#Imbolc is not a thing outside of Celtic traditions. This is a liminal time in the Wheel of the Year: new life is struggling against #chaos. During #Carnival , we let the demons from the dying year loose one last time. We channel them through masks. At the end of the Carnival, we sentence them to death by fire.
From their ashes, new life will be born again.
"Jean-Claude Schmitt shows that medieval idioms used several words to designate the “mask,” each one of them meaning both the object itself and the “supernatural powers” that were associated to the ritual and the artistic use of masks: larva, persona, masca in medieval Latin, or, in vulgar languages, “faulx visage,” “fol visage,” “sot visage” in French, or visor/ vizor in English. (...)
But in Southern France and maybe in Italy, the word had a meaning that is capital for our study: “witch.”
|The #Mask of the #Witch: from #Ritual to Carnival and Theatre|
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/341063442_The_Mask_of_the_Witch_from_Ritual_to_Carnival_and_Theatre