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Concept · Seba Knowledge Graph

The Mask

The Mask

In walter-otto‘s phenomenology of dionysos-archetypal-image, the mask is the god’s proper form of appearance rather than a disguise over a face. The mask is the figure of the collapse of the ordinary boundary between the living and the non-living, between the one who wears and the one who is worn. Spring Publications’ summary of Dionysus: Myth and Cult places the mask at the center of the book’s phenomenology, alongside “tragedy and theater; bisexuality and the child; wine and the juices of vegetative nature” (Miller 1974, bibliographic apparatus).

The mask is load-bearing for the archetypal reading of tragedy: what the Greek theater staged, behind the prosōpon, was not an actor impersonating a character but the god present in the mask’s ambiguity. In the Dionysian register, the god and the wearer are not distinguishable in the mode of epiphany itself. This is the force behind Otto’s reading of the Dionysian as a religion of interpretation as participation (Miller 1974) — the worshipper is not observing but entering.

The concept’s reach into depth psychology is through the persona: carl-jung‘s persona is the mask of social adaptation, distinct from Otto’s Dionysian mask but structurally related. Where the persona is individual and protective, the Dionysian mask is collective and dissolving. Reading them together — as james-hillman‘s archetypal psychology implicitly does — restores to the concept of persona the older Greek sense that a mask can be the god’s presence rather than the self’s concealment.

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