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Coda II: The Mask as Metaphor

The system of metaphoric images that we find embodied in Mesoamerican art has as its function the revelation of inner truth through outward forms. Worldly images and materials are combined, often in distinctly unnatural ways, in each work of art as a way of allowing the underlying, otherwise unseen order of the universe to appear in this world. The relationship between physical and spiritual in that art is the same relationship defined for Aztec society by the concept of the deified heart according to which one could, and should, use his physical being to express his true, spiritual being. In that way, the material world could be transformed into spirit.

The raison d'être of the mask is, of course, to transform. It is a visual metaphor bringing together wearer and identity in an "instantaneous fusion of two separated realms of experience in one illuminating, iconic, encapsulating image."^[1] In pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, and still today among indigenous groups, the image on the mask was chosen by the wearer or his society to replace the "image on the body" because it was spiritually significant. Such a use of metaphoric images, Jamake Highwater says, is "one of the central ways by which humankind ritualizes experience and gains personal and tribal access to the ineffable, . . . the unspeakable and ultimate substance of reality."^[2] Thus, according to Campbell, masks "touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion^[3] and point "directly to a relationship between two terms , the one empirical, the other metaphysical; the latter being, absolutely and forever and from every conceivable human standpoint, unknowable."^[4]

The mask, then, stands as a metaphoric recreation of what cannot otherwise be known and as such becomes the symbolic equivalent of the world of nature that "covers" the animating spirit just as the ritual mask covers the wearer who animates it. It is fascinating, and a testament to the fascination produced by the idea of the mask, that we find in one of the most significant passages in Herman Melville's Moby Dick a similar insight into the nature of the mask and its metaphoric role. Trying to explain the whale's responsibility for his rage and his unquenchable drive to get beyond the mask that the whale represents to him so as to confront the order of the universe that both lies beyond it and is given material form through it, Ahab says,

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.^[5]

For Ahab, nature expresses spirit in much the same way it did for the cultures of Mesoamerica which used the mask as a central metaphor for the transformative relationship between matter and spirit. For them, the mask, as a symbolic covering of a spiritually important substance, served as a method of transforming the accidental to the essential, the ordinary to the extraordinary, the natural to the supernatural.

Schele and Miller in their recent study of the Maya recreate the thinking of a Maya lord, and in

that recreation suggest both the symbolic power and the metaphoric character of the mask for the peoples of Mesoamerica.

The style of this jade mask is clearly Olmec and would have been recognized as such by the Maya. It is possible that the identity of the portrait was still remembered in Maya times, but more likely the person portrayed was perceived to be from a legendary time. . . . A Maya lord, drawn perhaps to the immediacy and lifelike quality of the portrait, used this mask. Two glyphs, probably his own name, were carved on each flange, but only the left pair now survives. The way these two glyphs are drawn—backward so that they face toward the Olmec portrait—reveals the attitude of the Maya toward this object. By setting his name upon this heirloom, he claimed the Olmec portrait as his own, perhaps as a declaration of his identity with the kings of antiquity and as a means of controlling the sacred power stored in this extraordinary object.^[6]

Indeed, he may have claimed the Olmec portrait as his own especially in the sense that it revealed his true, spiritual identity as man and ruler. By wearing this mask as a pectoral, that Maya lord was asserting his true identity. And just as that mask could reach across centuries of time to join Olmec and Maya, so the masks of Mesoamerica, properly regarded, can speak to us about the spiritual lives of their creators who used those masks as well as the concept of the mask to stand as a metaphor for their relationship to all they held most sacred.