the mountainous regions of Austria. The Perchten took two forms: the Schönperchten (beautiful Perchten) who are lovey and bright who “bring luck and wealth to the people.” The other form is the Schiachperchten (ugly Perchten) who have fangs, tusks and horse tails and are used to drive out demons and ghosts. Men dressed as the ugly Perchten went from house to house driving out bad spirits.
This duality reflects this time of year so well. One the one hand, it is the time of the greatest bounty. All of the crops are in, the root cellars are full, the cheese is ripening and the wine is safely resting in casks. On the other hand, the daylight is waning, the cold begins to penetrate the land and the nature of life becomes more difficult. As the darkness creeps in we feel the chill of our mortality. We wonder in the midst of all the bounty, will there be enough to sustain us until Spring? So we distract ourselves, for a little while, playing out the dances of light and dark, of saint and boogie man. We don fierce-lloking masks to both honor what terrifies us and to disempower the dark’s hold on our hearts!
Austrian demon mask worn during a Perchen parade
This Halloween, when the little goblins come up your porch steps, remember their shamanic origins. When you open the door, take a deep breath of the chill air redolent with the smell of wood smoke and leaves. Then let their childish delight in dressing up drive away the darkness!
- Evelyn
Evelyn C. Rysdyk, author of Modern Shamanic Living is a nationally recognized presenter. Included in the book Traveling Between the Worlds she is among the world’s most influential writers and teachers of shamanism.
Originally trained in core shamanism, she has integrated practices taught to her by elders from North and South America, Central Asia, Nepal and Siberia. She is also a Medicine for the Earth Teacher--teaching ways that transfigured human energy can heal our planet.
With her partner C. Allie Knowlton, MSW, LCSW, DCSW she presents
eco-spiritually focused training programs--which include advanced shamanism and shamanic healing---across the USA and Canada. In addition, as a founding member of True North, a unique, integrated medical center in Falmouth, Maine--she collaborates with physicians, nurses, a psychiatrist, a naturopath and several other complementary healthcare practitioners to provide a new model of health care that includes the spirit.
www.spiritpassages.org
www.spiritliving.org
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