“The mask is a dead structure that is superimposed on another, the face, surprisingly dynamic and alive,” says the philosopher and humanist Mario Satz to conclude the conversation with this journalist at his home in Valldoreix, a charming town in the Collserola mountains, a few kilometers from Barcelona, but with a totally different landscape: humid, green, peaceful and slightly Anglo-Saxon. Nothing to do with the Mediterranean physiognomy of the Catalan capital.
But his sentence contains within it the whole development of The face and its masks (Acantilado, 2024), the exciting essay that Satz has just published. Playing with the reader and aware of his great erudition, this humanist of Argentine origin but living in Spain since 1978, exposes us in the text to a continuous leap between continents and cultures to try to unravel the role of masks in different civilizations.
And at the same time he interweaves a portrait of the different components of the human face, whether it be the eyes, lips, eyebrows, nose, etc. and how over the centuries and latitudes physiognomists (from France or Germany to China) have interpreted the possibilities of these components: for example the upturned nose, the angular nose, the aquiline nose; or bulging eyes, lips arched downwards, etc.
The aim is to show the contrast between something alive and dynamic and the dead and inert structures that are masks. The inevitable question is: why do we use masks if they erase the vitality of the face? Satz’s answer is not simple, but he gives two fundamental clues during the interview. The first is that masks are not really dead, at least functionally and spiritually.
A bridge to the beyond
“They have at least one function in the majority of cultures that use them: to serve as a bridge between the real and the mythological; the physical and what is in the beyond,” explains the philosopher, who also adds that “their use in the ritual sense requires that those who wear them dance them.” This means that they stage a dance or a performance with them, so that the mask comes to life, justifies itself and expresses itself through it.
This happens in Mexico, where pale masks also represent oppressive Europeans, and thus evil characters, during the dance. But it also happens in Arizona with the Hopi Indians, an ethnic group in which children are given masked dolls, the kachinasso that they can learn the steps of masked dances by moving them. And of course, this happens in Asia, where Tibetans dance with their intimidating masks; or in Japan, where dance turns into theater in Noh and the mask into makeup in Kabuki.
It is understood that the dance is the confirmation that the mask is linked to the afterlife, to the spirits it represents, whether ancestors or divinities invoked to represent hunting, fertility or, on many occasions, death, as happened in the Middle Ages. macabre dances that appeared after the plague struck Europe.
Community versus individual
The second explanation proposed by Satz is that “the mask dilutes individuality, subjects the face and therefore the individual to anonymity, and in this context integrates it into the community, which is the true social body.” The author also establishes a correlation between types of religion and the use of masks, so that animist religions, those that believe in a community of gods that interact with each other, develop a whole culture of masks.
“But monotheistic religions, on the other hand, advocate the predominance of the individual over the community, which corresponds to their interpretation of a single God,” he explains. Thus, Christianity, Judaism and especially Islam reject masks that hide the face and with them individual responsibility. “The Muslim armies that conquered Egypt had a soldier in charge of destroying the faces of statues,” Satz explains about Islam. “The religion in which God has no face because he has them all,” he adds.
“Hence the aversion to painting Allah, because by giving him a face all the others are stolen,” he concludes. But it goes further The face and its masks and he ventures into the realm of veils, chadors and burqas to believe that if, as Ludwig Wittgenstein said, the face is the soul of the body, the goal of radical doctrines is to appropriate the face to control bodies.
In the same spirit, but with the opposite aim, in carnivals (Venice, Hamburg, etc.) the celebrants hide behind masks to free themselves from their promiscuous instincts, which, Satz agrees, could be described as a dissimulation with regard to the whole embracing and watchful god. The philosopher, however, cites the Roman carnivals, where masks were already used to reverse social roles.
The Western Cult of the Face
But beyond Islam, under Christianity humanism developed and with it the cult of personality. In ancient Greece person This was the name given to the masks used in the theater. In Christianity, the individual (the face) replaces the mask and its functions and appropriates the “person” to call itself. However, the development of humanism, with all the progress it has brought, also has its dark corners.
“Masks, traditionally, are passed down from generation to generation and are preserved with the awareness that they accumulate the scents and energy of those who wore them in the past,” explains Satz. They represent ancestors, touching them is remembering them and they themselves age over time, as if they were another member of the family or community.
“In the humanist West, this function is replaced by photographs,” adds the author, who explains that in this way they try to fix the human face at a specific moment, denying its evolution towards aging. “We are looking for a kind of portrait of Dorian Gray through photographs and now especially with selfies and the platforms to put them online,” he adds sarcastically.
In this way, the passage of time is devalued, just as the first European explorers who collected masks did, depriving them of their sacred value: “They tore off the raffia that covered them, which is the fabric that the dancer wore as a costume and which culminated in the mask. In doing so, they deprived them of context: “We didn’t know how old they were or who had made them.” They transformed them into dead objects that had lost their sacred value and become affordable on the market. In this regard, Satz emphasizes: “To desecrate is to put a price on the value of the sacred.”
The face as a mirror of the soul
Since civilizations have existed, human beings have always tried to unravel the human soul or, if we want to put it more prosaically, the personality through the face. It is not for nothing that it is said that “the face is the mirror of the soul”. Many are the readings that have been given to the infinite variety of faces through physiognomy, a pseudoscience that nevertheless has a great tradition.
“Balzac followed the postulates of physiognomy to draw the characters of his novels,” illustrates Satz, who sets out in the book the different physiognomic schools and certain interpretations of the different parts of the face. It is in this context that at the end of the conversation he drops the sentence that titles the text: “The mask is a dead structure that is placed on another, the face, surprisingly dynamic and alive.”
In this regard, in The face and its masks For example, the gestural parsimony of Japanese Noh theatre, due to the use of masks, contrasts with the richness of gestures performed by actors in Japanese Kabuki theatre, who do not use masks but makeup. This is why Satz is so unhappy with the compulsive use of photography. And also surgery for purely aesthetic purposes, the aim of which is to transform the face into an inert and timeless mask. “The skull is the last mask we will use,” the philosopher reminds us in his postface.
