The Quiet Nightmares of Men in Masks
The wearing of a mask is an act of prayer, an unspoken and often unwitting offering to The God of False Faces; an invitation to the greedy influence of Its ageless animus and anima. Born on the say of Its wordless whisper, masks have been a part of human culture since wood and rock could be worked into crude forms, becoming integral to their rituals and play alike until their transformative powers had secured the idea of masks a place as an essential aspect of the human psyche. The forms that masks have taken, the intent behind their creation, has varied throughout history and geography, but the The God of False Faces has no shown no particular favour to any tradition over its fellows. Instead The God of False Faces does Its works in anonymity, worshipped in function but never by Its unknowable name as It feeds off both the fascinated attentions and the shivers of uncanny discomfort that Its many avatars variously evoke.
The God of False Faces is greedy for experience; a vicarious neophile and thrill-seeker promoting an atypical courage and solipsistic hedonism in those who, in wearing a mask or disguise, open themselves up to It. A passenger from the most ancient parts of the brain and the unconscious It grants enervation without a specific agenda giving those It inhabits a primitive and primal energy which moulds the recipient into someone, something, more likely to provide the entertainment It craves. The wearing of masks can even be addictive to those whose own spirit is so lacklustre that The God of False Faces’ influence offers an invigoration whose loss is felt so keenly as to be painful. Such tragic figures may not even realise the cause of their sickness, merely recourse to wearing their mask with increasing frequency as their own self becomes thin and drawn, a paper-like shadow which merely acts as a vessel for the insatiable appetite that is the The God of False Faces.
Needless to say The God of False Faces thrives when large numbers of its tributes are worn together, its influence building almost-exponentially as its unknowing followers congregate. Whilst the word “possession” has come to signify, in the modern parlance, something more drastic than is typical in the event of a mask being donned, there have been any number of psychological studies which explored the manifold effects that are exhibited in those who have been so changed by The God of False Faces and it seems wilfully obtuse to deny the uniformity of effect that that influence, unchanged even by the presence or absence of anonymity, exerts. This influence is such that once one has worn a mask (of any variety or for any length of time) they might occasionally dream of The God of False Faces, a shifting amorphous figure whose masks peel away like leaves from a tree only to expose endless layers of similar obfuscations…
HAPPY HA’AL O’WE’EN FROM POSTMODERN IDIOSYNCRASIES
