Various Asian cultures have used puppets to model curing when disease or disaster threaten and, through miniaturization, to allow in a brief lifespan to envision more cosmic processes. Puppets/masks, including, of course wayang/topeng, have been put to work delivering the souls from hellish pains and allowing initiates to step from mundane to cosmic time. We encounter object theatre used in purifications of individuals or communities as in ruwatan and berish desa and recently we have even seen them put to work contra Covid. So why are puppets/masks sometimes a preferred medium for theatrical events that cure or transcend? Is perhaps their non-realism the central attraction that allows them to carry the weight of the unseen demonic, the ancestral dead, the eternal? Is this function superfluous as we move into a secular/scientific frame, or does wayang or topeng still read as a tool for facing unknowns—from Covid conundrums to our own mortality and potential apotheosis? Why a puppet?