In modern days, people sometimes dress up for the sole purpose of being identified professionally; judges wear wigs and lawyers special cloaks; doctors wear white coats and nurses add a special head gear; soldiers and policemen wear special uniforms, and so do some schoolchildren; Christian clergy wear a "dog collar", and other priestly functionaries wear a variety and sometimes colorful garments. Some dress up not professionally but for special occasions: black (or white in the Far East) for funerals; evening gowns for women; near naked for bathing, and so on.
The most prominent of modern occasions are those made up specially for the purpose of wearing masks and dressing up (or down) as far as the imagination can go; these occasions are called Masques or Carnivals. Many of them, especially those that have been in use for centuries, are direct descendants from seasonal rituals, and most of them take place at the same season of the year, which is around the end of February, symbolizing the fight between the darkness of winter and the revival of spring. The Chinese dragon procession, for instance, takes place at the New Year which falls in that month; similarly, the European Mardi Gras (which is also celebrated in the French part of the U.S.A.), and the Brazilian carnival—which, admittedly, because of its geographical position, no longer occurs at the beginning of spring; and the Jewish festival of Purim, which purports to celebrate a national overcoming of an enemy, but is perhaps taken from the initial Persian battle between evil/ winter and good/ spring. This battle is well presented at the festival celebrated in the Dominican Republic, as described by Ivan Erickson. That carnival expresses particularly a state of conflict and clash as seen by the special masks worn by the participants, and by their rather violent behavior; the result of the ensuing battle is always the winning of the "good" figures over the "demonic" ones, in the best tradition of that particular seasonal ritual.
In contrast to the spring masquerade, Halloween falls in autumn. The seasonal battle here takes place between the end of summer and the coming of winter, and it celebrates the winning of the latter and the death of the year. In consequence, the masks worn here are usually those of fearsome animals and threatening demons, and even the game of "treat or trick" may have unpleasant outcomes, in contrast of the pretty and happy masks and the gay atmosphere of the spring carnival.
The Oxford Companion to English Literature1 mentions that "masques, dramatic entertainments involving dances and disguises... were popular" at a certain time in Europe. One such occasion forms the scene for Edgar Ellen Poe's story The Masque of the Red Death2 taking part in a flourishing castle. Usually, wearing a mask means pretending to be someone you are not, and such is the case of the lords and ladies taking part in Poe's masque; this "gay and magnificent revel" was full of "delirious fancies, beautiful, much of the wanton and the bizarre, something of the terrible and not a little of that which might have excited disgust"—clearly, outside these lords and ladies everyday life. But among these exulted people who did not look what they usually did, an intruder appeared, one mask presented to the world exactly what it really was, and this was the dress of the Red Death, the lethal disease that at the time inflicted the earth; this plague was the one from which the same lords and ladies wanted to find shelter in the Castle, but in vain.
Notes:
1 Initially published by Oxford University Press in 1932 and edited by Sir Paul Harvey, the fifth edition is edited by Margaret Drabble, 1985
2 Available free at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1062
