The Horned Helm, Part 2

Greek world. We talked about horned helmets and where those motifs came from, the association with vikings, and and we had so much more. And we're back today. Yeah, this episode is going to be more of a um a selection of various helmets and helmet traditions, uh from different parts of the world. Um, we are going to get into samurai armor a bit more. We toil. We very briefly mentioned it in the first episode, and I've figured

it was deserving of a deeper dive. But before we get into that, we're going to touch on just a really bizarre helmet from European tradition. Yeah, this is one that we were sort of planning on talking about last time,

but I guess we ran out of time. But if if you're if you're talking about horned helmets and you're just looking around for historical examples worth mentioning, you are bound to come across one that is I would say literally unbelievable, and I mean literally unbelievable in the correct use of the word literally, because when you see it, you will be inclined to think, there is no way this is actually an early sixteenth century artifacts this is

a prop from a Terry Gilliam movie. Oh. Absolutely had the exact same response when I first came across because if you if you start researching helmets, and if you start looking on using image searches to find examples, you find a lot of of creative energy that has gone into the creation of fictional helmets and sort of artistic um twists on fictional helmets and sci fi helmets. Everything. You have to do a fair amount of of digging around to make sure that what you're looking at is

something from the real world. And when I looked at this, this is just this is just too weird. I figured this is some bizarre art experiment here. There's no way that this was an actual helm from European history. Well it is, I think a bizarre art experiment. But it's like, you know, five years old. Uh so, No, it's not from Terry Illium movie. It's not from the set of Legend. This is a helmet that is known as the horned helmet of the English King Henry the Eighth. It is

astonishingly bizarre. It is definitely worth actually looking up an image of if you have a chance, but I am going to describe it if you're not in a place where you can look it up right now. So you can read about this artifact and see close up photos at the website for the British Royal Armories Collection and leads. This helmet was commissioned as part of an armor set in fifteen eleven by then Holy Roman Emperor maximil In the First and it was given as a gift to

King Henry. So Henry the eighth when he's a young man, he's given this, this helmet and this suit of armor as a gift. But I'm wondering what a gift like this was supposed to signify, given its visual features. So first of all, it's a helmet that's made of steel. It's very close fitting, it's got features and a couple of other metals. It's got a pair of corkscrew rams horns made of sheet iron. And if you're trying to picture this, they're not the tightly curled like Princess Leiah

rams horns. They're not the sticky bun rams horns. They're like the curling out like a corkscrew that you would use to open a bottle of wine. Then on the face it has spectacles like glasses. Spectacles made of copper alloy, so they shine in a kind of different color than the rest of the face, and the spectacles may once

have been gilded. So this is a helmet that fully encloses the head with front facing flats that hinge open like a flower spreading its petals in the sunlight, you know, or like the face of the demag organ in uh in stranger things. You know, it's got the petals that open up. So it's got two side plates that hinge out to the right and the left. So imagine these would fold over sort of the the the jaw area. The side burns and they flap out, and then the

face plate hinges up over the forehead. And so you can open the flaps up like this and put the helmet on by sliding it over the back of your head and then you close the plates around the sides in front of your head, which I have to admit it, it's kind of hard for me to picture just looking at an image of the helmet. I think most of the images, if not all, the images you run across, are of the closed helmet, as if it's being worn and it's sealed up. Yeah. Actually, though, you can look

it up on the Royal Armory's website. They've got a video with a curator at the museum. They're unfolding the flaps and showing you how it works, So you can check that out on their website if you're interested. But so, the front of the front plate on this helmet, the face plate is carved with a level of intricacy that's almost kind of awkward, you know how when somebody like makes a parody of something but they put way too

much effort into it. If you look close at this face plate, you will see these delicate wrinkles etched in around the eyes, and stubble all around the mouth and lips, and a texture that looks almost like pours across the cheeks and the nose. The expression on the face is really hard to describe. It's something I guess the way I could come closest just to say it is a demonic rictus. Uh. It suggests I must scream, but my

lips are stapled together, loosely stapled together, but stapled together. Yeah, I mean it's yeah, it is really hard to describe um. Certainly, you know, the stubble is very interesting, especially in light of mustaches on helms that we mentioned in the last episode and and well up again in this episode later. Uh. But yeah, this this expression, it's it is hard to

categorize because it it is intimidating. There's this there is a sense of that when I look at this helmet, I cannot imagine thinking that anyone who would wear this um has good intentions. Like there's a there's a vileness to it, you know. There there's the mouth is making you get the impression it's making a sound kind of like a you know, it's a there's a goblin esque

aspect to it. I will say that the the the expression on the mouth of this face reminds me of some of the faces that Willem Dafoe polls in some of his various villainous roles. You know, this kind of intense um grim lenoid kind of a smile, but but not necessarily a happy smile or not a happiness that is shared by other people in the room. Yeah, it's it's like part Memlin or Goblin, part mad scientist, and

part Willem Dafoe in Streets of Fire. But so apparently after the English Civil War, so this would be about a hundred years after Henry the Eighth to death. After the English Civil War, most of the rest of Henry's armor was discarded. It was you know, used for scrap metal. But for some reason, this helmet, this this grotesque, bizarre horned helmet was preserved. And it's quite possibly just because

it looked so weird. You know, you can almost kind of imagine Oliver Cromwell finding this and thinking like, yes, okay, this is an accurate representation of the monarchy. But another thing is something that we talked about in the last episode, which is the dual use of helmets. Helmets that you know, you might wonder like, would this actually be very useful in battle or you know, if it was actually designed to protect the head in battle, wouldn't it wouldn't it

be kind of different than it is. And this is another one of those helmets where it's just hard to imagine it being very practical for a fighting scenario. It's got the curling horns which just scream, you know, grab me, knock me, use me as a lever. Uh and uh. This, this intuition that we get from looking at this thing, is in fact historically correct, because this wasn't fighting armor.

This was party armor. Um. I actually found a similar looking, though less elaborate helmet in the online collection of the Swedish Royal Armory Museum because I was trying to find other examples of helmets kind of like this that we're used as party armor, ceremonial armor instead of armor for battle. And there so there's this helmet in the Swedish Royal Armories collection that belonged to the Swedish King Gustav Vasa, who lived from four to fifteen sixty. And this helmet

has everything. It's got a dorsal fin, it's got a carved mustache, it's got splayed eye holes, it's got a grimace straight from hell. It does not have horns or spectacles, though, and it is it is a beauty I do want to come back to the idea of of dress armor versus battle armor for a king because I know some you know, if you're not, you know, super familiar with the history of British royalty and battle, you might think, well, you know, why would Henry have any armor but uh,

fancy armor for non combat events? Would a would a king have battle armor? So Henry lived through fifteen forty seven. Uh, And it's worth to put that in context of King Richard the Third uh died of his wounds on August eighty five, and he was the last English king to die in battle. Um. So the idea of a king having battle armor not entirely out of the question for

that time period. No, not at all. And uh and you know, Richard the Third is not even thought of as an especially like you know, he's not thought of as a warrior king usually. But no, he rode straight into battle. He was trying to kill Henry Tutor, who was attacking him to usurp the throne, and he was like literally in there in the fight himself. But just to reference what the Swedish Royal Armories Museum says about

the helmets with face plates like this, you know. They say that around the sixteenth century it was popular for wealthy elites like kings and other nobility in Europe to wear armor, including close helmets, to wear these things too celebrations, parades, big parties, and in the early sixteenth century, they say that it was common to where these with quote grotesque visors in the form of animal or human faces like this one, the one we were talking about a minute ago,

to enhance the festive atmosphere and heighten the sense of theatricality. So I guess it's possible to some extent that the weirdness of these face plate grotesques, like King Henry's horned helm or King Gustav's weird looking face mat s here. It's not just that something is being lost in translation across time, language, and culture. It's possible that some of them were supposed to look weird. They were supposed to look funny. Yeah, it's like a masked ball, only a

lot more clinky. But when you really look into the significance of the visual features, Henry the Eighth's horn helmet gets even weirder. So I just want to mention a couple more facts that are brought up by the Royal

Armories collection. One is that I mentioned the face plate has spectacles, right, These cover the eyeholes, so their eye holes in the face plate, and then these spectacles descend down from a hinge at the bridge of the nose, And that might look kind of weird to us today, but this actually was a common format for spectacles at

the time. They would kind of have a rivet in between these two separate arms that each went to one lens, and it would fold down over the bridge of the nose, so you can kind of clip it on your nose, but on the mask. There's no indication that these spectacles ever held lenses, so it appears they were decorative rather

than functional. But why would you have decorative spectacles without lenses, I mean, the the the immediate answer that would come to mind as well, if you if you had spectacles on a lot, or you use them and they were part of your identity, then you might want them replicated.

In the same way that people who have, like for instance, warned glass eyeglasses for a long time and then have lasic surgery might still keep some glasses with just plain glass as lenses just because that's part of their look. That's possible. I don't think spectacles were really considered part of Henry's look, especially when he was young. Uh, there's another thing they point out that that might be the

answer here. Apparently spectacles were an accessory that in the sixteenth century often appeared in renderings of the stock character from from culture at the time known as the food owl. So I guess something kind of like the Shakespearean fool, right, like touchstone and as you like it? Okay, so well.

On one hand, this is of course disappointing because it sounds a bit like it's it's essentially like a nerd joke, right, it's like making making fun of the very important individuals at the time who at the time where we're using them to get a lot of work done for the crown, And here you're just gonna turn it around and use it as a goofy trope because glasses look funny. So it's possible that this is just a costume of the fool, in the sense that a lot of times these fest

there would be festivals in which the fool is made king. Uh. This is kind of perhaps a play on that. That's possible. Here's another thing in that column. If Henry's helmet was supposed to make him look like a fool. That would also possibly explain the horns. Now, we mentioned in the last episode that horns had appeared on European decorative helmets and times gone by, but by the sixteenth century a human depicted with horns had negative kind of stations, often

either demonic connotations or connotations specifically of cuckoldry. And this gets really interesting for a for a brief diversion that really does come back to the helmet. So I was reading an article by a scholar named Una mckilvina, who is a historian at the University of Melbourne, and she argues that there was something of a popular obsession in the early modern period with cuckoldry, this bizarre paranoia pulsing through European culture during the Renaissance about wives cheating on

their husbands. And it shouldn't come as any surprise given the sexual politics of the time, right, Yeah, So obviously there's a lot of paternalism and misogyny rolled up into this.

There was this idea that women were more lustful than men and less rational, less in control of their actions, and that they could lose control of their behavior and commit scandalous acts of infidelity, and as a res old, a married man, by a virtue of being married to a woman, was constantly at risk of being humiliated by her cheating on him. Uh and this state of humiliation was expressed through the imagery of invisible horns on the head.

This imagery shows up in Shakespeare in several different ways. For example, in Much Ado about Nothing, there's a character named Benedict who's being cynical about marriage, and Benedict says, basically, hey, if I ever get married, I might as well quote pluck off the bulls horns and set them in my forehead. The ideas that he's like, what's the point. As soon as you get married, a woman will cheat on you,

and then you'll have these horns. Now, it's not known exactly where this link between horn imagery and sexual humiliation comes from, but there are several theories. She mentions a few. Some have to do with various types of castrated domestic animals, such as the ox, which has horns, of course, or the capon, which is a castrated male chicken. It was once common, apparently to ingraft the spurs from the legs of a capon into its comb so that it could

be told apart from the other roosters. And maybe this had something to do with it. But we don't know for sure where this imagery comes from. But here we tie it back in with the spectacles because apparently during the early modern period there were also popular associations between cuckoldry imagery and the stock character of the fool. So sometimes the fool might have been depicted with spectacles. Other

times the fool might have been depicted with horns. Okay, so so it all again could be part of just sort of the the trope cartoon character of the day for the fool possibly. So, I mean, it just makes me wonder, like, Maximilian, what are you trying to say

with this gift? Man? Yeah, it's it sounds like either just h it really depends on to what extent you get Henry's sense of humor, because this is this would be kind of a dangerous gift to give a key unless you knew he was really into this, right, Yeah, And I want to be clear that I don't mean to suggest that the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian the First was insinuating anything about Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon

at the time or anything like that. But it is interesting that this elaborate gift helmet includes elements that exist in this nexus of association with the character of the fool. So yeah, it must suggest either I don't know, he's that he thinks maybe Henry is going to have a good sense of humor and will dress up in Fool's armor for ceremonial occasions. I don't know. There is also it really stinks of luxury to to have a helmet like this, and helmets, says we've discussed in the previous episode.

You know, these are they're well crafted, um implements of of battle like these are expensive items and to have one that, for many reasons is is nonfunctional and could even be something that would never be worn because it's something of a but you know, perhaps like a white elephant gift, you know. So maybe that that's part of the the appeal of this helmet as well. I'm wondering if it was kind of the horsehead mask of the

early undreds, oh man. So yeah, if they if they could do selfies like this would be a helmet you'd wear for your selfie. Now, speaking of Goofy helmets from the medieval period. Specifically um one that I think a lot of us have seen many times and it's always kind of puzzles you on some reason is the hound skull helmet, which comes from the German uns google or or a hound's hood or sometimes translated as pig faced helmet.

So it's not quite a horn, but this helmet has something that looks like a snout on the front of it, um, you know, like the snout of say a indeed, a hound or a pig. It has a very be steel look to it. Uh and it even so it has a very transformative nature to it. You see these nights uh uh in depictions of nights dressed in this armor,

and they look kind of like Eastman, right. And this is a common theme that we talked about in the last episode, the zoom morphic mask or the theory anthropic mask, the one that suggests transformation into an animal or having some kind of animal characteristics, right. And and so this style of armor also looks very goofy. It gets it has kind of a spy versus spy feel, you know, with like the pointed nose, very cartoony. So it raises

the question why do we see this design? Indeed, why was this an extremely popular um form of the design? This is not something where you just saw a few examples of you know, relegated to the the you know, the fancy affairs of a king. No, this was this was a legit battle armor, and it was it was a pretty widespread um uh throughout medieval Europe. Um. Let me guess it was a beak for pecking the enemy. It does kind of look like it looks kind of you know, offensive in that regard, but it turns out

it did have two key purposes. So, first of all, breathing is always uh an issue in a helmet like this. You know, you put some sort of big metal contraption over your head, Well, you still need to see out of it, and you still need to breathe. Well, if you just have a like a flat face mask in front of you, there are only so many holes, so many um events you can put in that thing to allow you to breathe. But if it is elongated like this, uh, then that allows for even more breathing holes. So it

depends on what example you pull up. Sometimes you pull put you find an example of of this helmet and it doesn't look like they're really that many they're not really taking advantage of this feature, but others have a lot of holes in the miss Essentially it's almost like a whiffleball. But perhaps the more important aspect of this design was that its shape would deflect blows to the face.

So if your face is shaped like a cone, it is going to be harder for the enemy to land a spear or a sword in such a way that it's going to, you know, just through and cut your face in half. Yeah, I see that. It's gotta it's got a natural perrying formation. Yeah, so it and I have to say it does also look kind of creepy into humanizing and while also being kind of goofy uh.

You know. You also see lower slits in some of these helmets, so they'll be like the upper is slip like clearly for for for viewing, and then there's a lower slit that kind of looks like a mouth. And I was reading about this in History of Armor eleven

hundred through seventeen hundred by PAULA. F. Walker, and the author points out that most of these lower slits were probably intended to allow the night to look down, which makes us again, think of the the movement limitations and the vision limitations in a helmet like this, How are you going to see what's going on below, you say,

in your lap on the horse or whatnot. Um you know you're you gonna do a full body movement to look down or do you need essentially lower windows in your head cage so that you can see what's going on down there? I see. Now, we talked about this in the last episode. To the idea that and you're designing armor and especially helmets, you're often that, uh, you're working with trade offs, right, you know, you've got the level of protection versus what kind of limitations come along

with that protection. Sometimes it might be limitations and mobility, especially for types of armor on the body, but with helmets and armor on the head, you're gonna have limitations to the senses. That's right. So apparently this is a pretty successful design though. Um Walker writes that the style here became universally used across Europe during the fourteenth century

and a lot of those were lost. But if you survive today, so if you do a little bit of image searching around online for a hound skulls or or huns, google helmets, you'll find some really interesting examples. All right, well, I guess we need to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more. Thank thank Alright, we're back. So in the previous episode, we we mentioned the helm of the samurai in passing, but there's just way too much beauty and complexity in the Samurai tradition to leave

it at that. So I want I wanted to go into it a bit more and a bit more detail on what we're really looking at. When we behold examples of Samurai armor, especially Samurai helms, which have to rank among the most elegant military helmets ever created. Some of them are so beautiful and looks so delicate I would be afraid to touch them. Yes, yeah, that, and and

really they they're an art unto themselves. That also makes searching up examples of it kind of difficult because people continue to create riffs on Samurai armor and Samurai helmets, and at times it it becomes a challenge to figure out, Okay, am I looking at an actual military helmet? Am I

looking at this kind of showy military helmet. There's more or less in line with the sort of fancy dress helmets you know, a status symbol or am I looking at something more recent, something that is a uh, you know, a purely modern artistic flourish that is playing on samurai identity. Um, it's there's a there's a whole world of design here. But to go back to sort of the beginning, you

know what, what is a samurai? Just to refresh everybody, This was the Japanese warrior class, which originally denoted the bushy or aristocratic warriors, but eventually referred to all members of the warrior class. They came to power in the twelfth century and they held power till the Meiji restoration

in eighteen sixty eight. They grew out of the Kamakura period, which would have been eleven ninety two through UH thirteen thirty three, taking the pre existing refinement of the Imperial court and transforming it through a unique mix of military skill, warrior ethos, and stoicism. So you have elements of Zen, Buddhism, Confucian thought, fill the old Pity and Shinto mixed together into this uh, this code of the Bushido, which by the nineteenth century also became just an ethical blueprint for

Japanese society itself. Now that's not to say that the details of bushido were set in stone, as it did drift depending on external influences such as the influence of the aforementioned uh um, you know, outside philosophies. So the samurai were loyal to specific feudal lords to an all consuming degree. The warriors honor purpose in life, we're all

bound to these individuals. So, of course there's this long history of Samurai armor, and its story is one of just design evolution, continual tinkering, artistic embellishments, and at times archaic revival. Uh when you basically see all of these

and other armor armor traditions as well. But some of the earliest examples can be examined in terra coda figurines and grave goods from the Tumulus period from CE two fifty through five two, which shows us this uh uh, the scaled armor that is we've just touched on this briefly in the previous episode that is predominantly Chinese in its design, but with few purely Japanese flourishes those would follow uh. This was this is according to Samurai and

Illustrated History UH by Mitsuo Curi. Now, Curry points out that this armor style resembles Chinese tongue and song style lamelar armors. And that whether the Japanese ruling class of the day, you know, originally migrated from Northern Asia, or if native Japanese borrowed or imported foreign fighting techniques and technologies, whichever it may be, it's still a controversial question. But the films would have been either peaked or beaked, according

to Curry, now explain to me the difference there. So basically there's gonna be either it's gonna gonna be kind of almost like a cone at the top, you know, or it's going to come out almost like the bill of a cap. Okay that makes sense, Yeah, which you know, not just I guess it would also protect your eyes from the sun, but also it would help shield your

face from blows. But this is just essentially the beginning. Uh. Curry's book is an excellent read if you want an in depth history of the various styles of Samurai armor. And indeed there are so many fascinating addition and add ons that end up making up this armor. Again, there's just continuous evolution. Uh. And and also given the modular aspects of a lot of armor, traditions, but especially Samurai armor.

It gets even more intricate because you'll see like the addition of a of a of a net guard here, the refinement of cheek guards over here and then, and also the evolution of just like the purely artistic aspects of it. But as far as the helmet itself goes, uh, here are a few interesting facts that that curry gets into. So first of all, the top of the helmet bowl features a small four centimeter hole called a hotchi manza

that apparently had a dual purpose. So first of all, it provided provided ventilation, helping you breathe a little better in the in the helmet um, but it also allowed the warriors top knot hairstyle to be drawn up through it. And what's interesting here is that this helps steady the helmet. Uhar helmets had no inside liner and they were only fixed to the head by the chin cord and the top knot. I have never heard before of your actual organic hair being used to secure a helmet in place,

but that is a brilliant idea. Yeah, as long as the hairstyle matches up with that, Because apparently during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, hairstyles change toward a looser style, and there was growing concern as well that the holes now only benefit of ventilation was overshadowed by the fact that it provided a weak point for arrows when the

warrior charged head down at adversaries. So by the fifteenth century it goes away as an actual whole, but you still retain an exterior decorative flourish that it tests to its previous existence. Uh, kind of a decorative groment um. Because also it had other ideas. Other ideas were bound

up in it as well. There's this notion that the whole allowed the ninety eight thousand gods of war to enter into the warrior, and in fact, the fact that the name Hatchi Manza apparently comes from the name hat Chiman, which was a patron god of war, a Shinto god who embraced Buddhism. I was reading about this um, or actually I was listening to Anthony Cummins, an author and translator on Samurai arms, armor and the tactics of warfare, who also host a series of informative videos on YouTube

about the topic. So by designing the helmet this way, the idea was that the gods of war could sort of enter into the warrior and inhabit them and give them strength and battle or guide their actions. Yeah, or at least that was sort of the the philosophical ideas that were attached to this whole, though it seems like it was mostly for the hair, and certainly when you begome become concerned that that it's going to be a

hole through which arrows will enter the warrior. It seems like everyone's was it was pretty much on board with the idea of sealing it up with something that's interesting. I mean it makes you think about all these different aspects of inventions that dwell for a long time in culture, where they might have a rich and only had a functional purpose, but then over time is the functional purpose

goes away. I wonder if people are more inclined to read religious or cultural significance into that that element of the invention. Yeah, I mean, it's one of the things people do is we brood over our objects. We attached an assign meaning to the things that we create and the details of it, and sometimes those those are the things that live on well past the functionality of a

particular element of the design. It makes me think of like church bells, for instance, that were once functional and signaling times of day for for worship or just for time keeping in a locality, and then over time just came to mean more. It is just something that is part of what a church is, even though it's not. Everybody's got a clock now. Yeah, shutters on houses another example. You know, how often do you see shutters actually closed on windows unless you're dealing with say like a beach

house or something. A lot of times you'll see examples of this where the shutters either are never used or even be incapable of being used. It could be a purely decorative flourish. Yeah, it's interesting. So the main bowl of the helmet or kabuto here was was the hatchie, and you have the plated neck guard with this was the shikorro, which is made of overlapping plates, and then you have a brim or a visor as well, which

I kind of mentioned already. But then if you ever look at a samurai helmet, you often see these wing like or ear like backwards folding flaps, and these were these were known as the fuka gaishi, and these were the front parts of the neck guard. But they became folded back like this to enhance visibility and to prevent getting in the way of drawing a bow. So another example of the evolution of the helmet being to a

certain extent aesthetic but also purely functional. And then you have the sunamoto and this is the This is in the front. It's a mounting point on the front of the helmet and where you might have horns or antlers or a flower motif or something like that. That added. Now, something else that you see with a lot of these helmets is that they don't just cover the top and sides of the head, but they, like a lot of the other helmets we've been talking about today, have a

face mask. Yeah. And this is often one of the most you know, arresting aspects of the samurai helmet and one that clearly resonates, uh in our fiction around the world. I mean, you look at, say, the Darth Vader's helmet, and there is a strong samurai element in its design. Oh was it? Do you know if it was directly

inspired by samurai helmets? Uh? Well, I was. I looked this up the other day and it seems like that has been cited as one of the influences, though there are a couple others, like there's some old sci fi cereal with a helmeted bad guy that may have played a role. Uh you know. Some others have pointed to Dr Doom as another likely influenced, but it seems like the samurai aesthetic was part of the influence for sure.

I do think George Lucas was was a fan of Japanese cinema, wasn't he Like, Oh yeah, definitely, He's definitely cited Curasawa is an influence for sure. So so yeah, I think when you see Darth Vader, you're you're definitely seeing some samurai influence there. Now on the samurai helmets, of course, they these these masks often take on the likeness of a human face, though often with very aggressive flourishes. Also, you'll frequently find mustaches that have been added a lot

of times. They're kind of like you know, brush base. They're they're they're were made with horse hair or something, so there they actually have a brustlely aspect to them. Oh man, that's so much better than the metal mustache of Sutton Who and all these others. Yeah. Now, one one thing to note about the face mask of the

samurai is there are actually several different varieties. So there's the the hapuri, which Cury writes date back to the Hayon period of seven to eleven eighty five, and they covered the foreheads and the cheeks and a kind of upside down you shape. You don't see that as much when you just get you know, look for sort of

stereotypical uh samurai armor. Far more prevalent in just standard samurai iconography is the partial face mask or menpo, which emerged in the fourteenth or fifteen centuries to provide protective coverage for the lower face that was apparently lost by some of the design trends that were affecting other aspects of the helmet. So this would have covered like basically from the eyes uh down to the chin, and sometimes

there's a scaled net guard hanging below this. Another variety was the the hen bow, which covered the nose to chin area as well, but not the cheeks. Now, you also see examples of the sulman, which covered the entire face, and some of the examples of this are very uh beautiful as well, But apparently this was not a popular choice as it was said to be uncomfortable to wear. Uh, So I guess, you know, just more constricting of your

face and perhaps limiting your your your senses a bit. Now, the overall look and feel of the helmet was was sometimes crafted to represent something about the warrior's character, such as through an animal motif, and samurai tended to like to stand out from the crowd. Um. In the book Samurai, author Anthony J. Bryant points out that for early samurai, crests were a privilege of rank. Uh. These date mono were mounted on the front, sometimes on the sides, taking

the form of dragonflies, butterflies, crescent moons, disks, horns, various emblems, etcetera. Uh. And they were mostly made of wood or paper mache, even that had been painted and affixed to the helmets, which I think is interesting because you're getting into this area where okay, there's the purely functional aspects of the helmet that are going to be made of more durable material.

But indeed, if you're gonna have some sort of uh, you know, flourish affixed to the top of your helmet, it makes more sense really that you would have it constructed of paper mache or wood or something and not be a physical part of the helmet that would again, you know, send your your helmet flying or twist your neck around if it were to catch a stray sword blow. I yeah, that's extremely smart. Actually, paper mache adornments could be They can still be seen, they can convey the

same symbolism, but they can't become a lever. Yeah, just rip right off. Yeah, So it seems like that that would be a key advantage here now in terms of this sort of tug of war between aesthetics and uh and and just utilitarian purpose. Uh, you certainly see things perhaps going more in the direction of of just aesthetics. When you consider the kawari kabuto or the changed helmets or in usual helmets, and these are the more elaborate examples of samurai helmets you'll you'll come across, and some

of the most beautiful, uh they were. They were expensive, so only the wealthy were able to have them unless they claimed them on the battlefield from a falling samurai. But these would have been highly decorative helmets with unique

shapes or even the overall likenesses of an animal. So instead of there being just this you know, this wooden paper mission a flourish added to the front of the helmet, like the helmet itself would be transformed like a parade float into uh an animal or with any enormous animal motif affixed to the top of it. So like the entire thing is the body of a of a fish

or some kind of yokai or something. Yeah, there's a pretty great fish based one that I've seen images of, and there's also a really beautiful one from the seventeenth century that apparently is in the Mets collection. I don't think it's currently on display or hasn't been recently, but uh, it's beautiful because it looks like this black cresting wave. Uh, it's it's just elegant to behold and also kind of shiny black. It looks a lot like like the material

of Darth Vader's helmet. Yes it does. Yeah, this one's very Darth vadery and it's almost it's almost got like a scorpion's tail aspect curling up at the top. Yeah. So there's a there's tons more we could talk about with some Samurai helmets and Samurai armor. We've only really touched the you know, the tip of the iceberg here for an example of just how many very designs you

come across. I was I was reading Samurai Armor though one Tabby Art Museum Samurai Armor Collection Volume one by Trevor Absalon and David Thatcher, and they the authors here, point out that the kawari kabudah encompasses so many different variations that like, for instance, there's this one that they pull out. It's a design from the mid late Edo period that has this horned helmet, horned samurai helmet. But

then over it is this hood. So this is hood in place, and then the horns are sticking out through the fabric of the hood. So that's just another example of the rich variety you'll find with these helms. Joke, and you pull up an image of this side. I'm looking at it right now. This is cult movie material. This is so good. So the hood, yes, the hood has holes. The horns come through the holes. It's like

little sleeves for your horns. Uh. So creepy looking. And then the face mask it has not just a bristly mustache, but a whole briskly beard. Uh. And this is great because like if you if you were to try to kiss somebody wearing this mask, you would feel the bristles, but legitimately creepy and beautiful to sign. Yeah, this is awesome. Alright, Well,

on that note, we're gonna take one more break. When we come back, we're gonna discuss just a few more examples of philut design from around the world and throughout history. Thank thank thank all Right, we're back now, Robert, I know you wanted to mention a bit about pre Columbian

cultures in meso America and South America. Yeah. I mean, we've discussed um the Inca civilization on the show before, as well as aspects of Aztec civilization, and especially when we're talking about the Inca, we talked about their amazing fiber based technologies. Um I believe we talked a lot about their use of knots, as well as the use of things like elaborate rope bridges. But it also played into how they can truct did their body armor and

their helmets. So the Inca depended on quilted and padded cotton tunics for body armor, with wooden plates added in places, especially the back, I understand, and likewise their helmets were mostly wooden. Apparently, generals or other prestigious individuals might have theirs decorated with a little bit of copper as well.

Now you might wonder like, wait a minute, why would wool be all that useful for armor, But I mean think about helmets and pads of today that say a football player would wear, or that you might wear if you're riding a bicycle. These often involve a lot of kind of soft padding elements which are quite useful if you suddenly get hit on the head or hit somewhere

in the body. As that you know, they might not stop a sword from stabbing you, but they can't slow the acceleration or deceleration of impacts, which makes a big difference in in protecting your body from injury. Right, so, even if you are going to have some sort of robust plating on your body, you also want some sort of uh, some some sort of material there to help absorb the blow as well, because otherwise, yeah, that the sword might not break the skin, but the impact of

the sword might break several bones. So, uh, that's just the inca in brief. But also I was looking around at the the Aztec. According to Handbook to Life in the Aztec World by Manuel uh Aguilar Marino, the Aztecs also utilize similar cotton tunic body armor, and war leaders would wear feathered tunics over these. So as far as their helmets go, the helmets varied. Some were made from

wood and bone and decorated with feathers. Others were far more animalistic, made in the likeness of a wild animal of divine significance and associated with different warrior groups such as wolves, coyotes, jaguars, and pumas and the And in these mass the warrior would gaze out of the animal's open mouth, and these were generally supported over a frame of wood or quilted cotton. Yeah, and it's worth looking

up examples of these. A couple of the ones that come to my mind are the jaguar warriors and the eagle warriors. The jaguars and the eagles were like different classes of military combatants in the in the ancient Aztec or Mexico culture. Yeah, with a lot of sacred associations with these animals. So it wasn't just like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if I looked like a jaguar, wouldn't I be intimidating like it? It went deeper to that and was more entrenched in a in in a sacred

battle um ethos. But I wanted to to also talk about another far flung example of helmet technology, and that is the helmet that you would find um uh used by the Hawaiian people. Interesting. Yeah, so, you know, I do want to stress there's so many different variations in warrior helms throughout human history, and there's there's a lot of sameness to a certain degree. You see fabric, fiber, leather,

and hide helms across all cultures. Bone and wood are frequently taken up as our metals, as metallurgical advancements and um you know, and and also the local environment allow but but these are a couple of reasons why it's really neat to look at Polynesian technology, and specifically Hawaiian helmets.

So I would love to come back at some point and do a proper look at Polynesian technology, because the various cultures at this far flung tip of human expansion are and we're really amazing and advanced in ways utterly the fitting of their challenges. So here's one of the interesting things about about Hawaiian warriors. So, given the complete absence of iron on the volcanic islands, the ancient warriors of Hawaii were instead masters of wooden spears, slings, wooden forks,

and daggers. Sometimes they had these two pronged eye daggers as well as these unique shark tooth weapons for close quarters combat. They kind of looked like in some cases they look kind of like paddles or or kind of like wooden daggers, but they're lined around the edges with the saw blades made of sharks teeth. Uh So they if you getting close enough, you know, you can essentially you know, gut your enemy or or you know, slice

a vital part of their anatomy. They also had strangling chords that sometimes featured shark teeth as well, and all of this would would have been additionally incorporated into specialized tactics and specialized martial arts as far as protection goes. According to Warrior Arts and Weapons of Ancient Hawaii by Sid Campbell, the warrior chieftains of old would wear a brightly colored cape into battle, often slung on one arm

to deflect or snag spears. He writes, uh quote, so these decorative capes looked more ceremonial than martial to foreigners unaccustomed to the Kia's battle accouterments. They proved very effective in instances of close range combat, which were frequent where clubs and sharp toothed daggers were commonplace. The cape used as a shield could also be a protective barrier to enshroud, deflect, perry,

or confine the enemy's weapon. The This reminds me of some of the earliest examples of body armor that we talked about it in the last episode which depicted on the Royal Standard of Or. I think it was where these ancient Mesopotamian warriors are shown wearing heavy leather capes as armor and battle. Yeah. Absolutely, And I think in the last episode two we we had a brief tangent where we talked about the capes worn by Darth Vader

and Count Dooku and General Grievous in the Star Wars films. Uh. And then so certainly there's historical presidents for the use of capes as armor in close combat and in the Star Wars universe. On top of that, they have this idea that you have these garments made out of armor weave which would be capable of dissipating blaster bolts or at really and at least providing limited resistance to lightsabers.

And I do want to stress again that there there would have been an entire martial arts at play here in the use of these various weapons and this protective cape. Now they also had helmets that would they would use, and there at least two example polls of of it. So first of all, there's this gourd mask helmet design that it was traditionally known as macacay or makini I believe, and they're also they've also been commonly referred to as uh okay okay I believe. It's a it's actually a

popular cultural motif today. So if you if you do some image searches for this or um you know, or or do any amount of driving around the Hawaiian islands, you will you will see examples of this where it is like to describe it, it's kind of like a gorge shape with kind of a big hourglass shape cut into the front, allowing uh one to to to look out and also exposing cheeps and nose region. There's often kind of a feather based um um kind of a

mohawk or crest on the back of it. And then you'll also have some material hanging down from the edges covering the neck. Yeah, a lot of the examples I've seen involved not a single space in the front of the face, but with two whole separate eye holes. So I guess you could do it multiple ways, but the a lot of the ones I've seen, they end up making you look kind of like Jack Skellington. Yeah, there is kind of. I think that's one of the reasons that it's such an interesting image and one that uh

that that that people keep coming back to. I mean, aside from it's it's it's cultural relevance, it also has this kind of skull like quality. It feels, you know, if you're coming at it from a sci fi direction, it almost feels like a space helmet. And also being gourd based. It it's a little it's a little different. It it um you know, it's it's uh, it's a different tradition, a different way of of covering the head

and protecting the head. And apparently this would have been a design that the very first European explorers to arrive in a y you would have observed various warriors wearing. Now there's also another variety of helmet and these would have been more um artistic and more just purely for for show, But there would have been a crested helmet known as majol, and these would have been um uh made of aerial vine roots that were woven into kind of a basketry frame, so kind of a wicker helmet

that was then decorated with feathers. Again with this kind of crested appearance to them, that reminds I think we we easily remind a uh, you know, a Westerner of various Greek helmets or some of the uh, the the head gear that is associated with Tibetan monks. Yeah, it certainly looks very elaborate and regal. I mean, you see somebody wearing this, and it does suggest that they are in charge. But there's something also about the images I've

seen of this type of helmet. The texture on the outside. I'm not sure if that's original. It might be a sign of of where weathering over time. It looks kind of like coral. I know it's not made of coral, but it's got that fuzzy pink kind of texture on

the outside. Yeah. Well, like the the use of feathers in this helmet helmet, for example, um, if you're not, if you haven't seen a picture of you may be thinking of something that is very feather like, enormous feathers, but a lot of these look to be very small feathers, which creates a oh almost kind of a furry appearance that it looks like it's something made from the fur or some sort of fabulous multicolored mammal that that we just don't know about, kind of sponge like almost like

you might imagine that if you were to touch the helm, it would sting you. Yeah. So anyway, just another example of the various materials and designs that have been used to to cover the human skull, to enhance protection for the human skull, but also transform the human body to create some different idea of who we are and what our status is in a given culture. Robert, I have enjoyed this helmet journey. Yeah, there's been a lot of fun. And of course we we only got to touch base

on on so few examples. I mean, there there's so many other traditions and and again you people have whole books about samurai arm or about you know, the martial arts and uh an armory and uh and weaponry of say, the Hawaiian people. So I hopefully this episode will be more as a more of a starting point for folks out there that one of these examples really perks your interest, then look into it more because there's a lot of a lot of cool material out there, a lot of

photography reconstructions, uh that that really make it rewarding. Absolutely. Now, obviously we'd love to hear from everybody about this. Uh. You know, if we've touched on a particular helmet that is important to you culturally, we'd love to hear from you. Or if it's we've just touched on a topic that you have some additional insight regarding. Perhaps you've worn some of these helmets, tried them on, or tried on reconstructions of them. We would love to hear from you about

all of that. In the meantime, if you want to check out other episodes of the show, you can find us wherever you get your podcast and wherever that happens to be if you have the ability to do so. Uh, just rate, review, and subscribe, because those are just some small acts that help us out all in the long run. Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth

Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest topic for the future, or just to say hi, you can email us at contact. That's Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my heart Radio, this is the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows.