Theater is the oldest religion in the world. Now, I know this sounds silly, but trust me, I base this on fact. Our origins go back to the storytellers around the fire who pointed to the stars and showed us the women and men in our history that are commemorated in our stories and remembered by the shapes the stars make in the sky. These sages help us define who we are and help define our tribes. But the real giveaway is hidden in plain sight: we’re represented by two theater masks—tragedy and comedy. So one would think that it’s all about melodrama and schtick, and to the uninitiated and the pedestrian, that’s what those two masks represent—but it goes so much deeper.

When you go to a sporting event, there’s always cheers, and a lot of the time there is a call and response—like someone yells something and the crowd yells something back. That goes back to the earliest forms of theater, which were dithyrambs. Now, the masks themselves were used so that actors could play different parts, and more often, the masks were over-exaggerated, like we see with the comedy and tragedy masks, so that people furthest away would know what kind of person was being represented. That’s where we get the word persona from—it is the mask we wear to show people the kind of person we want to be. Comedy and tragedy, the smiling and sad masks, are the most complex. The word tragedy comes from “goat song,” and it was the song sung and dedicated to Dionysus when they sacrificed on the thymele (altar) before the play. So tragedy starts and means a sacred act.