Explores ancient mask customs, rituals, and traditions throughout Europe, from Scandinavia and England to Germany and France to Greece and Rome • Reveals how mask rituals are akin to shamanic journeying and allow the mask wearer to personify an ancestral presence, spirit, deity, or power • Examines animal guising and shows how mask customs are tied to creation myths and the ancestral founders of a people, tribe, city, or nation • Looks at morris dancers and mummers in the UK, Krampuslauf and Perchtenlauf in Germanic areas, the Gorgon myths of Greece,

Norse Berserker rituals, and the annual Black Forest rite to awaken ensouled masks every spring There is a spiritual power in masks that transports one into realms unseen and gives voice to things unspoken. Within the context of ritual, putting on a mask places the wearer at the intersection between the present and the past, the living and the dead, this world and the Otherworld.