Ritual, Masks, and Sacrifice

INTRODUCTION Ritual is intimately connected with the mask, either in the wearing that hides the true face, or in the adoption of a public face. The mask makes the disengagement from ordinary time and the connection to the ancient and repetitive, which is the heart of ritual, psychologically acceptable. Together, ritual and mask facilitate the apprehension of identity and its connections with paradox by placing the mystery of change outside of life’s ordinary reasonableness into the domain of magic and power. This change and transformation is enacted by the sacrifice of the ritual. The question of transformation is also related to cognitive categories, sexual identity, and violence. There is not only aggression and violence in Nature (as in the matsyanyāya of the big fish eating the smaller fish), but also within the human soul. It is in the human nature to own and command, and this sets up a struggle with other individuals. Rousseau’s idea that man is fundamentally good as in his famous slogan “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”, led to the naïve view that violence is a consequence of social ills alone. But society only embodies that already exists as potential in each individual, and violence is a fundamental impulse of life. Hobbes and Sade represent ancient psychological views more accurately than Locke, Rousseau, or contemporary liberals. Ritual recreates the universe in a symbolic mirroring whose structure depends on the cosmology underlying the culture. It helps shift perspective from the outer to the inner. Reconciliation to loss may be easier if one acknowledges that subjective facts are constructions of the mind. The creation of internal reality by the mind is confirmed by the consideration of altered states of consciousness. It is for these reasons that masks help one to confront the questions of identity and personhood. Visions of the end of the world flavour the grammar for much ritual and sacrifice. There exist two main views, centered about permanence and change, respectively. In the first, the end leads to the resurrection of the body; in the second, the spirit goes through cycles of change. Conflicting body-centric visions of the end of the world are at the root of the ongoing war in the Middle East. The vision of a permanent body maps to a word-centric tradition, whereas those who consider change as part of natural law use images, since the image is a snapshot of a dynamic sequence.