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Here I offer some reflections and several facts potentially useful for a phenomenology of the mask Needless to say, these hypotheses are of an adventurous character With them I offer nothing less than an origin to the universal use of the mask by people, which goes back beyond this species, to the insects who still wear it     1 The Importance of the Mask   All humanity wears or has worn a mask This enigmatic accessory without useful end is more widespread than the lever, the bow, the harpoon or the plough Some peoples were entirely ignorant of more humble, or more precious tools Yet, they knew of the mask Some civilisations, among them the most remarkable, have prospered without having the idea of the wheel, or, worse, without knowing how to use it Yet they were familiar with the mask Man in general, abstract and hypothetical man, from the first eras and the first cultures – could not have embodied more accurately, more appropriately, Descartes’s saying: ‘I advance masked’ There is not a tool, an invention, a belief, a custom, or an institution which brings about the unity of humanity to the same degree accomplished by the wearing of the mask   The Mask remains mysterious What are the reasons that have driven people to cover their faces with a second visage, instrument of metamorphosis and ecstasy, of possession by the gods – instrument, as well, of intimidation and of political power? All of ethnology is filled with masks, and with the vertigo, the trances, the hypnoses, and the panics that are its nearly inevitable consequences Here I chance my first sprawling hypothesis: a people enters history and civilisation the moment they reject the mask, when they repudiate it as an instrument of individual or collective panic, once they consign it to an institutional function Even reduced to a simple carnival accessory or mundane festivity, it disquiets and fascinates Its power of seduction has been completely appropriated, yet it does not disappear I will come back to this For the moment, though, I would like only to underline that the problem