Human disguise

A human disguise (also human guise and sometimes human form) is a concept in fantasy, folklore, mythology, religion, literary tradition, iconography, and science fiction whereby non-human beings such as aliens, angels, demons, gods, monsters, robots, Satan, or shapeshifters are disguised to seem human. Stories have depicted the deception as a means used to blend in with people, and science fiction has used the dichotomy to raise questions about what it means to be human.

In pagan religions, deities very often took on the form of a human disguise for various tasks. The gods "of whom the minstrels sang" in Homer's Iliad watched the "human spectacle" as partisans, and came down to Earth invisible or in human disguise to interfere, sometimes to protect their favorites from harm (compare deus ex machina). Their human disguises sometimes extended to them getting hurt in conflicts.Zeus's human disguises have been compared to Plato's use of communicating through alternate characters as a means to express that the "essential philosophical nature is divine rather than human" and "cannot be represented without some element of human "disguise". In the borderlands between religion, myth, and literature, Dunn in his study of the concept of incarnation notes that Greek gods appeared disguised as humans in Ovid's legend of Baucis and Philemon.

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