I bought this mask a year ago while traveling in Bali without putting much thought into it beyond aesthetics. After suggesting to hang it on the wall, my girlfriend said it looked scary.
To ease her concerns, I looked into the meaning behind the mask and found that the masks typically are either depictions of Barong, a positive spirit, or Rangda, a demon queen. Looking at images online, I have a hard time identifying which of those masks I now own. Neither my girlfriend or I are particularly spiritual, but at the same time if I'm going to display imagery in our home I'd prefer for it have a positive context rather than accidentally endorsing a demon queen.
Are there any Balinese Redditors or religious historians that can comment? All help is greatly appreciated!
If you don’t find the answer here you may have better luck on /r/WhatIsThisThing
Rangda usually has a tall/long teeth that cover half of its face. It is usually frowning. Barong doesn't have such large teeth and is almost always colored red. At first I thought it might be Rangda because of the color, but its lack of teeth and lack of horrid frown seems to suggest it's Barong.
Regardless, I'm not sure if "demon" is an accurate translation, if by "demon" we associate it with Christian/Abrahamic notion of satanic evil, a direct opposition to forces of good angels and so on.
Rangda is closer to Indian image of the goddess of destruction Kali. She is fearful, and depicted as having horrific look (flaming tongue, buling eyes, dreadful teet), but not evil in the same way we understand satan. They are both deities with ambivalent powers of sorcery who are able to simultaneously heal and destroy human's lifeworlds. Likewise, Barong, her opposite, is depicted as a protective figure, but also has human desire, anger, and passion.
The thing with Balinese religion, they don't have one holy book like Christians or Muslims to refer to. There is no codification of what exactly is the nature of certain spirit or demon or even god/goddess. In one village Rangda may appear as man-eater spirit that need to be vanquished; in another she provides protection from bigger malices.
This has changed quite a bit since Indonesian independence in 1945, where the state enforces a centralized institution for Balinese Hindusim located in the capital of the province (maybe imagine it like Vatican). The state has also simplified Balinese difficult understanding of spirits with Abrahamic simplistic notion of "good" and "evil" (i.e. "angels" vs "demons") through of creation of religious textbooks and Sunday school-like activities. This simplification, in my opinion, is similar to the process of integrating folk beliefs such as faeries to Christianity in middle age Europe (see /u/itsallfolklore's intro from his book here).
Instead of Abrahamic notion of "good" and "evil", maybe it's more productive to understand Barong and Rangda as force of "protection" and "destruction". Destruction here is not necessarily evil; it's just something needed for the other to exist.
But regardless, as Geertz noted, their myth is not much meant to be anything than the Balinese presence when they are performing in a ritual with that mask.
They are, then, not representations of anything, but presences. And when the villagers go into trance they become--nadi--themselves part of the realm in which those presences exist. To ask, as I once did, a man who has been Rangda whether he thinks she is real is to leave oneself open to the suspicion of idiocy. The acceptance of authority that underlies the religious perspective that the ritual embodies thus flows from the enactment of the ritual itself.
The fascination which the figure of the Witch holds for the Balinese imagination can only be explained when it is recognized that the Witch is not only a fear inspiring figure, but that she is Fear. Her hands with their long menacing finger-nails do not clutch and claw at her victims, although children who play at being witches do curl their hands in such gestures. But the Witch herself spreads her arms with palms out and her finger flexed backward, in the gesture the Balinese call kapar, a term which they apply to the sudden startled reaction of a man who falls from a tree. ... Only when we see the Witch as herself afraid, as well as frightening, is it possible to explain her appeal, and the pathos which surrounds her as she dances, hairy, forbidding, tusked and alone, giving her occasional high eerie laugh.
And on his side Barong not only induces laughter, he incarnates the Balinese version of the comic spirit--a distinctive combination of playfulness, exhibitionism, and extravagant love of elegance, which, along with fear, is perhaps the dominant motive in their life. The constantly recurring struggle of Rangda and Barong to an inevitable draw is thus--for the believing Balinese--both the formulation of a general religious conception and the authoritative experience which justifies, even compels, its acceptance.
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