DEATH & THE DEVIL

To frighten evil spirits away from their homes and villages on festival days, Mexicans put on the faces of nightmare bulls. Chinese dragons, purple monkeys, Byzantine kings, Greek satyrs, cranberry-colored Satans and a host of nameless beings as varied as they are scary. Small papier-mache masks for children sell for only a few cents in every market place; more elaborate examples, carved from wood or gourd, are used in ceremonial dances. Next week, during the festival of Corpus Christi. such dances will be held all over Mexico.

Painter Diego Rivera, who owns one of the world's best collec tions of Mexican archeological treasures, considers these contemporary masks as fine as those produced 1,000 years ago, and predicts that they will be museum pieces 1,000 years hence. They are, says Rivera, "a genuine expression of the plastic genius of the people of Mexico, combining the traditions of our ancient cultures with the contributions brought by the Spanish invasion. Along with the expressive potency of their forms and colors," Rivera adds darkly, "the masks have the black humor that enables our people to laugh at death and the devil, follow funeral processions with music and fireworks, and eat skulls of sugar."

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