I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid the sight of a masked man leaping through
the air doing seemingly impossible stunts spoke directly to some lizard part of my brain.
The forked tongued whispers of wrestling, the well-told lie of good vs evil, would always
capture my imagination, but there was something about a luchador that had an extra magnetism.
Maybe it was the insane aerobatics, because I’m sorry Mr Cornette, but flips is cool,
but I think it fundamentally came down to the mystique of the mask.
Masks are worn by everyone who’s anyone in geekdom:
“That’s correct Wendy, we all wear masks metaphorically speaking”
Yeah but like also literally: you’ve got masked up superheroes, swashbuckling adventurers,
ninja turtles, which is a lizard brain bingo. They confer mighty powers that can save the
day and no one knows what lies behind the masquerade.
MA-MA-MA-MASK
Which muh-muh-means it can be anyone under the face covering... even you. For kids especially
that’s a pretty neat feeling, pop on a mask and suddenly you are Rey Mysterio.
But as masks are synonymous symbols of lucha libre it’s worth noting where they actually
come from. Are they some sacred tradition from thousands of years ago? What do they
stand for? And what powers do they confer?
I’m Laurie hailing from partsFUNknown and this is lucha masks explained.
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Lucha masks feel steeped in Latin American mysticism - they conjure images of ancient
masked warriors taking on totemic powers associated with these spiritual figures the masks depict.
Giving the wearing of a mask this feeling of a ritual, a tradition that can be traced
back thousands of years.
Much like we discovered when we looked at the creation of the green mist, lucha masks
actually started life as a US export.
Now masks have been used in wrestling for over a hundred and fifty years if reports
of a “Masked Wrestler” appearing at the 1865 World’s Fair in Porto, Portugal are
to be believed.
Frenchman Theobaud Bauer was said to don his disguise as he toured France as a member of
the circus.
But the man credited with popularising the gimmick was Mort Henderson - the story goes
that at the 1915 New York International Wrestling Tournament the crowd had grown bored with
the action and attendance was dropping until a masked man strode through the audience,
seated himself near the stage and issued a challenge to the other wrestlers.
News of this mysterious figure circulated through the papers and suddenly the Manhattan
Opera House was full to bursting - this Masked Marvel as he came to be known became the centre
of a storm of speculation.
And all the while under the mask was humble Mort Henderson, a journeyman performer whose
own star had faded. And Henderson would fade back into relative obscurity, but the Masked
Marvel would endure.
Meanwhile, to the south, Mexico was embroiled in a bloody revolution that would span the
1910s, and two Italian businessmen Giovanni Reselevich and Antonio Fournier seized the
opportunity to offer the beleaguered people a distraction.
They began to organise matches between fighters, bare knuckled and with no weapons, it became
known as lucha libre or “free fighting”.
The Mexican wrestling scene relied heavily on imports from the US for many years until
Salvadore Lutteroth Gonzalez - the so-called ‘father of lucha libre’ formed the first
Mexican-owned promotion, the Empresa Mexicana de Lucha Libre or the EMLL in 1933.
Within a year they were selling out their homebase, the previously run-down Arena Modelo
and gathering crowds of 5,000 paying fans.
In those early days though the EMLL also had to rely on American talent, and it was one
of those bookings that changed everything.
Corbin James Massey had been working throughout Texas in the early 1930s as “Cyclone Mackey”
and caught the eye of Lutteroth who brought him to the EMLL, Ciclon MacKey wrestled the
very first show, but a year later he would don a mask to become La Maravilla Enmascarada.
The Masked Marvel. Where have I heard that before?
La Maravilla Enmascarada was an outsize hit with the Mexican crowd though, drawing above
the mid-card expectations of his masked contemporaries in the US, so much so that Lutteroth began
to introduce more and more masked characters to the EMLL, know as Enmascarados.
This allowed the promotion to focus more on homegrown talent, which in turn let them expand
across Mexico and at the same time cemented the idea that the mask was part of what defined
a luchador.
But the masks had no meaning, no actual significance, beyond their ability to draw - so as with
masks to war, were buried in death masks that would shield them on their journey to the
afterlife and for religious ceremonies would wear masks that represented different animals,
whose spirits were entwined with the gods and conferred a portion of their power onto
the wearer.
Like a strong King in a jaguar mask, or a Prince Puma.
The Aztec’s too believed masks had an intrinsic power as described by Dr Cecelia F. Klein
an Art History Professor at UCLA who said:
“Masks were valuable because they were thought to be powerful. They derived some of their
power from the materials used to make them. t”
To even own a mask was a status symbol, something that can easily be brought forward to tie
into the luchador honor system - lose the mask, you lose your status.
And that’s kind of the crazy thing here, none of this is why lucha masks exist, but
the parallels throughout history keep cropping up.
Hell one ancient mesoamerican society known as The Olmecs had these pretty gross masks
with disfigured faces that suggested a transformation into birds, lizards and felines - bringing
the human and the natural together in a way that would come to define their cosmology.
They also apparently produced this very famous sculpture that has come to be known as The
Wrestler and is widely debated as to its authenticity and its subject matter, as it’s likely not
a wrestler - but you can see how all these myths can muddy the true origin of something
as simple as a mask, especially when the veil of kayfabe is drawn across it too.
And masks afford a serious firewall of kayfabe for luchadors, right - because at the end
of the show it comes off and the wrestler gets to walk down the street completely anonymous.
No one the wiser that this man, who admittedly is built like a brick shit house, is the high
flying performer they just saw. It’s kind of a Clark Kent/Superman kind of disguise,
but he’s not wearing glasses or a mask.
Except I don’t even think the masks in lucha libre are actually meant to be read as masks.
These are the character’s faces.
Theatrical performance dating back to ancient Greece used masks to bring beings of immense
power to life - it started with the worship of Dionysus, who you may know as the lounge-lizard
God of Wine from Hades, as parts of 6th century rituals communicants would impersonate the
deity through disguise making the god manifest.
Which inspired them to speak as the god, in first person, which essentially invented the
art of drama.
Ritual-dramas then commonly began to use masks to represent the gods, demons, and even concepts
like sin and they continued to do that throughout history - and I’d argue lucha libre is part
of that global tradition, because what is wrestling if not one big weird morality play?
And the masks of luchadors - though they started out in simple block colours that could be
seen from the back of an arena still became the face, the symbol of the blue demon or
the phantom or Spider-man. That one works less well.
But generally they evoke creatures of myth, benevolent deities or creeping darkness, aspects
of which the performer takes on during the match. Even the idea of high-flying and improbable
stunts feels like something more than human.
It’s definitely about more than a bloke who doesn’t want to be recognised when he’s
out buying his protein powder - you can get a hat and sunglasses for that. Masks are totems
of power so when luchas lose them in the dreaded Mascara contra mascara, or mask vs mask match,
it’s a disgrace, a dishonor and it’s disempowering.
That’s why when the mask comes off it’s usually as part of a retirement or at least
a retirement of that character - the mask has lost its power, same reason Samson didn’t
go scooping up his offcuts after Delilah gave him legend’s first ever lockdown mullet.
Even this weirdly can be linked back to the Aztecs, as Dr Klein of UCLA said:
“In Aztec society a warrior who killed his first captive was said to ‘assume another
face.’ Regardless of whether this expression referred literally to a trophy mask or was
simply a figure of speech, it implies that the youth’s new “face” represented a
new social identity or status. “
In lucha if you conquer a fierce rival, you can take their face, their status as your
own. Just not in the skin flay-ee way of the Aztecs. Maybe in ECW.
Think about how Kevin Nash took Rey Mysterio Jrs. mask in WCW, which lead him to inherit
the gimmick of his uncle Rey Misterio with an ‘I’ now spelled with a ‘Y’ by WWE
Rey Rey. These are two separate, nearly indistinguishably named gimmicks.
Or how one of the most famous luchadores of all time El Santo never removed his mask during
his 40 year career, even being buried in his trademark silver face covering. Some of Rudolfo
Guzman, the man beneath the mask’s reverence for his character informing some of the myth
of lucha libre.
But I hear you screaming in the comments - you said none of this myth stuff has anything
to do with lucha masks. And it doesn’t because masks were adopted in Mexico for one reason
alone “MONEY”, but it also has everything to do with the myth stuff.
Dr Klein described the Aztec’s like this:
“Like many Mesoamerican peoples, the Aztecs... made extensive use of masks. They were, in
other words, what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss termed a “mask culture.”
In his book The Way of the Mask French Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss posited that mythical
representations cannot be understood as isolated objects. Specifically referencing the masks
of North West Pacific Coast Tribes saying they 'cannot be interpreted in and by themselves
as separate objects'.
He instead tried to draw parallels between the masks of one group and the masks of another
people, saying they all informed and transformed each other, creating a greater pantheon.
“They are parts of a system within which they transform each other. As in the case
with myths, masks (with their origin myths and the rites in which they appear) become
intelligible only through the relationships which unite them."
And lucha libre through its masks creates this pantheon of figures who represent gods,
animals, forces of nature, Wolverine. And each inter-relation between your technicos
and rudos, your goodies and baddies, your lineages, your El Hijo del Fantasma, your
Rey Mysterio Jr, your tag team mask coordination all of this has fundamentally created the
myth of the masks where there wasn’t one before.
It’s a mask culture.
And every little clod of meaning lucha masks have gathered as they’ve rolled through
existence, be it links to the Maya or Aztecs, to the divine, to superheroes, changes our
understanding of them. It’s all part of an ongoing, ever-evolving dialogue.
We all wear masks metaphorically speaking, but luchadores literally wear masks and metaphorically
they keep morphing and changing meaning as more and more wrestlers add to the tradition
and as fans continue to draw parallels with myth.
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your letters of thanks from Adam Blampied are in the post. If you enjoyed this video
on masks why not check out this video on Sting because it’s sort of about facepaint and
also how the Icon has been a figure that stands against WWE for all of his career. There’s
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video. See you next time, jam that jam.