SCAPEGOAT MASK
I created the Goat Mask for TRAGOS, a film by visionary film maker Antero Alli (2000). I also created the mask as a community ritual, in collaboration with Melissa Penn, who is a non-denominational minister, to understand and exorcise the demons of scapegoating in all of us.
A paper chain was made of stories ritual participants gave to us, and in time the chain was burned, and the mask was left in the Sonoran desert wilderness in Southern Arizona, to be dissipated by the heat and the wind. In Biblical times, the Scapegoat was an important tribal ritual, whereby a litany of the sins and tribulations of the tribe were recited, and symbolically laden onto the back of a goat. The goat was then released into the desert, to bear their burdens away. Through this ritual of witnessing and naming, a cleansing or purification had occurred.
In the modern world we have few such "at-one-ment rites" to make conscious destructive projections, as well as a sacred means to collectively witness our grief. Hence, the scapegoating of each other, of "other", of the weak and disenfranchised - of the Earth - is done without conscious understanding.
"We forge a chain made of fear, fear of the other, fear of being diminished, fear of being magnificent. When we witness the mask of the scapegoat, we witness the links in this ongoing tragedy that chains us to our suffering. The ancient, sacred role of the scapegoat was to take this burden back into the desert. We give it to the beast of the wilderness. Our links are those projections that keep us from compassion, from being in right relationship. Back and forth, goat and goated."
Melissa Penn, 1999
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