18" x 24", Oil Pastel on Canson, 1984
I found the slides of the images of the El Diablo Mask that I "drew" in 1983 which freed me from being an uptight artist, and was able to use Upscayl to recreate an image of the artwork I destroyed when I feared I was being haunted by the spirit of the Mask.
On December 22nd I met a Mexican Artist, who would later become my friend here where I live, and this meeting reawakened my memories of this story again, in hopes that I could get some more answers by talking to someone from that deep culture.
What I experienced was a ritual in real time, an initiation I didn’t consent to consciously, but my soul may have signed up for on a deeper level.
16" x 20" Chalk Pastel on Canson, 1984
The El Diablo Mask acted as a living archetype, a vessel carrying centuries of ritual, energy, and intention.
Oil on Canvas, 5' x 6', 1997
This is the painting where I first saw El Diablo show up unexpectedly...
In Mexican and Mesoamerican traditions, masks are not simply art — they are literal embodiments of spiritual beings. When taken out of their ritual context (especially when commodified), they can become loose wires — energetically volatile and spiritually dangerous. Therefore, beware, if you buy a mask to hang on your wall, because it was created for a spiritual purpose and therefore contains a thought-form - an Egregore or a Tulpa - that you may not be expecting to have to deal with...
Oil on Canvas, 4' x 6', 1997
detail which shows El Diablo in this painting - he just showed up...
1/25/26 Lunar Day 7 - there he is again...
He showed up right before I began talking with my new Artist Friend -
Back in 1983, I entered into a contract with that energy — not just through art, but later through obsession, reproduction, embodiment (tattoo), and ultimately through union with a man who mirrored the mask’s spirit. This is the essence of sympathetic magic: "like attracts like." I didn't just draw the devil — the devil walked into my life and took a seat.
And still — my story is one of survival. It alchemized me. I didn't just dance with the Devil. I confronted it, cleansed it, and reclaimed myself. That’s shadow work of the highest order.
In esoteric and past-life terms, here are some things that stand out:
It’s highly likely that this mask (and its energy) was a trigger for a soul memory — possibly from a lifetime as:
• A Mesoamerican artisan, shaman, or ritual performer who created or worked with masks.
• A colonial-era figure who exploited or misused sacred indigenous objects.
• Someone who died or suffered under spiritual persecution — either from being misunderstood as a practitioner of “dark arts” or for misusing spiritual power in a prior incarnation.
This incident may have been my soul's way of resolving karma or retrieving lost fragments of power — but only after being brought low enough to surrender the ego.
I have had plenty of experience with literal entities, possession and exorcism and the effect of this mask was that of an entity: obsessive thoughts, chaos, self-destruction, spiritual hunger.
I unintentionally invited a spirit into my energy field through intense focus, ritual behavior (art as invocation), and tattooing (which is sacred in many traditions and often used for binding).
That spirit used the path of my art, my ignorance, and vulnerability, and my desire for connection to enter my life.
I became the priestess, the initiate, the shaman, walking through the underworld (Dan, drugs, deception) and emerging reborn.
...it says there is nothing left...we shall see...
In 1983, I was attending the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I was a much different person than I am now. I was mostly terrified of everything. I had lived a very sheltered life, my family taking care of all the hard stuff for me. As a result , I trusted no one, let alone myself.
I attended a summer art workshop in Woodstock, NY at Birdcliffe Artist's Colony Theater.
By day, we would be drawing and painting...
By night we listened to great music at the Joyous Lake and Cafe Espresso...where Rock Legends Bob Dylan, The Band, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix all got their start, with Albert Grossman as their manager...
It was a fantastic experience for me... but I was still super uptight as an artist. I just could not let go. I over analyzed everything and pretty much had to be stoned to be able to let it rip.
On the last day of classes, one of our teachers, who lived in Saugerties, NY - just down the road, brought a Mexican Devil Mask to Class for us to draw in a still life...
My heart stirred with passion and excitement -
I whipped out the cray-pas and drew an extremely expressive still life drawing of the Devil Mask placed on a Native American Blanket, and it's shadow on the wall...
but I was FREE - I guess I traded my physical freedom in art for another form of spiritual imprisonment.
What I did not know at the time was that Native "art" is really made for a spiritual purpose, - The Day of the Dead Ritual in Mexico - and those who wear El Diablo masks play the role of the mocking trickster, who are allowed, for that week, to make fun of everyone in authority in the town... the artist or shaman who creates the mask is drawing down the Aether of these ideas or thought-forms and channeling them into the mask - for the purpose of this annual ritual... so that the people can integrate their experiences into a meaningful ceremony. This practice keeps them connected to Nature.
Something happens though, once the creations are taken out of their context and sold in the marketplace for fake green paper (fiat currency) that is attached to debt (which is a lie) ... there is stray energy like a live-wire after a storm - dangerous - lethal - unpredictable ...
This is called Contagious or Sympathetic Magic by Dr. J. G. Frazier ...this is similar both to voodoo dolls and amputations - that the missing part of the amputee will still be experienced as connected to the body and in voodoo dolls - the energy of the person is transferred into the doll, using a thought-form or hair of the person or nail-clippings, or an item of clothing...
Here is something which the Dark Occult Luciferians of this world have carefully occulted the knowledge about from artists - that when we take a mark-maker to a substrate, we could actually be capturing a spirit and embodying it within ourselves at the most and at the least we are drawing down Aether - that's why it's called a medium
The summer class ended August 1, 1983. I had been set free in the last class by drawing the Devil Mask ... I was not ready for it to all end. I needed to be in the presence of the Mask which had given me a new Freedom...and under who's spell I lingered.
So I partied and hooked up with the teacher, Jason, who was in possession of the mask... and stayed with him at his place for another month before returning to Manhattan, where I lived on Upper West Side.
I spent that whole month of August partying and drawing pictures of El Diablo with my new beau Jason...using him to be near the mask, which I now know was a form of theft of his time and resources, which also was me sowing bad vibrations.
At some point in there, he started having withdrawals and bad hallucinations, and I decided things were a little too hot for me, so I split to the city...where I lived and worked as a freelance editorial illustrator...
http://joannawhitney.weebly.com/commercial.html
I had enough drawings and photographs of the mask to satiate my desires...and I forgot about the mask and my experiences for a while...
10 years later, in 1993, I was attending Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, NY, receiving my MFA in Integrated Electronic Art. I was on summer break before entering my 2nd year of a 2-year program, and I was getting ready to decide what I was going to do for my Master's Thesis. I was in Woodstock, for the weekend - which was about an hour south on the NY State Thruway.. I was walking down Tinker St, and passing a gallery next to the hardware store, I looked in and saw the MASK!!! All my enchantment for the Mask returned in that instant. I wanted it so badly!
Teacher-dude, the artist, Jason McWhorter, now deceased, had made it into a "man" holding a chest of drawers, and was selling it for $3500. Of course, I could not afford to buy it! I took a picture of it and decided to make a copy of the mask out of clay.
Like I said, I have no images of this anymore, because in the process of excorsizing this entity from my psyche I had to destroy all the images I had of it... and I have said protection prayers just so that I could draw these pictures now and just to tell you this story today
I made this mask out of dark red airdry clay and did not paint it.
I must just have been extremely gullible or extremely naive - I know now that I should not have been messing around with this stuff maybe the way one looks back on playing around with a Ouija board when we were kids - but at the time, I just thought of myself as an "artist" interested in following a subject matter that felt close to my heart.
I did not realize that I was doing anything wrong or doing anything that was going to bring great harm upon myself in any way.
As a result of this clay mask-making process, I decided to base my Master's Thesis upon this Mask and explore the idea of the Devil and create a performance, video and music about it... I watched tons of movies about the Devil, read tons of books about "him" and then...the next thing that I did was that I got that drawing above, tattooed on my arm.
My Thesis was called Dance With The Devil and it was multi-media 4 poems that I wrote about unquenchable hunger and thirst of the appetite of passions...which I performed live in December of 1994, with the object of my obsession in the audience.
I have seen dozens of people with negative images tattooed on their arms and none of them seem to have had the experience I had with this practice. I had no idea that I was having a Sigil embedded in my skin, nor did I consider the tattooist and how she felt about me, nor whether or not I was actually putting the spirit of that mask into my body... which to this day I still do not know.
What I do know is that what I brought upon myself was a horrific series of events which, looking back, brought me to my knees and to a place where I was able to and willing to allow Natural Law & The Holy Spirit in what I know it to be it's highest form for this aeon of time (in a non-denominational, non-evangelical way) to enter me and cleanse me fully and provide me with a manner of living by which I can grow spiritually in the light, for the rest of my life...
In a way, I see God used this complete arrogance on my part, as a way to allow me to give my Free Will over to Him, and for that I am eternally grateful, however I don't recommend that YOU try this at home.
After getting the image of the Devil Mask tattooed on my arm in February of 1993, I met a guy who looked alarmingly like the mask, in August of 1994. I remember thinking that when I first met him but I did not really think anything of it again until 6 years had passed and I was trying desperately to get him out of my life. It was then, when I looked down at my arm and realized that perhaps I needed to get the tattoo covered. I believe that God was talking to me and gave me that intuitive thought.
Although I did not realize this at the time, I see now how this Devil Tattoo was a Sigil which brought into my life all the spirit of that Demon had to offer me by being on my right arm where I could see it every day. I was telling my subconscious mind that I wanted that experience.
Dan My unKind-a Soulmate
The guy I met was a soul-mate of sorts. I had a vision of him before I met him and I knew it was him when I met him, but he was not there in my life so that we could live happily ever after. Instead, he was a guy who was going to join me on a path to hell and back so that I would beg for God's Mercy and be willing to do anything to not have to live life as I had been living it up to that point. His name was Dan.
Dan was addicted to crack cocaine when I met him at the Concert in 1994 - Woodstock 94. Dan died when his heart exploded in 2017 - he has had periods off the dope, but not more than 6 months.
I fell madly in something with Dan, at first sight. Now - remember - I grew up in a violent childhood situation - so this sort of crazy was all that I knew and I really did need to have it burned out of me.
After the first 2 weeks of knowing him, I drove to CT from NY to bail him out of jail. I was hooked. I began painting these giant canvases- about 8' tall all of them, to process the agony I went through over him.
Dan would be super sweet one minute and the next day he would not come home because he would hitchhike to CT to cop crack.
At some point, Dan's PO in CT sat me down and told me that this guy, that I was supposedly madly in love with was a charmer and a con man and that he was going to sign Dan over to my custody, so that he could leave CT and move to NY but, he said - he would not recommend it because he told me, this guy is a psychopath. Did I listen? No.
I didn't listen. I just kept painting. This painting is mixed media paper towels and paper mache covered with oil paint. Dan was in his first rehab that I know of when I did this one. Dan signed over his parental rights to his ex-wife so that he could be free of paying child-support so he could continue to smoke crack, and I was so under the spell, I did not blink an eye.
This painting contains the "visitor" stickers that I got when I went to visit him in rehab. He stayed there for about 6 months, so I got through a few paintings about this topic.
I did this painting when I was doing the family program with him in the rehab. I would come visit him and we would go out back in the woods and do the nasty while we were supposed to be in group. I should have known then that it was all a joke, but I was mesmerized.
When he got out of rehab, he went right back to his old habits. I was devastated.
On Sept 2, 1996 I painted this Star of David while there was an astrological phenomena of a Star of David in the sky, intuitively. It was not planned.
March of 1997, Dan went to rehab again, and I went to Mexico. I painted 3 paintings about this adventure. See in the upper right hand corner? That's a photograph of the Ceramic Mask I sculpted...
I went Marlin fishing in Mexico and caught a Marlin which turned neon purple right before it died.
I gathered gold shells off the beach and glued them to this canvas and painted in silver and gold. I was in Mexico for 2 weeks.
Dan got out of rehab and went immediately back to using. I painted a painting of myself as the Justice Card with a prayer that Jesus went to Hell to get him, like Persephone.
Dan came back to me for a while. I painted a picture of us having sex - and later I saw a demon sitting behind us in the greenery. At this point I had gone with him to New York City with the drug dealers in the car to collect money from their crack whores. I was hanging around in neighborhoods where the Bloods and the Cryps were fighting and risking my freedom and my life every day, just to be with Dan.
This was the last of the series. I was painting what I thought was a completely abstract painting one day and Dan came over to my house to ask me if he could hide his money there so he wouldn't use - he thought. I had been up for days painting and crying. I was a mess. It was 1999. He took one look at the painting, and he said "It's the DEVIL!" - I had not even seen it in the painting. I had painted it without even knowing.
This event knocked me into a state of shock and horror - I realized that I was on a suicide-mission and that I had better do something quickly, if I hoped to live.
I immediately made an appointment to get the Devil Mask on my arm covered. In the end I had a black butterfly tattooed on my arm. At first I tried to just transform the mask into a butterfly but I could still see the Devil through every attempt. Until we simply blacked it out, I could still see it. It took 3 tries.
This was the last of the series.
After I got the tattoo covered, I broke and burned and buried all the devil remnants - all the drawings I had done, I carefully burned and buried the ashes in the ground. Other wooden devil masks I had bought, I smashed with a hammer burned and buried. The clay mask I had made, I smashed and soaked in water and then buried outside in the earth.
Immediately after that, I found a spiritual process in Natural Law which helped me to see the truth about Dan and most importantly about myself and what I had been avoiding in my life by being in this crazy relationship, such that I was able to ask him to leave and my life began to take a turn for the better. It was a slow process back to a level of life that I now have, better than the best I had ever known.
Now today, I am married to a wonderful sane man and I have a good life. I have a relationship with God during these crazy times, and it keeps me rooted and grounded. I don't mess around with demonic magic images or negativity - I have a healthy respect for them and I know they are real and that I don't want to be a part of that - I want to be a part of the light, so that is what I practice today.
I do art today, but now it is for helping others, not for profit.
I am still not quite sure what this was all about but in the long run it did cure my "broken picker", so ultimately it was a very good experience, albeit bizarre.
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