AESCHYLUS preserved in one of his plays a relic of the earliest rituals of Greece, the masked figure who is half horse and half rooster. And in the carnivals of Pinzgau and Pongau in the Austrian Tyrol, a descendant of the curious and classic beast appears in this antlered deer with the beak of a bird. This mask represents a Perchten--one of the "echt" Perchten, in fact. Twelve of these demons--old as time--appear in the procession of fifty or sixty young men who pass through the villages on the first Sunday after Twelfth Night masked as dragons, devils, and all manner of monstrosities, human and bestial. They riot down the streets, striking with whips, cow tails, and other phallic switches, the women that line the way. Young wives, anxious for offspring, gaze upon the potent symbols of fecundity depicted on the masks. From such ancient festivals, demoniacal and comic, developed that masking madness which spread down Italy, and carried disguises through carnivals that lasted six months. In the eighteenth century, from October to Christmas, from Twelfth Night to Lent, and indeed on the slightest pretext thereafter, people went about grotesquely disguised. In a scrap of a half-mask or elaborately helmeted, they shopped and called and danced, invaded church and palace, did business and pressed law suits. Under the mask all was democracy and license.
from Sacred Spiral.
MEETING OF DAEMONS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30JEDXjKyzc
run time: 4 minutes and 31 seconds
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