Mit Fratzen gegen die Angst! / Fighting Fear with Frightful Faces!

Fighting fear with frightful faces? How is that supposed to work? Aren’t we more likely to be afraid of a frightful face? In antiquity, however, there was a deep connection between the two. People deliberately used apotropaic, that is, evil-averting symbols to cope with existential fears.

A gaping mouth, bulging eyes and bared teeth – such frightful faces were depicted in similar ways in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece. And it is not only today that they inspire fear! To ward off demons, illness and the evil eye, one had to be fearsome enough oneself, for evil was driven away by even more powerful forces.

These grim faces adorned amulets, furniture, seals and thresholds. They were found in palaces as well as in simple households and accompanied people throughout their lives – from birth to death, in this world as in the grave.

In Mesopotamia…

… there were many demons who threatened people’s precarious lives. Among the most dangerous were Pazuzu, the king of the demons, and the child-devouring Lamaštu.

Both are depicted in the picture – see amulet [7] in [Wall Case 1.2]: in the centre, Lamaštu kneels on a donkey in a boat, suckling a dog and a pig and holding snakes in her hands. Pazuzu looks over the upper edge of the amulet from the back, thus forming a kind of handle. People call upon Pazuzu to drive Lamaštu away, since he, the king of the demons, is considered more powerful.

In Egypt…

…Bes, a lower-ranking god or ‘demon’, protected the house, people and even gods in situations in which they were helplessly exposed to danger, such as during childbirth or in sleep. He usually appears as a dwarf with a mask-like grimace, a protruding tongue and partly lion-like features (e.g. a beard like a lion’s mane, cat-like ears and eyes), standing frontally on slightly bowed legs. He wears a tall feather crown and, in early depictions, a leopard skin as well, later often only a panther’s head on his chest. An animal’s tail often hangs down between his legs, and in the Graeco-Roman period he is often shown largely naked with a visible phallus, which was likewise an apotropaic symbol. To fight dangers and enemies, he often carries weapons, e.g. a sword, and sometimes also snakes – see [2, 6, 9] in [Wall Case 1.1].

In the Graeco-Roman world…

… an important frightful face was the Gorgoneion, the terrifying countenance of the Gorgon Medusa. Originally a monster whose gaze turned the beholder to stone, she acquires a positive meaning for the Greeks in the myth of the hero Perseus: Perseus uses her head to turn his enemies to stone.

Although her appearance changed over time – from a frightful face with boar’s tusks in the Archaic period (c. 700–480 BC), staring frontally at the beholder, to an aestheticized, almost tragic beauty from the Classical period through to the Romans – her protective power remained undiminished. As a motif on countless objects, e.g. coins, armour, houses and graves, the Gorgoneion offered protection to all levels of society and was a powerful counterweight to fear in an unpredictable world – see [7] in [Wall Case 1.1].