UNDERSTANDING THAT MOST TATTOOING HAVE SPIRITUAL IMPLICATIONS. PT 1 In the Old Testament, Tattooing was abominable because of the spiritual implications of connection, dependence and worship of evil spirits. Lev 19:28 - NLT Do not cut your bodies for the dead, and do not mark your skin with tattoos. I am the LORD. Isaiah 8:19 And when they shall say unto you, Seek unto them that have familiar spirits, and unto wizards that peep, and that mutter: should not a people seek unto their God? for the living to the dead? Before a Theravada Buddhist tattoo master or arjan gives a tattoo in Thailand, he must first read your aura to determine what design you need. Magical tattoos of this type have power because they not only draw on the power of the tattooist, but also his mentors, and the Buddha and his teachings. These are all sources of power (kung). In this way, those who follow Buddhism operate with a set of assumptions about the nature of the world, the beings and forces within it, and the ways these are related. These beliefs form an integrated system of ideas and propositions that they use to interpret the world and organize their daily actions. In some cases, enemies can be turned into friends with specific tattoos, while others provide their owners with personal protection, commanding and attractive speech, adding to a person’s sacred virtue. It has been estimated that 500 years ago perhaps 1,000 indigenous cultures practiced tattooing. Today, most of these groups have completely vanished from the face of the earth, and only a few continue to persist in the remote hinterlands of Asia, South America, Africa, Melanesia, and Polynesia. Only fragments of this once rich heritage of body art remain in our modern world, but they allow us to gain a glimpse of a culture that connected tattoo, ritual, religion, myth, and nature from which indigenous tattoo culture ultimately sprang. Why was it important for indigenous tattoo artists to create permanent designs on the body? Were they made for purely aesthetic impact or for other more magical spiritual reasons? What deeper significance did these elements have for their makers and owners? And what did they communicate to others? For millennia, nearly all indigenous people who tattooed practiced shamanism (having access to and influence with the world of evil spirits), the oldest human spiritual religion. Death was the first teacher, the boundary beyond which life ended and wonder began. Shamanistic religion was nurtured by mystery and magic, but it was also born of the hunt and of the harvest and from the need on the part of humans to rationalize the fact that they had to kill that which they most revered: plants, animals, and sometimes other men who competed for resources or whose souls provided magical benefits. Shamanism is animism: the belief that all life – whether animal, vegetable, or human – is endowed with a spiritual life force. Sacrificial offerings, especially those made in blood, were like financial transactions that satisfied spirits because they were essentially “paid off” for lending their services to humankind or to satisfy debts like infractions of a moral code which most indigenous peoples around the world observed. For example, the heavily tattooed Iban of Borneo respect adat or the accepted code of conduct, manners, and conventions that governs all life. Adat safeguards the state of human and spiritual affairs in which all parts of the universe are healthy and tranquil and in balance. Breaches of adatdisturb this state and are visited by “fines” or contributions to the ritual necessary to restore the balance and to allay the wrath of individuals, the community, or of the deities. Traditionally, such rituals included the sacrifice of a chicken, pig, or in special instances even another human – especially when a new longhouse was built. Perhaps the most common and important blood sacrifice practiced by many tattooing cultures worldwide was headhunting: the taking of human heads for ritual use. Human blood, the fertilizing essence of everything animate, was a highly revered sacred substance believed to appease spiritual powers that controlled the forces of nature. For these dwellers of the Brazilian Amazon, mythology states that their tattoos were given to them by their Creator god who had several avian characteristics. Tattooing for both men and women consisted of fine, widely spaced parallel lines applied vertically on limbs and torso, each motif reminiscent of an abstract series of long bird plumes enveloping the body. Human head trophies were believed to please the “spirit mothers” of the game animals thereby increasing the yield of the hunt and making game more tractable to the hunter. Other indigenes like the Ainu of Japan and several Native American groups in California like the Hupa used obsidian lancets with which to slice open the skin; afterwards a sooty pigment was rubbed into the raw wounds until the skin felt like it was “on fire.” Both groups practiced medicinal forms of tattooing and also more supernatural forms aimed at blocking evil spirits from entering the orifices of the body. Amazonian groups preferred various varieties of palm thorns to prick-in their tattoos, while the pre-Columbian Chimú seemingly skin-stitched their tattoos with animal bone or conch needles attached to sinew or vegetable threads – such tools have been found in mummy bundles. The Kalinga people usually tattooed motifs especially of centipedes and pythons. Both creatures were considered “friends of the warriors” (bulon ti mangayaw) and are believed to be earthly messengers of the most powerful Kalinga deity Kabunian – the creator of all things. Many women proclaimed that their skin didn’t wrinkle if fortified with these designs and that their beautiful body tattoos increased their fertility. The Khiamniungen Naga warrior from the Myanmar/India border usually had a “tiger chest” tattoo and V-shaped torso markings which not only indicate that he is a successful headhunter, but that he could become “tiger-like” when he struck down his enemies in combat. Continues...
Posted on: Thu, 04 Dec 2014 08:29:52 +0000
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