A well-made mask always enthralls us. A marvelous costume, too, piques our sense of wonder. But we change clothes everyday. A mask is something special.

A mask is a simple thing. It covers the face. Yet our face is our identity, so covering it—or, replacing it—supplants our identity, and we are transformed.

Having been to a masked ball or two in my day, I have noted that the transformation caused by the mask is not only cosmetic, it is internal as well. People's behaviors change. Shrouded in our new persona, we are challenged to display new powers. We are released from our daily skins, and born anew in manifestations of our own personal symbolism.

In ancient days beyond the history of polite societies, when people lived in tribes or clans, masks were powerful. Masks served as an identity for the tribe. It provided a spiritual heritage, and a rallying point. Masks were entertainment and tools of learning, used by storytellers to teach the tales of mythologized ancestors. Masks were holy, used by shaman and spirit alike during ecstatic seasonal rituals designed to connect the two worlds of flesh and spirit, matter and energy. Men commanded bear spirits, or wolves, or ravens, and the spirits commanded the movements of the shaman—and the fate of the tribe—through the authority of the trancendental mask.