Hand Tattoo Design Biography
Source:- Google.com.pk
Whatever the outcome, the process in which the physical body became transformed and metamorphosed corresponded, in part, to the nature of the tattooing pigments used, as well as to the social precepts circumscribing them. Among the Siberian Chukchi and St. Lawrence Island Yupiget, lampblack was considered to be highly efficacious against evil as shamans utilized it in drawing magic circles around houses to ward off spirits. Graphite had similar powers as the Russian anthropologist Voblov stated in the 1930's, "[t]he stone spirit - graphite - 'guards' [humankind] from evil spirits and from the sickness brought by them." Urine, on the other hand, was an element that malevolent entities abhorred. Waldemar Bogoras, the eminent ethnographer of the Chukchi and Asiatic Eskimo, stated that urine, when poured over a spirit's head, froze upon contact immediately repelling the spiritual entity. In this connection, it is not surprising that several St. Lawrence Islanders told me that urine (tequq) was poured around the outside of houses to insure the same effect. In regards to tattooing, however, the ammonia content in urine probably helped cleanse and control the suppuration that resulted from the ritual.
CONCEPTS OF TATTOOING IN THE ARCTIC
St. Lawrence Island joint-tattooing. (sketch courtesy of Mark Planisek)Inuit (or Eskimos generally) and St. Lawrence Island Yupiget, in particular, like many other circumpolar peoples, regarded living bodies as inhabited by multiple souls, each soul residing in a particular joint. The anthropologist Robert Petersen has noted that the soul is the element that gives the body life processes, breath, warmth, feelings, and the ability to think and speak. Accordingly, the Eskimologist Edward Weyer stated in his tome, The Eskimos, that, "[a]ll disease is nothing but the loss of a soul; in every part of the human body there resides a little soul, and if part of the man's body is sick, it is because the little soul had abandoned that part, [namely, the joints]."
From this perspective, it is not surprising that tattoos had significant importance in funerary events, especially on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. Funerary tattoos (nafluq) consisted of small dots at the convergence of various joints: shoulders, elbows, hip, wrist, knee, ankle, neck, and waist joints. For applying them, the female tattooist, in cases of both men and women, used a large, skin-sewing needle with whale sinew dipped into a mixture of lubricating seal oil, urine, and lampblack scraped from a cooking pot. Lifting a fold of skin she passed the needle through one side and out the other, leaving two "spots" under the epidermis.
Paul Silook, a native of St. Lawrence Island, explained that these tattoos protected a pallbearer from spiritual attack. Death was characterized as a dangerous time in which the living could become possessed by the "shade" or malevolent spirit of the deceased. A spirit of the dead was believed to linger for some time in the vicinity of its former village. Though not visible to all, the "shade" was conceived as an absolute material double of the corpse. And because pallbearers were in direct contact with this spiritual entity, they were ritualistically tattooed to repel it. Their joints became the locus of tattoo because it was believed that the evil spirit entered the body at these points, as they were the seats of the soul(s). Urine and tattoo pigments, as the nexus of dynamic and apotropaic power, prevented the evil spirit from penetrating the pallbearer's body.
Hand Tattoo Design For Girls For Women Tumble Words Quotes For Men Design Designs Writing
Hand Tattoo Design For Girls For Women Tumble Words Quotes For Men Design Designs Writing
Hand Tattoo Design For Girls For Women Tumble Words Quotes For Men Design Designs Writing
Hand Tattoo Design For Girls For Women Tumble Words Quotes For Men Design Designs Writing
Hand Tattoo Design For Girls For Women Tumble Words Quotes For Men Design Designs Writing
Hand Tattoo Design For Girls For Women Tumble Words Quotes For Men Design Designs Writing
Hand Tattoo Design For Girls For Women Tumble Words Quotes For Men Design Designs Writing
Hand Tattoo Design For Girls For Women Tumble Words Quotes For Men Design Designs Writing
Hand Tattoo Design For Girls For Women Tumble Words Quotes For Men Design Designs Writing
Hand Tattoo Design For Girls For Women Tumble Words Quotes For Men Design Designs Writing
Hand Tattoo Design For Girls For Women Tumble Words Quotes For Men Design Designs Writing
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