A Witch's World of Magick (25 page)

The men then fly out in every direction, shouting away all evils as they make a mock charge on the invisible dangers they hope to divert. By acting out the masquerade of waging war on illness, disaster, and other misfortunes, the Inca sent a clear message to their deity, expressing their united intention with creativity as well as passion and flair. The impressive warrior garb coupled with the sheer number of participants involved in this ritual must have been quite awe-inspiring to witness, and magickally very powerful.

The Olmec also enjoyed a little magickal masquerade. In Olmec culture, an early civilization centered in south central Mexico, masks symbolizing gods, humans, and archetypes were employed for a variety of purposes. While many masks were made of clay, others were crafted from more precious materials such as jade and serpentine. Wearing the mask of a god was believed to confer divine power to the wearer, while a portrait mask representing the face of an ancestor might be worn to help a person connect with and honor the dead. Sometimes, masks were included on statuary, figurines, and other artifacts depicting the gods, used to emphasize the alternative identities and attributes of the deities. Masks were even used in death in Olmec society, placed on the face of the corpse to forever mimic their living features and thus magickally stave off decay.
¹³⁵

The Olmec crafted masks in a variety of sizes, from face size to oversize to tiny. Olmec mini-masks, called maskettes, typically measured about 3 inches in diameter and bore a drilled hole on each side so that it could be attached to an object or suspended from a cord. These small masks may have been used as pendants, as adornments for headdresses, or as decoration for miniature idols.
¹³⁶

Special costumes were worn for many Olmec rites and ceremonies throughout the year, and masks were an important aspect of the sacred garb. Often, ceremonial masks blended characteristics of human, god, and beast. The Olmec mask used to depict the “were-jaguar” rain god, for example, typically had a large protruding upper lip like a jaguar, yet human-like almond-shaped eye holes and a trapezoidal-shaped mouth hole typically found on masks portraying humans.
¹³⁷

Olmec shamans wore such masks to activate their inner connection to the spirit animal or deity therein represented, the costume helping along the ritual transformation from human to divine. Individual shaman had their own
naualli
, or spirit animal companion, with which they were associated. Through the use of masks, figurines, and other aids such as hallucinogens, drumming, meditation, and dance, the shamans entered a trance state in which they could travel between planes of reality.
¹³⁸

Ceremonial masks are still used in modern Mexico, incorporated into dramatic dances performed to mark religious days and historical events. Just as in ancient times, in some places the masks are believed to actually embody the spirit of the animal or entity represented, thus keeping the wearer safe and protected during ritual. Some masks are recycled: they’re given a fresh coat of paint and reused year after year, while other masks are destroyed straightaway after the ceremony.
¹³⁹

During modern Day of the Dead festivities, participants carry on the traditional practice of wearing masks or face paint to resemble the many aspects of death. These costumes vary widely, though the death theme is featured throughout. Some masks show a more comical aspect of death, depicting grinning skeletons, while other corpse-like masks appear more sinister and grotesque, complete with rotting teeth or other ugly features.
¹⁴⁰
By dressing as the dead, people show respect for ancestors, facilitate communication with the spirit world, and learn to accept the natural process of living and dying. Through the use of costume, a bridge is forged between the living and the dead, between the undesired and the unavoidable. Death is inevitable, and in Mexico, play-acting the part in advance has been a long-standing way to cope with and transcend the fear of dying that plagues us all.

In Switzerland as well, special costumes were employed for sacred purposes. In
Festivals of Western Europe
, a 1958 work by Dorothy Gladys Spicer, the use of masks during Carnival, or
Fastnacht
, a festival celebrated to mark an end to winter, is described:

Carnival is celebrated extensively throughout the country, with each town and village following its own local traditions. At Flums, near the Wallensee, for example, celebrants in wooden masks (many of which are handed down from father to son for generations) parade through the streets. It is thought that these horrible and terrifying masks, some of which symbolize abstract ideas such as war, death or disease, originally were made to dissipate the very forces they so hideously represent.

At Einsiedeln, in Schwyz, “Carnival Runners,” wearing grotesque false faces and with enormous bells attached to their backs, run through the streets continuously from Sunday to Ash Wednesday morning. The bells, which are so heavy the men have to bend their backs to support the weight, clang incessantly as the Runners course through the town. This ceremony, like the masks of Flums, also survives from ancient times when primitive people “drove out Winter” with deafening noise and fearsome faces and “rang in” their welcome to the Spring.
¹⁴¹

The rather scary masks employed in these ceremonies work to repel unwanted energies through mimicry. By embodying and imitating war, disease, or other frightening aspects of society, and by taking the mimicry a step further by being even more repulsive than these ills, the masks have a reflective quality that can send these unfortunate energies packing. So too does the bell ringing, running, and parading operate in mimetic fashion, symbolizing through various means and mediums the same basic notion of good triumphing over evil, vitality and strength prevailing over misfortune. We see in this example that both costumes and dramatic, mimetic action combine to produce the intended result, be it to welcome the spring or to drive off winter, war, death, or disease. The action of the celebrants with their masks and parade at Flums, the action of the Carnival Runners with their equally bizarre masks and loud raucous at Einsiedeln, represent sacred dramas of sorts, ritually enacted make-believe intended to have real magickal effects.

Fastnacht
is still widely celebrated today, and large-scale masquerade still plays a major part in the festivities. According to www.myswitzerland.com, the official website of Switzerland tourism, the Fasnacht carnival held each year in Basel boasts an average 15,000 to 20,000 masked participants!
¹⁴²

In ancient Greece, such large-scale community rites and festivals were common, with costume, drama, and ritual blending into a singular magickal experience. An excerpt from Harold R. Willoughby’s 1929 work
Pagan Regeneration
provides a succinct overview of known facts about an Eleusinian passion play that highlights the interactive and improvisational nature of Greek magickal drama used to mimic the gods:

The abduction of Persephone, the grief of her mother, the search for the lost daughter, and the reunion of the two goddesses—these were the principle scenes … Clad in gorgeous and traditional costumes the personages of the Eleusinian passion play must have been very impressive figures. Of scenic effect there was little or nothing … Greek audiences, like the spectators of the Elizabethan drama, were trained to depend upon their imaginations to supply what was lacking in stage settings. So at Eleusis, the effectiveness of the passion play depended much upon the cultivated imaginations of the mystae. Moreover, by simple expedients the participation of the initiates in the action of the drama was brought about. They were not merely spectators of a pageant; they were participants in a ritual. The gong focused their attention upon the first great crisis of the drama, the abduction of the daughter. With torches they followed the mother in her frantic search and again with the waving of torches they expressed their joy at the return of her daughter. Thus, by participation in the dramatic action, as well as by active imagination, the mystae were enabled to share emotionally in the experiences of the great goddesses.
¹⁴³

Willoughby’s summation of the Eleusinian ritual as allowing the participants to emotionally connect with the deities could hold equally true for many acts of mimetic magick around the globe. Through ceremonial costumes, sacred drama and dance, through dress-up and make-believe, we become as the gods, creating new worlds and new realities with our magickal play.

Common Threads and New Perspectives

Throughout this chapter, we’ve seen how people around the world have used masquerade and mimicry to enhance their magickal arts. Successful magick requires us to step up from mundane reality and step out of our everyday roles; in this way, we achieve a magickal mindset that allows us to use emotionally charged thought to manifest and mold the world around us. Through the use of magickal costumes and mimetic drama, we’re able to enter a ritual consciousness more readily. Masks, jewelry, and other magickally charged and attuned garb can make us feel like more than we typically are; by donning the head of a lion, we become like a lion, pushing fear from the mind as courage swells in the heart. We’re not only better able mentally to work the magick at hand, but also we enjoy the benefit of having more power available with which to cast the spell. As we’ve seen from some of the examples in this chapter, a simple mask can have within it the power of the beasts, the power of the gods—when we work magick wearing special clothing and costume, the energy within the fashions themselves can enhance the overall effect of our rites.

Using masks and costumes can have other benefits, as well. Extraordinary clothing creates an extraordinary atmosphere and mystical ambiance just right for ritual. Further, wearing a magickal costume can help us magickally connect—with the gods, with our spirit animals, and even with the dead.

So too does the act of engaging in mimetic drama help us weave threads between ourselves and the deities, between individual magick worker and universal magickal power. By imitating what the gods do, by imitating what we wish to happen as if our play-acting will make it so, our magick has a strong foundation on which to rest. Imitative, mimetic actions are at the heart of many a magickal formula. It’s simply one of the easiest, most reliable ways to create a living symbol, a message or code of sorts, that conveys to the “above” what we wish to occur “below.” Magick is make-believe, and through masquerade and mimicry, the belief we need to make the world as we choose comes as naturally as child’s play.

Magickal Mask-Making

If the examples in this chapter have inspired you, why not try crafting your own special costumes for magick? You might make a cloak, a robe, a headdress, or even a mask.

One easy technique for making a magickal mask is to create it out of papier-mâché formed over the front half of an inflated balloon. Begin by blowing up a balloon so that it’s about the same size as your head. Next, hold a piece of flexible paper over your face, and mark the eyes, nose, and mouth areas. Use this paper as a stencil to mark out the places on the balloon where the air and vision holes will go. Cut an old newspaper into strips that are roughly one inch wide and about five or six inches long. Dip the paper one strip at a time in a shallow dish of glue or paste. Let the excess sticky stuff drip off, then delicately place the paper strip on the balloon, smoothing out any wrinkles so that it lies perfectly flat upon the surface of the balloon. Continue placing paper strips in this manner one at a time, overlapping the strips and letting the mask dry between layers. Basically, the paper and glue combine to harden into a stiff shell. Plenty of overlap, plenty of glue, and plenty of drying time between layers is essential.

Once you have a good base layer of the mask going on, the entire face area minus the eye, nose, and mouth holes covered with at least a few layers of the paper strips, think about the basic form of your mask if you haven’t done so already. Will it have any appendages, such as a snout, or perhaps a pair of long, pointy ears? If so, use small pieces of cardboard, cut and folded to shape, to create the structural elements of your mask. Use duct tape or another sturdy tape to attach the cardboard directly onto the papier-mâché, then add more paper strips on top of and around these additions to strengthen the bond and even out the texture of the mask.

Once your mask is complete and you have at least
1⁄8
to
1⁄4
of an inch or so layer of papier-mâché, make sure it’s all dry, then pop the balloon and remove it from the mask. Add holes at the sides of your mask so that you can attach a string or elastic band.

Paint the mask any way you like, and decorate it according to its function. Magickally charged and intuitively or intentionally selected natural items such as feathers, stones, sticks, nut shells, seed hulls, leaves, and bark make fine additions to your mask.

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