with malevolent spirits, not with the spirits of dead friends. He must make himself into a kind of pseudodemon as powerful and as ruthless as the one he fights. To do this he must have a mask of peculiar potency, and he must know charms, chants, dances without end. He must study, he must specialize. He must become the medicine-man. Then, hidden behind a face of singular significance, and accompanied by a little boy to collect gifts in a bag, he may pass through the Congo village and plunge out into the jungle, sure that this demon whom he has conjured up by a mask will deal most destructively with any evil spirit that may cross his path. This principle of homeopathic treatment for demons can be extended to the cure of disease. Illness is obviously the work of devils. The sick one is possessed by the demon of leprosy, the demon of deafness, or the demon of tonsilitis. Confronted with his own form,-mask, costume, and all,—the demon will leave the body of the invalid and seek his proper home. The result of this line of reasoning is the highly developed pharmacopoeia of the Singhalese devil-dancer. This medicine-man has nineteen masks, each of which is potent for one of the nineteen official diseases. In cases of dubious diagnosis, the doctor dances in a composite mask on which all the nineteen demons glower.

Such are a very few of the forms in which the mask took hold upon primitive man, and still retains his favor. Yet widely popular as the mask still is, there is no denying that its great days are gone. When Columbus discovered the New World, and when Cortés landed in Mexico, among the presents with which the Indians hon

Alaskan Indians use such masks as this in recounting tribal legends

ored the coming of the white gods. were masks inlaid with turquoise mosaics. saics. The Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Incas used these faces in their religion and in their theater. Up the Pacific coast the mask spread its mystical diversions till it reached the Eskimo of the Aleutian Islands and hung over Kamchatka. Eastward the cult reached Florida, leaving relics of shell masks under the pile dwellings of the swamps, and in the ruins of mound-builders to the north. We find maskoids of stone on the trails of the Delawares and the Iroquois. But to-day the American mask is confined to primitive rituals among the Indians of Brazil and Ecuador and Central America, to the rain-making dances of the Pueblos, to the ceremonies, halfreligious, half-playful, of the Indians and Eskimo of the Northwest, and to the dying feasts of the few remaining Iroquois and Delawares.

The mask still serves the religious drama in China, Tibet, and Japan, but it does not play the part in demon worship that it did before the coming of Buddha. Mohammedanism drove

A Melanesian spirit-mask

the mask out of southern Asia along with graven image and painted form, and through Burma, Siam, and Java it lingers only in a theater of legends and romances. Ceylon, however, still prefers the mask to its own quinine as a cure for fevers, and the black men and brown of all Melanesia use the mask in all manner of festival. Poly

nesia, home of the highest of savages, shows only a hint of the cult in a Tahitian mourning-costume that hides the face. Africa still masks vigorously from Sahara southward, but the masks of Alexandria have gone with the theater of Thais, and it is only in conjecture that we can trace the masked rituals of the animal-headed gods of ancient Egypt.

It is Europe, of course, that has turned most apostate to masks and demons, yet there are civilized men in Thrace, in the Tyrol and the Alps, and in the English country-side, who still treasure something more than memories of the mask. Thracian peasants in goat-skins and false faces hold seasonal festivals that carry us back to the rites of Dionysus, who sprang from Thrace and brought drama to Greece. Within ten miles of Oberammergau post-war Germans in the heads of dragons and devils celebrated Twelfth Night and the beginning of Lent. These masked revelers and the May spirits whose green and leafy costumes still welcome

spring in certain parts of England all remind us of the days when Europe was pagan, and Druid rites met the rites of Kalends and Saturnalia beyond the Danube. And they remind us, too, of the mad masking which swept all Europe in the last days of the Renaissance.

We talk to-day of the mask as an odd and perhaps significant revival in the theater. We forget how vital a part it has played in almost every social activity of man, how vital a part

The

it still plays. In Africa and New Ireland men wear the mask to raise the dead and to dance in seemly fashion at the mourning ceremonies. In Ceylon it is the established therapy. In Dahomey negroes do justice behind its veil. Northern Pacific Indians dance to their gods in masks that protect the eyes of the worshipers from the blight of seeing the too bright forms of deity. Men of the South Seas make potent war-masks out of the skulls of dead chiefs. Pueblo Indians bring rain with their masked gods. The Delawares still keep their children in order by threatening them with a visit from the Living Solid Face. The moral ministrations of the Reverend Doctor Straton are supplied in New Guinea by the DukDuk maskers. The false face replaces the lodge goat in the secret societies of primitive man all over the world. In Torres Strait the mask is an indispensable preliminary to a fishing expedition; its magic swells the catch. And once upon a time, when Casanova was young, Italians went masked to court, to market, and to tribunal, dined in masks, danced in masks, made love in masks, and all but slept in masks through half the seasons of the calendar. Always these ceremonies, these rituals, these dances, lead into the theater.

But where does the mask start, and why? Everywhere, and for all manner of reasons. Forty or fifty years ago a distinguished ethnologist was foolhardy enough to trace the American Indian back from Peru across the islands of the Pacific to Hindustan, all because similar uses of masks and other facial ornaments occur along this path. Even without Fraser and his "Golden Bough," we might have

The mask of a Zuñi god whose ministrations bring rain to parched deserts

suspected the savage mind of being similarly primitive at the beginning of its life. We might have guessed that a superstitious and inquisitive white man in Gaul and a superstitious and inquisitive red man in America would come to the same conclusions about increasing the supply of game by dancing in animal skins. We might have divined that a black man in Africa and a brown man in Melanesia would think of a scheme for raising the dead by wearing their masks.

This scientist who rashly argued that the mask made Indian and Aryan one was blissfully ready to believe that all false-faces came out of the war-shield. The savage held the shield in front of his face. He made eye-holes in it to see through, and a mouth-hole, apparently to shout through. Then he tied the bulky thing on like a pair of blinders, and plunged into fierce hand-to-hand fighting. We must suppose that he found the terrifying face painted on the shield-mask potent enough to balance the low visibility of the enemy seen through tiny peepholes. The mask may have originated in this fashion here or there among particularly superstitious, unintelligent, and

The smile of this servant of the Buddhist madonna graces a thesis-drama of purgatory in China

unwarlike peoples, but not generally. War-masks of this absurd sort exist in Melanesia. In Alaska the Indians found it handier to push the mask up into a kind of helmet covering the forehead. The Incas and the Aztecs, like Hercules, stuck the head through the mouth of an animal's skin when they went into battle. True warmasks exist in Japan, and Christian knights wore visors shaped into fierce faces; but these men were protected by complete armor, and they rode horses. Quickness of eye or nimbleness of movement was no necessity with them.

The negroes, who have done as much as any people to exploit and to beautify the mask, have several legends as to its origin. One story from the Congo would make embarrassing reading for the white, protestant, and gentile members of the Ku-Klux Klan. According to this theory, the white hood that affrighted colored people in 1867, and still affrights them in this year of grace and of horsewhippings, might trace its ancestry back to the

wit of a negro king of central Africa. The people whom this king ruled were troubled by a marauder. The criminal was young, the king was old. And not even the bucks of the tribe cared to risk the anger of the marauder and his blood-relatives. Out of this difficulty the king found a simple way by dressing up certain husky young men in identical masks, and sending them out to do anonymous justice. Even to-day the Ku-Klux habit sticks in Africa. Explorers report masked secret societies that rule the hinterland of the Gold Coast. They punish crime and they even form a sort of league of nations to put down wars. When two tribes have pushed belligerency beyond the limits of public endurance, the delegates to the central union of the secret societies meet and decide which tribe is at fault. Then they send their masked army to destroy its village, and peace reigns.

Another African legend ascribes the mask to an inventive queen. This woman went to a forest spring every day to fill her water-gourd. Her little daughter began to follow her and to get in the way. The mother scolded, and the queen commanded, but the child, after the manner of children, persisted. Inspiration came to the mother-queen. She painted the head of a ferocious demon on the bottom of her water-gourd, and when she held this to her face the child was content to stay home.

There is hardly a use of the mask that cannot produce a plausible reason for the thing's invention. But there is the common mind of primitive man in which all uses of the mask are founded, one obvious way in which many, many masks have originated, and one emotion, one desire, that

makes masks a welcome adjunct to any toilet.

The mask comes most commonly out of the animal. Man begins by hunting, and his first magic is the magic of the chase. At the start it is as simple as his clothing, as simple, in fact, as the clothing of the animal he hunts. The first magic and the first mask are nothing more than decoy. The hunter tries to look like the hunted. The plains Indian wears a buffalo skin, and bellows like a calf. Perhaps after the hunt he dances around the camp-fire, recounting his adventures by imitating the prey and wearing its skin. Soon, through accident and coincidence, the idea occurs to him that he can cast a spell over the game. If he imitates the coming of deer, deer will come. If he dramatizes their slaughter, there will be a plentiful supply of food. Soon he is embarked on sympathetic magic and also on a sort of drama. The skull of the game makes the first mask, but it is not long before he has elaborated his magic into totemism, and then the artist comes out of the tribesman to create an image of his protector potent enough for his purposes.

It is probably a very long way from the skull mask of an animal to that of the artist's symbolic version, and it is further still before the simple magic of totemism becomes religious drama. Yet the path is hard-worn, clear, and undeviating. Religion elaborates itself by some inevitable law of the mind of man. Masked ritual spreads and changes and proliferates, too. The simple reproduction of a hunt develops into a legend of animal gods. With the coming of agriculture, sympathetic magic becomes more difficult and more complex. The rebirth of

One of the finely modeled masks which distinguish the Japanese No

the world each spring is dramatized into the rebirth of a god. Primitive man invents thousands of other stories of men and demons. He acts these out, usually with the aid of the mask. In the process the instinct of play develops, and the mask takes oddly significant forms.

The most elaborate use of ceremonial masks occurs among the Pueblo Indians of the Southwestern United States, and the Indians and Eskimo of the northern Pacific coast. In Melanesia and Africa the mask flourishes in ghost-dances, initiation ceremonies, disciplinary activities of secret societies, and all manner of ritual, and in these places the ritualistic spirit often disappears, and only a frankly amusing dance is left. But in New Mexico and British Columbia we may see the masked ceremony on its way to a kind of drama which is still religious because it is full of the meaning of old legends.

By some accident of mind the Northern Indians and the Eskimo who imitate them have taken to a kind of