At first this may not seem like a subject to get right into just yet, and should have been reserved for later. But the gods are a crucial foundation for humanity, and they constitute a large (if not one of the largest) portion of human history. The gods are foundational because they represent certain aspects of human institutions. Giambattista Vico illustrates this by pointing out that all the gods are patrons of this or that thing that is an institution of human life. Mars being the god of war; Vulcan the god of the forge; Venus the goddess of love and charm; Juno the goddess of marriage; Vesta the goddess of the hearth; Jupiter the god of imperial power; Odin the god of runes; Frigga the goddess of fertility and lust; Bacchus the god of wine; Diana the goddess of the hunt; Hades god of death and wealth; et cetera. Notice that most gods are patrons of human institutions, but their predecessors (the giants, the Titans, and such) were gods of nature, the cosmos, and order. Saturn, a Titan, was the god that created order in the world, and his Greek equivalent is Cronos, the god of time. All predecessors of the Olympians (or their equivalents in other cultures) are indifferent to humanity. This is with exception to one or two, such as Prometheus, who was punished severely for creating humans from clay and then giving them fire. The Olympians are our gods, and their forefathers are the world's gods. It is for our sake that the Olympians were the victors of the world.
It is completely unnecessary for me to clarify this or that culture's pantheon, and their differences or similarities. Joseph Campbell said it best in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: all myths and gods are the same, just wearing different costumes given the culture (I paraphrase). He called them "the masks of the gods" (the title of one of his better known series of books). He borrows a term from James Joyce to describe this phenomenon of the similarities between all myths and gods, which comes from Finnegans Wake, the "monomyth." The idea is to get past the masks of the gods and to focus on the essences behind them. But do not the masks give us something to identify with? I have friend who is an Asatru (Germanic-Norse) pagan, and he once told me in a letter, "I identify with the faces of Norse gods more than any other." That is just a wonderful way to put it. If the truth is exclusive and we are often denied privilege to it, but the mask is formed from the truth, is not the way to the essence of the gods found through their masks? Are these not all abstract notions that are intangible to us? Are not abstractions made concrete to us via the service of the metaphor? We certainly gave the gods masks for a reason. The masking of deity is our road to truth, since the palace of truth is not found without a road. Like the Arthurian Grail Knights, each of whom enters the dark forest alone to make their own path. Just like the face is facere, to make, or the actor is agere, to lead/make, the way to the gods is not without an actor (agere) or a making (facere). The true face of the gods or the monomyth is of little importance without a mask; the container, the impression and mirror of truth.
But, as Vico claims, the gods are institutions of human life, are not the masks of the gods ways to ourselves? Are not the gods little more than aspects of ourselves? So the identities of the gods, our gods, the way to the aspects of ourselves? They are the way to our art (the Muses), our destinies (the Fates), our creations (Vulcan), our inebriation (Bacchus), our marriages (Juno), our communion (Vesta), our strife and warring (Mars), our power (Jupiter). The masks of the gods are the masks of ourselves. The gods are reflections of ourselves, just like the mask is a reflection of our true faces. And it makes sense that we would pick a particular masquerade to identify with, just as my Asatru friend has done. In identifying with a particular masquerade we are at the same time identifying with the different faces of ourselves. It is easier to identify with a particular set of masks than to try an identify with the abstractions that lay behind the masks. If anything, to search out the universal truths autonomously on their own without the signifiers (masks) might be the most difficult spiritual path to take, if not a completely futile and impossible path all together. King Arthur and his knights set out into the primordial forest in search of the Grail castle alone because the quest for the Grail is a personal journey. It is one of discovery, whereby we find the masks - our masks - that show us the way to the citadel.
To say it again, the monomyth is pointless without a set of masks to define them. Take this analogy: you're watching a movie and you notice an actor you've seen before. You look for queues in their acting, voice, face, gestures, et cetera, to determine who they are. Finally you figure out which actor it is and what other movies they were in. Now without previous acting roles this person would have been no one worth noticing. In our analogy the person is the monomyth, and they are defined by their roles in various films. The monomyth is nothing without its masks and acting scenes. The person would have remained some nameless, faceless abstraction without any substance had not the variety of masks given him or her some definition.
Now for an art example: Michelangelo Buonarroti's tomb of Giuliano di Lorenzo de' Medici in the New Sacristy of the Medici Chapel at San Lorenzo. On the right side is Day with his classic Michelangeloan unfinished face, his beautiful solar bearded face looking up, and his body torquing the right while laying on his back. On the left is Nix, with her beautiful body on its side torquing to the left, right elbow resting on her left leg (inspiration for Rodin's Thinker), face looking down, an owl under her leg, and a masculine mask under her left arm. Not only does the mask of Night conceal the day (a mask of truth and light), it is the mask of the apparitions of our dreams, the faces of the psychic entities that entertain our nightly theater of dreams.
The entities of our dreams, according to Carl Jung, are archetypal characters that wear different masks, but are all the same set of cast members. Jung, in his studies of the Collective Unconscious and his Archetypes, establishes a sort of call sheet of characters that act in our unconscious minds. Most notable actors of our dreams are the Anima (Animus if masculine), the Trickster, Christ-figure, Patriarch, Matriarch, the Hag, and the Shadow. There are of course more, but these seem to pervade more through Jung's writings than any others. These are all formless, substanceless apparitions that are only defined by their multitude of masks and attributes that define them. They may have some autonomous qualities, but these are hidden, and therefore only revealed, through their play acts and masquerades. Just like Nix, they are abstractions of the mind, and the way we come to know them is through their masks. Jung's Archetypes are creations of our own minds, residual products of our distant ancestor's unconscious minds, and they are reflections of ourselves. We come to identify with them, and thus with ourselves, via their nightly masquerades in our own dream theaters and nightmare cinemas.
It is a bit uncertain where the word "mask" comes from originally, possibly Arabic maskarah "mockery," or Provencal or Catalan mascarar or Old French mascarer "to blacken the face," or even Occitan mascara "to blacken, darken." The earliest known relative for "mask" is Middle Latin maschera, meaning "specter, nightmare." This is part of the etymological play John Henry Fuseli is making in his painting The Nightmare. A grotesque figure sits upon the breasts of woman toiling in her sleep. He is an incubus, which comes from the Latin incubare, "to lay upon." Behind him is a black horse, which is a play on night mare. These are expressions (masks) of those abstract apparitions that haunt our nightmares and entertain our dreams. They are aspects of ourselves, just like the gods are aspects of us.
All of this is the nature of metaphor. As Lakoff defines metaphors: they are concrete notions to describe and give definition to abstract ones. This is how we identify and face those things that don't have a face. We make them a mask (fashioned in the image of the given culture, their motifs, icons, and ideologies) and write them into plays we call myths. The journey through the dark forest alone is our road to them, and thus our road to ourselves. Where there is no road we make one (agere), and were there is no image of an abstraction we make a face for it (facere). Hence my use of At The Gates's "the face of all your fears." Fear being an abstract notion that haunts us, and in order to face them we must give them a face to look at. The spiritual journey is an abstract one, driven by ideas, notions, feelings, belief systems, et cetera. The only way through this dark forest of abstract ideas (signifieds) is to give them a form that fits them in which to identify with (signifiers).
We had the ideas (signifieds), so we gave them verbal sounds to express them (signifiers). The idea behind the word is the actor (in a vague sense), and the word correlated to the idea is the mask. The whole study of etymology, the study of words, is looking at how the masks of the word-actor has changed to suit its audiences and stage sets. Just like the study of comparative religions, the monomyth, is a look at how the masks of the gods have changed given their audience and theater. In Catholicism the notion of a pantheon of gods was blasphemy, since there was only one true God (and his son, and the Holy Spirit). In order to convert pagans peacefully they created a pantheon of saints to take the gods' places, as all the saints are patrons of one human institution or another.
In summation, masks and faces are tangible analogies we make for abstract notions so that we may identify with them as aspects of ourselves, each other, and of higher forms of thought and aspiration.
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