It may be said that the mask gives its wearer a different "persona", changing its usual human personality into something else: a different human, a god, a demon, a totem animal, or the spirit of an ancestor. C. G. Jung gave the nickname "persona" to the daily appearance of form and character of a mature person, who uses it to show the world a different personality from his inner, true one. The word, however, has come down to modern times from the masks worn by actors in the ancient Greek theatre.
The Greek theatre was under the patronage of the god Dionysus, or his Roman parallel Bacchus, having begun as a ritual dedicated to that god. Special masks showed Dionysus/ Bacchus, as well as other gods taking part in that ritual like Zeus/ Jupiter, Hera/ Juno, and Athena/ Minerva, who were the chief divinities of Greece and Rome. With the development from ritual to non-religious theatre, however, some of the masks represented not gods but characters that expressed human feelings and ideas like sad or angry masks for the tragedy, laughing or happy for the comedy, a philosopher’s mask, and so on.
The Japanese theatre uses masks in a different way. There, the figures only rarely have human characteristics; they mostly belong to animal demons, which represent various forces of nature, mainly evil ones. These figures have been used by different Japanese artists, who were inspired to paint them as masks. One such creature is the she-demon Hannya, whose ivory mask looks like a demonic face with horns; another is the mask of a creature called Kohona Tengu, who appears with a twisted face with one eye and unrecognized features. It seems that the Japanese masks were used mainly for threatening; on the other hand, the ancient Celts used many masks to show beautiful creatures of fantasy—fairies, for instance—expressing beauty or the yearning for beauty, as can be seen at the site of Ancient Circles.
