Weird News: A Hanuman Mask Photo Op

This image was originally released by the Associated Press and reposted on the BBC News website. Here, a Hindu in India wears a mask depicting the features of the monkey god Hanuman for a seasonal festival. This one struck me very subjectively, but also in a way I imagine it might have hit other readers of the weird. Several ways, come to think of it. Before going further, however, I would hope the mask also possesses some intrinsic qualities of the awe-inspiring and unusual, even to readers unfamiliar with weird fiction. And I do believe it does.

That said, the first fanciful observation on the mask centers on what it might conceal. Images of Lovecraft's eerie, famous Hindu character, the Swami Chandraputra, immediately comes to mind. Anyone who read "Through the Gates of the Silver Key" knows the Swami's face is itself a bizarre disguise, for the grotesque creature from Yaddith beneath, and the essence of Randolph Carter behind that. From this single nugget of Lovecraft, a person needs no more than weak nudging to conjure up a million forms, blasphemous and beautiful, for the true face behind the mask.

Another odd musing on this face (or faces?) is what it represents. In reality, this mask represents Lord Hanuman, a famed figure in Hindu epic literature and belief, responsible for upholding strength, righteousness, and wisdom, among other things. However, a Lovecraft might see this as nothing but a thin, humanized veneer for the true material thing lurking back in the past represented by this mask, or even by the entire school of thought. A Dunsany might glimpse the seed of an infinite fantasy, where the lesser gods like Hanuman dance in a dreamy clockwork set and perpetuated by the greater god of Time. A Ligotti might see a blurring of identities in layer upon layer of faces. However, unlike the man hidden in the alien hidden in the mask that characterized Lovecraft's "Through the Gates of the Silver Key," the Ligottian mask is just a thin obstacle to seeing an entire universe of masks, with nothing more substantial than empty puppets behind them.

Finally, one so mentally addled with the weird might wonder what this colorful guise reveals. Above all else, it reveals the power of weird fiction to gorge the already magnificent sense of the unearthly inspired by real life religions. Perhaps, it also shows a lingering sense of Western ignorance in knee-jerk charm at the religious glamor of the East, which I confess to being vulnerable to. And the rest? You decide. For those who wish to breathe strange atmosphere into almost anything that would otherwise just gain passing notice, like a news photo from a far flung land, acquaintance with the weird is indispensable.

-Grim Blogger