For your celebratory mask-making ceremonies, you can and should design your own wild woman images. You can also choose from a list of classical goddess images, such as:
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Peacock Woman is Juno, whose totem is the royally plumed bird
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Blog posts tagged in masks
Today is October 31.2021 and All Hallow's Eve/Halloween. This is the season for costumes, masks and becoming something other than yourself. In some cases that metamorphosis guides the individual towards a new way of being in the world and in others it is an opportunity to try on another persona. And, for others it is a way of stepping out of the everyday and into projecting a new image for a short period of time.
So, what mask are you wearing today? What is it that you wish to project into the world? What are you temporarily stepping away from to become some(one/thing) else? We have ll been through so much this year and a half+ and re-entering the world has been challenging for some and still not an option for others. And, so I ask what mask you have chosen as a way to give some deep consideration to how we wish to move forward.
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Diane Don Carlos and I wrote this song for Merrymeet 1998, the year of the first-ever official male-male Great Rite at a pagan festival. It's set to the tune of Gula Gula, a hymn to the Earth Mother by Saami singer-songwriter Mari Boine Persen.
The chant explores the depths of the mysteries of the Mask, and, ultimately, the complex and layered nature of the Self.
The Mask Song
With these eyes, what are you seeing?
With these ears, what are you hearing?
With this heart, what are you feeling?
Who are you, the mask or me?
Who are you, the mask or me?
The mask—and, in particular, the horned mask—is generally reckoned among the mysteries of the Horned Lord; his priest wears it to personify Him in ritual. As such, it is also accounted a men's mystery.
Why?
As is usual with the archaic, ones looks for origins to humanity's perennial preoccupation, the getting of food.
As such, the mask originated as a strategy of the hunt.
To disguise your scent and outline, you wear the head and hide of (for example) a deer. Here we see the origins of disguise generally.
It is also the origin of the personifying priesthood: pretending, in effect, to be who you are not. Disguise yourself as a deer and act like a deer, and it gives you a better chance of taking the deer that you need to feed both you and your People.
This also explains the Mask's specific (though, of course, not exclusive) association with men. Although among people who live by hunting-gathering, virtually everyone—regardless of age or sex—hunts as well as gathers, hunting is generally accounted part of the men's sphere, since hunting large animals is dangerous and (to be quite frank), in the larger life of any given society, men are more readily expendable than women.
To this day, the priest of the Horned still wears the god's horned mask at the Sabbat, and a sacred connection to our food-sources lies at the very heart of the Sabbat and everything that we do there.
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In one form or another, Tehomet, I suspect that these ethics have been around for as long as we've been hunting. They're our imme -
I enjoyed this article, thank you. How old is that Charge, do you think?
And there's the mystery:
that down the long years
all manner of men have worn it,
yet somehow, in the end,
it's always him.
They say,
An artist creates masks that celebrate goddess spirituality. A Pagan writer considers the place of disabled persons within the social justice movement. And does the Pagan community have a problem with cultural appropriation? It's Watery Wednesday, our weekly feed for news about the Pagan community! All this and more for the Pagan News Beagle!
