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In his admirable work Les Masques, Georges Buraud was the first to make clear the profound significance behind the need that – throughout history and in every place in the world – has motivated human beings to hide their faces behind a figure modelled after an animal and made to resemble an ancestor or represent a god. He shows how such men – endowed with the power to observe the emotions that their appearance stirs in those who see them without having to reveal any of their own – actually identify with the being they strive to represent, and how they participate in and incite their whole group to participate in, the occult forces which rule the world. In the course of the ensuing passionate interaction, “all the powers with which the individual relates are the forces of his unconscious with which he has populated the world and which, in the form of fluids, presences, fears and energies, come back to him to compel or exalt him. He and his entire tribe (a colossal body of instinctive forces) become encompassed as if by a gigantic chrysalis in which they remain enclosed within this immense network of beneficial or frightening influences that in reality emanated from them. All that remains of what is unexplained and fatal in the world becomes a part of this cocoon of resonating instincts that primitive man drags behind him wherever he goes, further amplifying it as he endows it with immeasurable depth.”[…] Thus the power of the art which animates these masks, and the secret of their profound resonance with us might come from that which, in the lyrical shortcut of an initiation rite – from fish to bird, from bird to man – sums up one of the most vertiginous jumps of human kind by realizing a transformation not only of thought but of action.”—André Breton.
