Kumadori — The Painted Faces of Japanese Kabuki Theatre

Kumadori: the Makeup of Aragato Kabuki

see also: The Eye of the Demon — a StoryFaces Performance to learn about the stage presentation I do based on the legends of the samurai and the demons that they fight

by Christopher Agostino – published 1/20/12, occasionally revised since

“In a way completely different from the realism and individualism basic to the makeup used in Western theatre, Kumadori stylistically beautifies and emphasizes the stereotypical personality of a specific role. At the same time, unlike the Noh masks or the Chinese stage makeup used in Peking Opera, the Kumadori allows for greater power of expression since it closely follows the actual facial features and expressions of the actor.”  —  Toshiro Morita, Kumadori, 1985

Suji-kuma pattern of the Aragato Kabuki samurai

In theatre traditions of Asia such as the Chinese Opera, Kathakali theatre of India and Japanese Kabuki, the actor is the show. The stories are well known myths and historical epics, so everyone knows the plot. The audience is there to see the performer’s mastery of stylized movements, traditional vocal patterns and their otherworldly appearance in costume and makeup, as they embody legendary roles in a larger-than-life fashion.

The samurai character in action

The actors become living special effects to present the story, and extravagant masking and makeup is integral to this complete transformation of the actor, so Asian theatre generally includes the most sophisticated facepainting designs in the world, such as the Kumadori makeup tradition in Japanese Kabuki theater. The use of transformational makeup in Japan can be traced back to ancient religious rituals and, over time, as such ceremonies evolved into theatre, makeup was retained as a vehicle for transforming the actor in performances maintaining elements of the ritual origins without the specific religious context.  Examples of this transition from religious ceremony to theatre can be found in many world cultures, often retaining elements of masking and makeup to allow modern performers to portray supernatural and mythological figures.

A living special effect

We can glimpse a direct link between the famous makeup for the samurai hero of the Aragato style of Kabuki and the ancient use of makeup in rituals pertaining to spirit worship and shamanic possession, for the samurai’s ability to do the impossible is understood to be because they have allowed themselves to be possessed by a powerful kami (“supernatural deity”) and thus have become hitokami (“man-gods”) and a functionality of any extravagant transformational makeup like this is to generate the suspension of disbelief in the audience so that they can accept the convention that they are in the presence of supernatural beings during the performance (just think of the way Hollywood movies use CGI today to make us believe we are on another planet watching blue aliens run through strange forests for the modern version of this age-old concept). In the Edo region of Japan in 1673, a fourteen-year-old actor named Ichikawa-Danjuro I invented a Kabuki performance style called the Aragato, or the “wild show”, with stories centered around powerful samurai heroes to present the “super-human actions that a righteous and courageous hero undertakes in standing up to forces of evil (Toshiro Morita, Kumadori, 1985)”, and for his first performance he painted his face in a bold red and black makeup design—a modern example of which is at the top of the post, this suji-kuma or “sinew pattern” worn by the samurai hero of one of the Aragato dramas as it is seen today. (And, to be clear, real samurai did not paint their faces—this is an actor’s invention to project the inherent power of the character he portrayed)  The complex stylized makeup in Aragato Kabuki is called “Kumadori”.

The “Demon Queller Glare” as depicted by printmaker Kuniyoshi

His makeup is so fierce that the actor can strike a “glaring pose” to scare away evil spirits—an ingenious element of the samurai pattern achieved by leaving the eyelids white while framing the eyes above and below with black lines so the actor can make maximum use of his eyes and they seem to grow impossibly wide as he stares. This “glaring pose” is the theatrical embodiment of samurai legend, that a true hitokami samurai could scare evil spirits away just by glaring at them, and this again points to the connection between theatre and ritual as it is said that Danjuro miraculously cured a man of his afflictions by glaring at him, proving that he too had a touch of the gods in him.

“Kabuki makeup is already in itself an interpretation of the actor’s own through the medium of the facial features. On stage this interpretation becomes a temporalization of makeup in collaboration with the audience. The result is a decoding of the drama traced out in the graphic designs of the painted face.” — Masao Yamaguchi (quoted in The Painted Body, 1984)

painting the suji-kuma: “taking the pattern”

The influences on the development of Kumadori may have included the mask traditions of Noh and other Japanese theatre styles, and also the painted faces of the Chinese and Peking Opera, however, there is a difference in the intention and theatrical effect. Theatrical masks, such as Noh masks, free the actor from naturalistic facial expression, so that all the elements of performance are within the structured movements of the body, and Chinese Opera designs, although they are painted onto the actor’s face, also function very much as physical masks obscuring the actors’ features and expressions. Kumadori makeup does not function as a mask to hide the actor. It is a makeup designed to capture and project the expressions of the actor in enhanced form, to externalize the inner persona of the role through a design that responds to the actor’s features.

the Evil Aristocrat

Toshiro Morita writes that Kumadori should not be described as painting an actor’s face but rather as a “pattern-taking”, as in taking an impression of his own face, and in the original tradition, Kumadori was applied by the actor with his fingers so he could take the pattern of his bone structure as he painted himself. Painted today with fingers and brushes, the Kumadori still lives and moves with each facial gesture, through designs bold enough to project the performance throughout the theatre. The concentrated process of painting himself is also part of the actor’s internal preparation to present the mythic persona required. The different traditional characters each have general makeup patterns they wear, with subtle variations to develop sub-types for specific characters, following a “Yin/Yang” color symbology system. Aragato dramas are intense, and deal primarily with the expression of anger, of which there are two types in Yin/Yang symbology: the positive, extroverted “Yang” type (red) and the negative, introverted “Yin” type (indigo blue). So the red stripes radiating from the center of the samurai suji-kuma express the positive Yang anger of the hero, denoting his youthful vitality and therefor hot-bloodedness, coupled with a strong sense of righteousness as he acts openly and directly “with the heart of a child.” Other red patterns may be used for animals and comic roles. Indigo patterns represent the Yin anger more common to mature adults who have learned the conventions that govern society and so do not express their anger, but hold it in until it darkens the heart and turns one to evil, and those patterns are worn by characters such as evil aristocrats, vengeful spirits and demons. Browns in a pattern indicate a being has non-human powers, such as gods or demons. “The stage regained its original character as a sacred space, and the players their supernatural power…The significant thing is that makeup thus recovered its magical function as a vehicle of the supernatural, deliberately transgressing the natural features of the human face,”  writes Michel Thévoz (The Painted Body, 1984) about the fascination engendered in Europe of the 1950s by presentations of Kabuki theatre.  He’s talking particularly about the impact of the degree of transformation and stylization in traditional Japanese theatre in opposition to the naturalistic realism of the prevailing theatre in Europe and America, but if we are looking to the place that makeup has retained its “magical function” in modern Western culture we can more readily look to movies, even the cheesy sci-fi movies of those same 1950s. In my explorations of body art from tribal origins through modern cultures, I see an interesting evolution. In its original function, body art is a social act, elevating an individual above his natural/animal state to mark him as a member of human culture and his specific social group. In modern cultures, transformational makeup survives in the arts, in theatre, in movies, where its most profound use is to take the wearer (an actor) beyond his humanity so he can portray the supernatural and the super-human.

Exploring how Kumadori changes with my expressions as I painted this one on myself for my book

Sometimes I’ll use the eyes on the eyelids trick to create the “glare”.

Painting the suji-kuma in a demonstration for the Art Educators of New Jersey conference

There are a lot of lessons from such an effective and sophisticated art as Kumadori that I can apply as I paint a face. The foremost might be the importance of fitting a design to an individual’s features, “taking the pattern”. I am also perpetually intrigued by the idea of a painted face that does not mask the individual but rather projects the inner persona. I sometimes paint the suji-kuma face on an audience volunteer in my stage demonstrations on transformational makeup, both because it is such an exemplar of the power of makeup and because I’ve found that if I do take the time to paint it right and match the person’s features that the “glaring pose” always works, so I can show an audience just how theatrical makeup designs work to support an actor. As a vehicle for generating new facepainting designs I respond to the apparent looseness of the line work in these faces, the rough boldness. The sinuous lines make me think of movement, of wings and flying, so I have developed a number of bird designs out of the Kumadori patterns. I’ve also found these designs a great basis for some really fun spooky designs, see the Kabuki Spooky post. I’m a big fan of samurai movies—Toshiro Mifune in all those great Kurosawa films, like Yojimbo and  The Hidden Fortress—so I enjoy keeping alive the samurai transformation tradition. As a final note, much of the information here was from a fantastic book that is one of the real treasures in my library: Kumadori, by Toshiro Morita. (go to the Books  page for bibliography info) I received this book as a wedding present from an equally treasured friend. Thank you Kate!

“The metamorphosis of a Kabuki actor begins in his make-up. They call it ‘face making’ or ‘face preparation.’ Painting out their ordinary faces, they color in to create their new faces. The make-up is the basic condition for an actor’s metamorphosis and it is the first step to be taken in the process, a new beginning. From being a live in-the-flesh human, with every dab of paint, the actor inches closer to becoming one with the character of his given role. It is a process transcending the mundane dimensions of time and space.”  — Toshiro Morita, Kumadori , 1985

I painted these “Kabuki Kids” in traditional Kumadori patterns in 2006 for my book

The traditional Kabuki Ghost design, and examples on people at events.

Taking the sinew pattern into “birds of prey” concepts

The “Monkey” pattern is not a monkey, but a comic servant

Benkei Pattern

The hero of Shibaraku, wearing kumadori makeup...

Kuniyoshi print

“Kabuki Spooky” examples, turning the patterns into demon faces and vampires

Kabuki Spider

Trying out the red-faced version

The Noh Theatre mask exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History

On Instagram at christopheragostino

In homage to Stephen Jay Gould: From Leonardo da Vinci to Chief Seattle—The Earth as Macrocosm and Man as Microcosm

By Christopher Agostino

I was re-reading an essay by Stephen Jay Gould and had what I think of as a Stephen Jay Gould moment: I made a connection between two pieces of information from unrelated sources that in conjunction allow for a greater understanding of each. It was this quality in his writing that made his essays in Natural History Magazine so enjoyable to read, how he would weave together disparate bits of history and science, and, through this accumulation of seemingly unconnected information, craft a coherent explanation of a subject outside of my usual understanding—achieving clarity through seeming obfuscation, and simplicity through carefully crafted complexity. It was (and is) a joy to be led through his winding paths to the brilliant new insight he’d leave you with, and—in large part because he always made a story out of it with interesting characters, touches of mystery, human foibles and aspirations—at the end you’d be left with such an organic understanding of the subject of the essay that you would remember it and could repeat it to a friend. I find his to be an ideal approach to creating an entertaining and educational essay, and try to emulate him in the educational programs I do and in these writings.

Gould's essays were also collected in a series of books

The essay in question was “The Upwardly Mobile Fossils of Leonardo’s Living Earth” (Natural History Magazine, May 1997), on Leonardo da Vinci’s attempts to explain the appearance of fossils of sea creatures at the tops of Italian mountains through geological mechanisms in line with an all-inclusive theory that the physical earth is alive and ever-changing in the same way as the human body, which he learned from the writings of earlier scholars such as Jean Buridan and Albert of Saxony . Much of the essay describes the absolutely brilliant observations of Leonardo regarding fossils, describing his consistent ability to understand and develop concepts way beyond his contemporaries as analogous to Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, so far beyond his peers that he seems to be a man of the future sent back in time. Yet Gould’s goal is to point out that however advanced Leonardo’s observations may have been, he was a man of his times and his expostulation of his observations was in support of a world view of those times: “Simply stated, Leonardo was vigorously promoting a common and distinctively premodern view that could not have been more common to all his thought and art: the comparison, and causal union, of the earth as macrocosm with the human body as microcosm (Gould)” In Leonardo da Vinci’s own words from one his notebooks in the text called “Manuscript A”:

“Man has been called by the ancients a lesser world, and indeed the term is rightly applied, seeing that if man is compounded of earth, water, air and fire, this body of the each is the same; and as man has within himself bones as a stay and framework of the flesh, so the world has rocks which are the supports of the earth; as man has within him a pool of blood wherein the lungs as he breathes expand and contract, so the body of the earth has its ocean, which also rises and falls every six hours with the breathing of the world [the tides]”

The Living Earth

Reading that, I was immediately reminded of a passage I first came across some years ago, when I was doing research for a show I was writing about the environment. The book American Indian Myths and Legends (Pantheon Books 1984) describes a creation myth of the Okanogan people of Washington State that the earth is itself alive, a woman: “the soil is her flesh, the rocks are her bones, the wind is her breath, trees and grass are her hair.” In Joseph Campbell’s Historical Atlas of World Mythology he discusses this concept of a living earth in a larger context as emblematic of a world view generally shared by traditional cultures, a view of man as a only one part of a great unified creation, man as a reflection of Nature. As an example, Campbell sites the reported words of a Native American chief from a different tribe in that same region, Chief Seattle, in response to an order to transfer his lands to the U.S. government in 1855:

“Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people….We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins….The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors….The water’s murmur is the voice of my father’s father. The rivers are my brothers….This we know: The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood which unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.” (excerpted from Joseph Campbell’s Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Vol. 1: Part 2)

Now, here is where we reach (one of) the limitations that keep my attempts at an essay like this far removed from those of the man I admire, for Stephen Jay Gould is a genius—a true genius in terms of knowledge, accomplishment and stature—and so he could write with authority about what truths we can glean from the disparate pieces of information he would weave into an essay, whereas I am faced with questions rather than certainties when I find conceptual connections such as this one between the ideologies of Leonardo da Vinci and the Okanogan people, and have no sense of authority to share with a reader. In this case, as I wonder at the remarkable similarity in these two descriptions of the earth as a living being, from the Renaissance Italian Leonardo and these Okanogan Native Americans and Chief Seattle, I also question what I perceive as a distinctive difference in the emphasis they place within this macrocosm/microcosm relationship between man and the natural world as to who is the central figure in that relationship.

In addition to writing about his observations regarding fossils and how he used them as proof of a mechanism whereby the earth moves and changes like a living body in support of his living earth world view, Gould describes Leonardo’s frustration when he couldn’t make his observations of the earth match completely his understanding of the human body in another regard. In the same notebooks in which writes about fossils, Leonardo made multiple unsuccessful attempts to formulate a mechanical explanation of a way that water might be pumped upwards (against the flow of gravity) to the top of a mountain that would fit the analogy of blood pumped up to the head, and was frustrated because his observations of the movement of water through the earth did not meet the requirements postulated by these attempted explanations.

Vitruvian Man by Leonardo Da Vinci

Just as Leonardo’s observations of fossil sea creatures were framed in the context of his view of the earth as formed by the scholars he had studied, the sense I get of the root cause of his frustration at this failure to perfectly match a function of the human body with an observation of the earth is framed for me by the context of the image I hold of Leonardo da Vinci—that is Gould’s main point after all, that someone’s world view always provides a context for their observations. I am led by my image of him to see his frustration as stemming primarily from his placing man (not Nature) at the center of this reflective relationship, his certainty that the earth must function as the human body does because the human body is the perfect divine creation, the model for all, and therefor comes his annoyance when the earth doesn’t seem to measure up. Just the picture I hold in my mind of his Vitruvian Man might be enough to make me see Leonardo this way, but I also bring to bear the knowledge that he was a humanist, part of a movement towards a humanist view of the world that engendered some, or much, of the cultural changes that we call the Renaissance, a view that places man (as opposed to gods, supernatural forces  or nature spirits) at the spiritual center of the universe. This is a particularly strong framing context for me just now in regard to Leonardo, as I’m in the midst of reading The Swerve: How the World Became Modernby Stephen Greenblatt, which is about

Even the Mona Lisa is interpreted as being within Leonardo's world view of the living earth as the background landscape appears in a state of flux and is full of flowing waters.

how this massive change in the course of European culture came about, and, specifically, how intently men such as Leonardo were looking back to the sciences, arts and philosophy of the classical Greeks (and Romans). Gould points out that this view of “the earth as a living, self-sustaining ‘organism,’ a macrocosm working by the same principles and mechanisms as the microcosm of the human body” is just such an idea with origins in classical times.

Joseph Campbell, in his writings about the varied and changing world views of human cultures, also speaks of the origins of what we call “Western Civilization” in the classical Greek view of the universe, marking it as a turning away from the nature/spirit orientated belief structure we associate with tribal cultures, a shamanist belief structure arising in paleolithic times that all of our ancestral cultures started with. The Greeks put man at the center, as opposed to nature. Even the Greek gods, for example, are in the image of man, in contrast with the animal spirits and strange supernatural beings of shamanist cultures. (Campbell also discusses the emergence of monotheism and religions, such as the Judeo-Christian religions, as part of this turning away from shamanism, but I’m gonna keep it simple here and stick to the Greeks.)  (There is a direct connection here, by the way, between the emergent Greek world view and body art, for as the Greeks came to see man as the primal creation they idealized the unadorned human form, and body art comes to be seen as a disfigurement of perfection—think of all those naked Greek statues and the naked athletes competing in the original Olympics. Body arts like tattooing became taboo in classic Greek times, associated with “uncivilized” people.) 

In his introduction to the words of Chief Seattle quoted above, Joseph Campbell describes him as “one of the last spokesmen of the paleolithic moral order” speaking out against the new order of the white settlers, a new order less concerned with the reflective relationship between man and nature than with man’s dominance over nature. With that contextual understanding I see Seattle’s words about how “the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth,” and that Okanogan evocation of a living earth that “the soil is her flesh, the rocks are her bones…,” as having a very different emphasis than the very similar words of Leonardo, for here I find the earth placed at the center of the reflective relationship, not man. For that show on the environment I was writing years ago I used part of the text of Chief Seattle’s speech as an example of this general perception of the Native American reverential relationship with nature, as the speech fits a romantic notion of the native, the primitive, living in perfect harmony with nature—the circle of life and all that—the stereotypical view we in the Western Civilization are taught to bring to any understanding of Tribal People. But here I have to question the context that I, as a product of my culture, bring to this subject, for, though I may not be an authority, I’ve done enough research since then into tribal cultures around the world to feel that this romantic Western view of “the native at one with nature” is an oversimplification, at best. (And a persistent one: in a brief aside, there was a Gauguin exhibit recently that pointed out that by the time he got to Tahiti most of the people there wore European clothing and were Christians, so he made those naked tropical women up in his paintings to fit his own idealized image of the primitive, and was encouraged to do so in part by the French authorities looking to promote tourism to the Tahitian islands they owned.) (I should also point out here that I am aware that using a phrase like “Native American culture” or “Tribal People” is an inaccurate shorthand, and it’s another oversimplification to suggest there is single homogenous culture amongst all the varied groups covered by those rubrics.)

Here we get to another of those twists that always made a Stephen Jay Gould essay so much fun, for now I’ve come to learn that those words are not authentic. There was a Chief Seattle (for whom the city is named) and he apparently did make a moving speech to a large group of people at a time when white settlers were taking away their traditional lands, but it wasn’t recorded or transcribed in any way that can be considered accurate. We don’t know what Seattle said that day. (Check out Wikipedia Chief Seattle’s Speech for the earliest version, written by a white settler, Dr. Henry A. Smith, some 30 years after the supposed date of the speech, based on his incomplete notes of a translation of a translation, which then became the basis for all the other versions you can find in so many different places today.)

This is a twist that leads back to this overall consideration of context, the world view we each bring to our observations and how it colors and limits them, and back to an aspect of it which Gould approached in his essay regarding Leonardo, which I also see as applicable to Chief Seattle and his speech. In addition to writing about his actual brilliance and accomplishments, Gould referred to the “legend” of Leonardo da Vinci, the image we hold of him today as a man beyond his time: “The overwhelming prevailing weight of public commentary about Leonardo continues to view him as western culture’s primary example of a ‘spaceman,’ that is, a genius so transcendent that he could reach, in his own fifteenth century, conclusions that the rest of science…would not ascertain for several hundred years…because he combined his unparalleled genius with a thoroughly modern methodology based on close observation…” It is that legend of Leonardo, Gould writes, that impedes a more accurate understanding of how his observations and discoveries fit within his world. In other words, the context that we today bring to Leonardo’s brilliance prevents us from seeing that brilliance in the context within which it functioned. I’d go further to say that we are bringing a modern arrogance to our view of that brilliance when we insist on seeing him as someone beyond his time, as if a man from that long ago couldn’t be so brilliant without some kind of supernaturally futuristic ability. It’s a similar arrogance which I also often perceive, and that I find myself falling into, when doing research on other cultures, ancient people, tribal people. Their most lauded accomplishments are those that seem to be most in line with our modern Western Civilization world view, rather than trying to understand them within their own perspective.

The World on a Turtle's Back - another living earth image from folklore

My world view, my context, is relatively close to Leonardo’s world view from the Italian Renaissance of 500 years ago when taken in comparison to the world view of someone like Chief Seattle or the Okanogan people, because Leonardo and I share a classical Western Culture and Chief Seattle does not. We can readily frame Leonardo’s accomplishments in our modern Western context, and, further, we have Leonardo’s thoughts and observations because of a cultural element we share with him that he didn’t share with Chief Seattle: he wrote them down in a notebook. I don’t think that Chief Seattle would have ever considered writing his speech down because he lived within a culture with an oral tradition for the retention and dissemination of information. (It is a discussion for another time of how an oral tradition like Native Americans or Aboriginal Australians retain just as much complexity of information and history as we Western Civilization folks do in our books and notebooks.) It was through an application of the context of the white settlers’ culture that Seattle’s speech became “legendary” once it was written down and published in a newspaper 30 years after the fact, and the legend has apparently outstripped the man, as it has come to be that speech that he is know for among the general American culture. I don’t know how he is viewed within the contemporary Native American culture and I certainly don’t know how he was viewed by his own culture during his lifetime, and isn’t that the lesson about context that we have to remain aware of, the limitation of the cultural framework we each bring to our understanding of another?

Thus the question remains for me: how did the humanist Leonardo da Vinci and the shamanist Chief Seattle, as men of their time, their culture, come to see the world we all share as alive? Is it a cultural concept that survived from the ancient, paleolithic mythology through the transformational Greek philosophy? Is there an application of the macrocosm/microcosm analogy here in another way, that each of us lives in the microcosm of our times within the macrocosm of our larger human heritage? At the core, we are each of us a being alone in a vast world, and it has always been so. Perhaps we all want to see the earth as alive because it then becomes a kinder macrocosm within which each of us lives as our own little microcosm?

So I am left with a sense of wonder about this quote of Leonardo’s and how much it shares with an Okanogan creation myth, and here we get back to Stephen Jay Gould, for I can’t help but think that at this point in an essay he would have answers where I have questions. He was a scientist after all, it was his job to find answers. I’m an artist. What I am working on is trying to find the right questions.

http://www.agostinoarts.com  Christopher Agostino

follow me for the face of the day:  https://twitter.com/#!/storyfaces

From Wikipedia:

Stephen Jay Gould (September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was also one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation.[1] Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the latter years of his life, Gould also taught biology and evolution at New York University near his home in SoHo.

Gould’s most significant contribution to science was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972.[2] The theory proposes that most evolution is marked by long periods of evolutionary stability, which is punctuated by rare instances of branching evolution….

Gould became widely known through his popular science essays in Natural History magazine and his best-selling books on evolution. Many of his essays were reprinted in collected volumes, such as Ever Since Darwin and The Panda’s Thumb, while his popular treatises included books such as The Mismeasure of Man, Wonderful Life and Full House.

A passionate advocate of evolutionary theory, Gould wrote prolifically on the subject, trying to communicate his understanding of contemporary evolutionary biology to a wide audience. A recurring theme in his writings is the history and development of evolutionary, and pre-evolutionary, thought…..

(READ the rest yourself, it’s fascinating:  Stephen Jay Gould )

Or check out:  The Unofficial Stephen Jay Gould Archive  and  Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002)

Jaguar Helmet Masks — from Aztec and Maya to Diego Rivera, from Hercules to Knights in Shining Armor…and Hockey Masks

A mural by Diego Rivera: Indian Warrior, 1931

Jaguar Helmet Mask design

by Christopher Agostino

Performing in a school on Wednesday I used the facepainted version of an Aztec Jaguar Warrior helmet mask to illustrate a folktale from the Kayapo people of the Amazon, so imagine my delight and surprise on Thursday to see that same image depicted in this mural by Diego Rivera in the current exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. The helmet mask idea has been a favorite vehicle of mine for dramatic face designs for a long time, especially when I want to get a “wow” reaction while painting an adult male at a party. It is a pretty universal mask concept: a mask depicting a powerful animal that fits over the full head so that the wearer’s face is visible through the open mouth of the animal, framed by the animal’s teeth—and you can just see the mouth of the Indian Warrior peaking through behind the teeth of the jaguar in Rivera’s mural. Aztec, Mayan and Toltec sculptures and paintings portray warriors wearing such masks, sometimes depicting eagles, serpents or coyotes rather than the jaguar. The text accompanying this mural states: Jaguar knights, members of an elite Aztec military order, were known for their fighting prowess; according to legend, their terrifying costumes enabled them to possess the power of the animal in battle”, which is probably only a partial explanation for the use of jaguar helmet masks.

Eagle Warrior

The symbolic use of animal imagery in traditional cultures often carries multiple layers of significance. The exhibition of Aztec art at the Guggenheim Museum a few years ago included many examples of this helmet mask concept, including the breathtaking, life-sized terra cotta sculpture of an eagle warrior from the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan (found under the streets of Mexico City).

Deified Eagle Warrior

In addition to the idea of accruing power by association with powerful totem animals, the exhibit described how the ascension to the rank of eagle or jaguar warrior meant the individual was imbued with the spirit of the animal—not just the physical animal, but, more importantly, the animal in its spirit-world state, or god-state. So, we see in the “Deified Eagle Warrior” sculpture how the human in the spirit-world is completely enveloped by the eagle. I am reminded of the concept in Northwest Coast American Indian cultures and masks of the celestial eagle coming to earth in human form, kind of like an eagle/man superhero.

Contemporary Jaguar Dance

Which is not to negate the functionality of wearing something scary to scare your enemy in battle. The warrior’s interest in that is probably universal. Imagine what a warrior might have felt seeing this human/animal jaguar man rushing at him across a battlefield. In modern day Mayan festivals, dancers will wear jaguar masks made from the heads or skulls of real jaguars—which may have been the same way the Jaguar Warriors made their masks in ancient times—so as I explain to school kids in demonstrations, wearing that mask is like saying “don’t mess with me, I’m the one who killed him”. Other modern Mexican mask traditions include papermache or wooden masks recreating the Aztec helmet mask appearance or worn like helmets with the dancer’s face showing through the mouth as it opens and closes.  Holidays and festivals in Mexico can include a blend of ancient and modern, including the Indios, dancers in traditional Indian costume, such as these two spooky looking guys wearing animal skulls, horns and bones in a 2007 procession through the streets of Gunajuato (where “la vida no vale nada” according to the old song).

Guanajuato, Mexico 2007

Guanajuato, Mexico 2007

In the Diego Rivera mural, I’ve got to think that he put the Indian Warrior in that jaguar outfit in part to create an equivalency with the scary armor of the conquistador he has killed (“you may have armor, but we have jaguar-power”), and he is using a stone knife while the Spaniard’s steel blase lies broken underneath him. Now, if that conquistador had only been wearing the right armor, he might have done better.

Knight's helmet, 1460

New York kids love to visit the collection of knights in shining armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and there you can find a golden helmet in the shape of a roaring lion that might have stood up to that jaguar.It was made for an Italian knight in 1460 and, again, its symbolic significance is not limited to the idea of him wanting to be as powerful as a lion.

Hercules

Alexander the Great

This helmet mask is part of a European warrior tradition that goes back to Alexander the Great and the ancient Greeks, for it is meant to invoke the spirit of the greatest of all classical warriors:  the mythical hero Herakles (Hercules). Herakles slew the Nemean Lion and from then on wore its head and skin in a classic example of that general use of animal totem imagery in many cultures: “don’t mess with me, I’m the one who killed him.” On coins from ancient Greece, Alexander the Great is also depicted wearing a lion-headed helmet, to proclaim his personal mythic connection to the ancient hero. Lion-headed helmets have been showing up ever since.

Punia and the King of the Sharks

In our facepainting, we use this helmet mask concept for dragons, crocodiles, snakes and all the big cats. Anything with teeth. Years ago I used the concept to adapt a Northwest Coast American Indian storytelling mask depicting a man’s face inside a shark’s mouth to create the face I have used ever since in performance of the tale Punia and the King of the Sharks, and it always gets a response when I reveal the painted face. This past Halloween season I had the min-brainstorm at an event to try adapting it to a vampire and got one of my favorite new faces of this past year, the “Vampire’s Bite“.

As I said earlier, the concept is a crowd pleaser.People like big, ferocious looking teeth. And, when you have a kid with close-cropped hair or a bald man, you can make a real show of it and paint their whole head. I think it is important that you have some faces you can show off with.

Painting at tiger helmet

Faces to use when the event is slow and you still want to make an impact, or something to paint when the host sits down after you’ve painted all the little kids at the party. There’s a photo here of me painting a man in a tiger helmet design at the start of a special event for government officials and their families. We were doing their kids, but I didn’t think we’d be getting a lot of the adults to sit down. So I wanted to make this one count. At the end of the evening he returned to thank me, telling me that so many people had stopped to look at him and take photographs that he had felt like the life of the party.

The 1st time I tried the Vampire Bite

Full head Tiger Helmet

recent Serpent Helmet

Jaguar Helmet from my book

Hans Silvester foto - animal helmet mask as aesthetic design

Cujo

Panther helmet mask

Shark helmet mask

I was looking for examples of modern day hockey masks, which I knew sometimes use this concept, and I was surprised to learn that hockey goalies get the chance to design and create their own masks. Some of them, like Curtis Joseph’s “Cujo” mask, are so distinctive they bring the design with them as they change from team to team. Wow. What a cool example of the power of the mask. (hockey mask images from the website:      http://bleacherreport.com/articles/545279-the-50-best-goalie-mask-designs-in-nhl-history/   )

A Mayan painting from a temple wall that shows aristocracy in elaborate jaguar masks -- rising up higher on the head than the mask may have been, for there is a thin line painted in front of the face, seeming to indicate that there was a mask in front of the face, as if this is a depiction of the individual inside the mask as well as the mask he was actually wearing over his face