INTRODUCTION

The engaging title of this study leads one to expect that it would reward the careful reader with an understanding of the metaphorical dimension of the use of the ritual mask by the peoples who created and developed the mythological tradition of Mesoamerica. And while it surely provides that reward in full measure, remarkably, it provides still more as the constellating theme of the mask as metaphor is developed and extended to represent, finally, the whole ritualistically controlled civilization of Mesoamerica as metaphorical of the spirit. Moreover, the clarity of its exposition, through the vehicle of the mask, of a consistent weltanschauung informing the whole spectacle of that civilization from the Olmec period, ca. 1200 B.C., to the folkways of the present enables this work to penetrate the veil that has so long obscured the mythological thought of that monumental flowering of civilization that took place in the middle zone of the Americas.

Developing as their thesis the idea that "for Mesoamerica all of reality—inner and outer, microcosmic and macrocosmic, natural and supernatural, earthly, subterranean, and celestial—formed one system whose existence betrayed itself in the order that could be discerned behind the apparent chaos of the natural world," the authors show in fascinating detail how that system, represented by the mask as a central metaphor, could bring into a unity the myriad details of the world of appearances confronting the Mesoamerican consciousness. They differentiate clearly between the ethnic ideas necessarily derived from that local experience and the elementary ideas they enclose, that is, between metaphor and connotation. And the wealth of detail they present enables them to demonstrate again and again how nature has been transformed by the shaping mind of the artist and seer into the mythic images, rites, and festivals through which life within the cultural monad is defined and controlled metaphorically in the way of art. For it is ultimately the artist, as the Markmans often remind us, whose transforming consciousness brings the images of this and every mythology to realization.

They understand and have used the complex historical factors that shaped Mesoamerican culture to penetrate ancient America's "mythogenetic zone," a zone I have defined elsewhere as any geographic area in which a language of mythic symbols and related rites can be shown to have sprung into being, from which diffused many of the forms with which we are familiar in the myths and tales of the native peoples of North America. We are introduced to the initiating metaphysical insights and an understanding of the connotations of the most important metaphoric customs of that civilization, and we are enabled to see the essential pattern of the development of those early insights into the elaborate mythological system existing in Mesoamerica at the time of the Conquest. Thus, because the imagery of a mythology is metaphorical of the reality of the people to whom it belongs, we are exposed, by means of the fortuitous choice of the mask, to the marvelously rich and highly complex mythological tradition of archaic Mesoamerica.

Their choice of the mask was indeed a fortuitous one. The mask has always been used as a ritual agent of transformation, and since a fundamental premise in Mesoamerican spiritual thought is that of the interchangeability through transformation of the inanimate, the lower animals, the human, and the divine, it is through the mask, which touches and exhilarates centers of life beyond the reach of the knowable, that the unknowable can be revealed. The mask, as the authors indicate, served both "as a symbolic covering of a spiritu-

ally important substance and . . . as a method of transforming the accidental to the essential, the ordinary to the extraordinary, the natural to the supernatural." Furthermore, it may be noted that the authors' insightful realization that "the most essential form of transformation does not require abandoning one state for another but allows them all to exist simultaneously" enables them to explain the "unfolding" of the god identities and to consider each of the individual gods as a set of symbols that constitutes a mask that specifies the particular aspect of the life-force being considered and not as a member of a group of fixed individual deities such as those of the Greek or Roman pantheon, a misconception that has dogged the study of Mesoamerican myth and religion and hindered its understanding and appreciation. If we are to seek a model in other civilizations, this study makes clear that it would more likely be found in Hindu than in Greek thought. Because the god identities were not always transformed in a diachronic process but rather exhibited a synchronic totality, they can furthermore be seen to exist simultaneously in more than one state.

For this reason, the discussion of transformation as the operational mode of the entire Mesoamerican cosmological system, to my mind the most significant single portion of the study, enables the Markmans to bring together all the areas of their earlier consideration: the shamanic underpinnings of the culture; the temporal order as manifested in the solar cycles revealing the macrocosmic order and the cycles of generation, death, and regeneration which revealed the corresponding microcosmic order and "provided proof to the Mesoamerican mind that there is no death in the world, only transformation, and there is no end to life, only changing forms, changing masks placed on the eternal and unchanging essence of life"; the spatial order that provided the impetus to reproduce the divine "shape" of space and time in architecture, thus marking the points of transformation from the earthly plane to the realms of the spirit; and the highly sophisticated, astronomically and numerologically derived calendars of Mesoamerica which "embodied in abstract form the whole process of transformation" and provided here, as they did in all of the archaic high civilizations, a glimpse into the essence of the eternal order as revealed through the celestial lights of the macrocosmic order.

The first task of any systematic study of the myths and religions of mankind should be the identification of the underlying universal ingredients, what Adolph Bastian termed the elementary ideas, and as far as possible, their interpretation; and the second task should be to recognize and interpret the various locally and historically conditioned transformations of those elementary ideas, Bastian's ethnic ideas, through which these universals have been rendered. But it must be remembered that in the final analysis, the religious experience is psychological and in the deepest sense spontaneous and universal. Thus, there surely can be no absolute or final system for the interpretation of the mythic images upon which religious experience is built and through which it is communicated. Since myths reply only to the questions put to them in the course of the study of any local mythology, what they disclose will be great or trivial according to the questions asked, and only those who are themselves alive to the fascination of the inexhaustible symbols of myth, always fresh and alive to the seeking, open mind, can ask the right questions. Those whose sole aim is to systematize and classify can understand neither the vitality nor the deep meaning of such symbols. Putting the right questions to the images constitutive of the Mesoamerican mythology which remain for our perusal enables the Markmans to gain replies that not only illuminate the structure of the ethnic ideas of that culture but reveal clearly the underlying elementary ideas that continue to fascinate. By doing that, this study enables one to relate these sometimes strange images and rites to those of the other cultures mankind has developed, cultures that must necessarily express the elementary ideas derived from our common psychological structure and basic life experiences, but each in images drawn from its particular, locally based experiences of the world so that for each reader the mythic thought of this now irretrievably destroyed civilization can come once more to life through the mythic image.

What we have here is an illuminated exposition of the spiritual content of a profoundly inspired, major religious system centered not in the worship of any single god but in the recognition, as in Hinduism, of a transcendent, yet immanent, informing ground of all being, an exposition whose argument is so clear that one hardly realizes to what complicated symbolic systems and profound mystical insights he is being introduced. After announcing their thesis in the prologue and then demonstrating that a mask may reveal rather than conceal as it bridges the gap between nature and spirit, the authors show one how to "read" the visual myth presented in the mask by presenting first the case of the Aztec god, Huitzilopochtli, to make clear that "the Mesoamerican visual statement uses specific items—features, masks, attire—combined in a plastic rather than narrative fashion" to specify the identity and function of the god.

Following that is a lengthy section devoted to an amazingly thorough investigation of the rain god in each aspect of its manifestation from the 0lmec were-jaguar to the time of the Conquest three thousand years later. Demonstrating that the figure identified by the rain god mask not only involved the provision of life-sustaining rain but was also concerned with divinely ordained rulership

and other fundamental themes of Mesoamerican spirituality, the authors suggest that these mythic forms point past local ethnic idiosyncrasies to mysteries of universal import, as mythic images are wont to do. Thus, it is no surprise that while it is in his seemingly infinitely varied metamorphoses that the fascination of this god resides, each of those metamorphic manifestations points directly to the underlying elementary idea linking fertility and rulership to the eternal cycle of life existing both microcosmically and macrocosmically. The analysis of the individual features that occur in these varied manifestations of the symbolic mask of the rain god enables the Markmans to explore the fusion of Olmec spiritual thought with the art styles and belief structures of the coexisting village cultures, and that exploration allows them to present a convincing explanation of the method by which those elementary ideas, crystallized first in Olmec culture, diffused to all of the high cultures of that zone, forming, by that process, one great mythological tradition. It is remarkable that all of this can be read so clearly in the features of the masks of the rain god in its various incarnations, and it is even more remarkable that this exploration of those symbolic features is able both to uncover the ethnic ideas of each of those cultures and the elementary ideas of which they are metaphoric.

This first part of the study concludes with a discussion of the mask as it was used in ritual, becoming therein a veritable apparition of the mythical being represented—even though everyone knew that a man made the mask and that a man wore it. As the authors show, that ritual wearer, so often depicted in the images of this mythic art, does not merely represent the god; he is the god. He manifests the life-force. Through that ritual transformation joining the worlds of spirit and nature, man and god fuse in what the Markmans, using Arnold van Gennep's conception as modified by Victor Turner, describe as a zone of liminality, a zone of mysterious transition marked in Mesoamerican myth, as elsewhere, by the mask that is itself metaphoric of that stage. This consideration of the ritual mask ends with a thorough investigation of the architectural masks that were used on ritual structures to signify and control the presence of the sacred and, ultimately, with a discussion of that final mask, the funerary mask by which the peoples of Mesoamerica attempted to comprehend the mystery of the return of the life-force to its source.

Following that detailed consideration of particular masks the study opens out into a consideration of the cosmological view underlying and gaining expression through those specific masks and presents with great clarity the shamanic assumptions forming the core of Mesoamerican spiritual thought, elements to be seen as early as the El Riego phase of the Tehuacán valley (ca. 8000-5800 B.C.) with the evidence of burial ceremonialism discovered by Richard MacNeish. Shamans were the first finders and exposers of those inner realities that are recognized today as of the psyche, and the myths and rites of which they were the masters served not only the outward (supposed) function of influencing nature, causing game to appear, illness to abate, foes to fall, and friends to flourish, but also the inward (actual) work of touching and awakening the deep strata and springs of the human imagination. So primitive man, from the first we know of him, here and elsewhere, through his myths and rites turned every aspect of his work and life into a festival celebratory of the wellsprings of his being, and these festivals, in Mesoamerica, made extensive use of the mask, which was itself metaphoric of the inner reality celebrated.

But as we know, man early turned to the heavens to further explore the mystery of being, and the order apparent there, most clearly in the sun, but most magnificently in all the orderly complexity of the glittering lights of the night sky, led him to a conception of cyclic time as a manifestation of the cosmic mystery. Thus, it is proper that the Markmans move from a consideration of the shaman's inner journey to Mesoamerica's "outward journey" into the heavens, through astronomy, to an understanding of the cycles through which time could be seen to move, cycles charted in the sophisticated calendrical systems by which the mysteries of the cosmos could be unlocked to reveal the underlying spiritual order that exists behind the mask. This complex calendrical system existing, so far as we know, only in the metaphoric god images of the sacred and solar calendars represents the Mesoamerican realization of a cosmos mathematically ordered, a realization that it is in the magic of number that the mystery of being ultimately resides, a realization directly parallel to that original realization of the Sumerians in the Tigris-Euphrates valleys ca. 3500 B.C.

But in the Mesoamerican experience, as this study clearly reveals, the revelation arising from the inner world of the shaman could be made compatible with that of the outer world reckoned by the skyward-looking priest in the temple through the solar cycle's metaphoric unification of the macrocosmic annual cycle of that burning orb with man's microcosmic cycle of birth, death, and regeneration. And, fascinating to behold, all of this was then fused with the spatial order through the identification of the path of the sun with the four world quarters. Thus is revealed a metaphorically conceived all-encompassing cosmic system reflective of the essential order of the cosmos and expressive of the divine essence, which is none other than the life-force itself. Quite obvious, then, is the fundamental importance of the concept of transformation to this cosmological view, for it is through transformation that the essence of life informs the

myriad manifestations of life in the world of nature. And it is the mask that is the transforming agent par excellence. Once again it is apparent that the generative conception, from which this study springs, of the mask as metaphor is a fortunate opening, giving unity and clarity to the whole.

As I have remarked above, transformation seems to me to provide the core of this study since that conception unites all of its elements. It is through the transformation of creation that god becomes man; and it is through the transformation of sacrifice that man "feeds" god just as it is through the transformation of the seasonal changes of the earth that god provides food for man. But it is also through the transformation wrought by the artist that the commonplace materials of life become images expressive of the power of the mysterious force of life. For the peoples of Mesoamerica, as the evidence here adduced so eloquently testifies, as for all the peoples of this earth, it was the artist who was able to render the message of the spirit through his heritage of symbols, images, myth motives, and hero deeds. And so this concluding consideration of transformation brings us full circle to the metaphorical implications of the mask as that which covers the animating spirit of the wearer corresponding in that way to the world of nature which "covers" the animating hidden spiritual world that must come from beyond "meaning" on all levels at once, most important, through the images of the artist, if man is to survive.

The final section of the text carries us beyond the time of the great Conquest by Cortés to the present day through the violent transformation of conditions represented by the introduction of Christianity and illuminates the fate of the mask in those crucial four hundred fifty years. The study here of the syncretic processes that occurred through the fusion of the Christian and pagan religious beliefs is a marvelous analysis of every significant aspect of that uneasy merging of two of the world's great mythological traditions, and it is followed by a study of the uses of two exemplary mask forms in the rites which represent the terms of the relationship between those two traditions: the masks of the Tigre through which the symbolic features of the pre-Columbian rain god continue in existence and the masks of the Pascola of northwest Mexico in which the syncretic compromise of the two traditions is evident. Used in ritual still today, the mask remains a manifestation of the living myth bringing together the worlds of spirit and matter. Providing a fitting conclusion to this last section, the final chapter looks at another type of mask being carved today and voices what may well be a prophetic concern with the loss of meaning in the use of festival masks, which no longer serve to carry the human spirit forward because the signal code is losing its force as the conditions from which it sprang undergo alteration, the new conditions no longer permitting the group to experience the mystery of existence in the old way. For when the metaphoric implications of the mythic image become too far removed from the immediate experience of the group, myth and rite lose their power.

But the Markmans find hope where others might despair. They allow us to see that even as the traditional mask with its age-old symbolic features seems to be losing its metaphoric power, the mask has found new life as a symbol in modern Mexican art, and at least two important artists, both born Indians, have used the mask as a means of drawing from the indigenous past a metaphor capable of revealing the spiritual mystery at the heart of things and allowing the yea-saying made possible through the transformation of art. Like the shamans, priests, seers, and artists of the past, such modern artists have mastered metaphorical language and continue to serve, as the artist always has, as mankind's wakener to recollection: a summoner of the outward-turning mind to an awareness of inner reality and then to conscious contact with the universe without in the way of the spirit. For art is the mirror at the interface where the worlds without and within must meet. Like ritual and myth, art thus reestablishes within each of us our own deep truth and allows us to know that our own truth is at one with that of all being. Once known through the way of art, that truth allows communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another, precisely the communication that in earlier systems was the function of myth and rite.

When Marija Gimbutas said of Vinca art that "it is almost unbelievable that during the thirty or more years in which essays treating Vinca art have appeared, there has been no sustained reference to the mask, its most captivating element,"^[*] she might well have been writing of the neglected treatment of the essential metaphoric role of the mask in Mesoamerican ritual and mythic thought. This neglect is surprising, especially so when we realize that the first monumental civilization of the New World appears to have been created by the Olmecs ca. 1200 B.C. at roughly the same time that the Late Shang dynastic capital was built in China at Anyang (Honan), ca. 1384-1025 B.C.; the same time as the legendary fall of Troy to the Achaeans, ca. 1184 B.C., marking the end of the Mycenaean period and the beginning of Hellenic civilization ca. 1100 B.C.; the same time that the Colossi of Rameses II were built in Egypt, ca. 1290-1225 B.C.; and the time of Moses, ca. 1250-1200 B.C. We have had the opportunity to understand the root metaphors of the Chinese, Egyptian, Hebrew, and Hel-

* Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1982), 60.

lenic worlds through the many perceptive studies of the mythologies of those civilizations readily available to us. But this has not been true of the metaphorical form at the center of the Mesoamerican mythological tradition until the publication of this study, which I believe will stand for many years as the most coherent and comprehensive as well as eminently readable exposition yet composed of the Mesoamerican experience, an experience whose fragmentary remains still give us the sense of a majesty and spiritual force yet to be fully recognized.

It should perhaps have been expected that a work of this nature would have been written by comparativists conversant, by training and inclination, with the methods and scholarship of history, including the history of art and of religions, anthropology, including (presently) archaeology and ethnology, literary and art criticism, and the comparative study of mythology. The spiritual development of Mesoamerican culture, like that of any culture, must be studied through the images that comprise its mythology, and these images require what is today known as an interdisciplinary approach if they are to yield their insights, since no single modern discipline is capable of encompassing the references or understanding the language of the images of the great mythologies. For that reason, perhaps, the great mythical and cosmological thought of Mesoamerica has too long been hidden in specialists' monographs that are necessarily technical, scattered, fragmentary, and very difficult to coordinate.

Presented without jargon, the scholarship here is formidable yet unaggressive, and conflicting opinions of major scholars in the field are constructively interpreted, reconciled, and coordinated as the result of the Markmans' ability to penetrate beneath the surface of these symbolic images to the underlying structure, deriving from that structure the interpretation of the symbol. This, as any reader of specialist publications in comparable fields must realize, is an unusual ability. Particularly impressive in this regard is their treatment of the controversy over the nature of the connection between the god images of the Olmec and those of the Aztecs millennia later, a controversy generated by Michael Coe's and Peter Joralemon's assertion that the prototypes of particular Aztec gods may be identified in Olmec art. This claim provoked heated opposition of several types, but as is here argued, that opposition, as well as the original assertion, was the result of too great a concentration on specific images to the neglect of the underlying structure generative of those images and alone supportive of their meaning. When viewed in the light of this structure, the controversy surrounding these images fades and their true relationship appears.

Similarly reconciled are the differing interpretations of the metaphoric images found in the mural art of Teotihuacán. George Kubler argues that those images may not be read in terms of the meanings attached to similar images in the centuries later Toltec and Aztec art of that region, while Esther Pasztory argues that those later meanings may be used, and Laurette Séjourné, taking a different tack and condemned for it by both Kubler and Pasztory, among many others, attempts to read essentially Platonic meanings in these images. The Markmans not only reconcile these opposed interpretations, seemingly so fundamentally at odds, but demonstrate that each interpretation is essentially correct in its treatment of the piece of the puzzle it chooses to solve. However, the puzzle is larger—and deeper—than those who would solve it realize, and only the realization of its most fundamental level of meaning, what Bastian terms the elementary idea, makes possible the recognition that interpretations on other levels are to be seen as applications of the elementary idea. The reconciliation of such seemingly divergent views on the basis of detailed analyses of the matter at hand is scholarship at its best. I know of no other work in the field of Mesoamerican studies that analyzes such images so insightfully or that interprets every aspect of the grandiose symbolic development from Olmec to contemporary times as thoroughly and thoughtfully as the present study.

Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the work, however, is that it offers not only a series of insights into the local mythology of Mesoamerica but also a truly significant insight into the nature of mythology per se. Its constant return to the theme of the mask as the agent of transformation from inner to outer makes the symbolic mask not only a metaphor for the understanding of Mesoamerican myth but a metaphor for myth. For myths, by their very nature, function to reveal the inner in terms of the outer. Novalis's saying captures the essential idea: "The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and inner worlds meet." To that magic, germinating point of myth, the senses bring images from the world to be transformed through contact with accordant insights awakened as imagination from the inner world of the body. For the Buddhist, these are Buddha Realms, orders of consciousness to be brought to mind through meditations on appropriately mythologized forms. For Plato, these are universal ideas, lost from memory at birth, to be recalled only through philosophy. And these, of course, are Bastian's elementary ideas and Jung's archetypes of the collective unconscious. And for the seers of ancient Mesoamerica, these are levels of inner reality to be brought to consciousness in the guise of the mask, that seemingly perfect metaphor for the inner made outer. Finishing this fascinating study, we are left to ponder the connection between these masks of the spirit and our own inner reaches.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL
1987