They Tattooed Their Bodies So the Demons Would Pass Them By

Not like I've hung around a ton of exorcists, but there was a time when I was putting a show together in a foreign country called Para Sa Masa, where the premise was to investigate people who were allegedly possessed and see if we could debunk what was happening to them. I'll write about my personal experiences through that venture another time, since there is enough weird shit buried in that story to send us in a completely different direction, but for now there is one part worth sharing, mainly due to where it resurfaced years later in a place that had absolutely nothing to do with exorcisms.

Going into that project looking for explanations rather than demons probably made what followed even stranger. Possession was the obvious attention grabber, yet the more interesting discussions involved what supposedly happened before any of that shit started, particularly the idea that people could participate in rituals, make promises, dedicate themselves to a belief or perform acts carrying spiritual significance without considering any of it an agreement. There were personal experiences during that venture too, including some shit that felt aimed directly at me after spending considerable time poking around where other people thought nobody should be poking, but opening that door right now would hijack this entire article and probably require an article of its own.

The useful part was learning to look for the contract. Spiritual contracts became the easiest way to describe an exchange in which a person willingly participates in something believed to carry spiritual weight and accepts whatever may come attached to it. No attempt at creating new theology is being made here, nor does the phrase prove that an invisible authority actually recognizes such an agreement; it describes a structure that becomes difficult to ignore once rituals are viewed according to what the participants believe is taking place rather than what an outsider can physically see. People tend to pay plenty of attention to what they believe they are receiving from a spiritual act without spending nearly as much time asking what participation may require from them afterward.

Baptism gives us a familiar example without requiring a crash course in theology. Christianity contains different teachings about precisely what baptism means and accomplishes, but from outside the faith the physical ingredients aren't terribly impressive: a human body, water, spoken words and the religious authority surrounding the ceremony. Nobody believes the importance rests in the chemical composition of the water, since the meaning comes from what the participants understand the act to represent, including initiation, covenant, identification with a faith or sacramental significance depending upon the tradition involved. Look only at what physically happened and a person got wet; understand what the participants believe happened and the exact same act carries consequences extending far beyond the water drying.

Tattooing takes that concept somewhere considerably darker. Protective tattoo traditions have existed in which permanent markings were associated with defense against illness, hostile magic, spirits and dangers the people receiving them believed could reach into ordinary human life.

Anthropologists use the term apotropaic for practices or objects intended to avert evil or harmful influences, although the academic terminology is considerably less interesting than the solution people arrived at when dealing with a threat they believed couldn't be physically confronted.

People carried things for protection long before anybody could walk into a tattoo shop, which makes permanently cutting the symbol into the body a pretty extreme choice when the easier option could have been hanging it around your neck. That choice tells us a lot more than the symbol does. Whatever these people believed was out there wasn't being treated like a story used to scare children; they were willing to bleed and carry the mark for the rest of their lives, and apparently leaving the protection at home wasn't good enough.

Sak Yant gives us a living example without turning it into mystical tattoo porn. Sacred tattooing traditions associated with Thailand and other parts of Southeast Asia can incorporate yantra imagery, sacred script and religious influences drawn from Buddhism, Brahman-Hindu traditions and animist beliefs, with practitioners and believers associating particular designs with protection, strength, fortune and defense against harmful spiritual forces. Practices differ among teachers, regions and lineages, making any universal explanation suspect, but traditional Sak Yant can involve far more than reproducing the geometry correctly, particularly where blessings, the authority of the practitioner and expectations concerning the recipient's conduct form part of the tradition surrounding the tattoo.

Those expectations are where the pretty pictures stop telling the entire story. Some Sak Yantpractitioners teach behavioral or moral restrictions associated with maintaining the spiritual power of the tattoo, although the specific rules vary and shouldn't be presented as a single universal code. A person seeking protection can therefore leave carrying expectations concerning personal conduct, creating a relationship considerably different from buying supernatural insurance and expecting coverage whenever bad shit shows up. Protection is the attractive part of the proposition; what gets considerably less attention is whether anything is expected from the person asking for it.

Sacred symbols aren't difficult to get anymore, and that creates a problem nobody had to deal with when access to them meant being part of the culture they came from or at least getting close enough to understand what you were looking at. Now I can pull up a tattoo from the other side of the world sitting here in California and decide I want it without knowing a thing about the person who originally wore it, which becomes a little more uncomfortable after learning that some of these markings weren't intended to exist apart from the beliefs and practices surrounding them. The image survived the trip perfectly. Everything that explained it might not have.

None of that means copying the wrong sacred tattoo from the internet accidentally signs your soul over to a demon. There is no credible evidence establishing anything close to that, and anybody claiming certainty about supernatural consequences is offering something other than verifiable fact. Removing a symbol from the belief system that created it, however, doesn't remove the history attached to the symbol, which leaves us with a considerably more interesting problem than whether anything invisible is waiting to collect on the agreement.

There is also nothing unusual about participating in something without knowing much about where it came from. Plenty of us were introduced to religious practices as children and did what the adults around us were doing long before we were old enough to question any of it, which is probably why the word contract sounds strange when attached to religion in the first place.

Nobody handed us paperwork or told us to call it an agreement. It was church, family, tradition, culture, or whatever name belonged to the world we grew up around, and most of it felt normal precisely due to how early it entered our lives. Put that same behavior inside an unfamiliar culture, especially one talking about spirits and protective markings, and suddenly we're comfortable calling their shit superstition without taking nearly as hard a look at our own.

Tattooing doesn't leave quite as much distance between the person and the symbol. Putting a mark through the surface of the body makes the body part of whatever statement is being made, and for people living inside cultures where hostile spiritual forces were regarded as part of reality, that permanence could solve a practical problem.

A person who genuinely believed a mark could keep hostile shit away wasn't choosing between a tattoo and something that looked better hanging over the fireplace. The body matters, which is easy to overlook when all we have centuries later is the design and whatever history survived with it. Whatever authority people believed the mark carried went home with them, slept with them and remained attached when they entered places where whatever they feared might be waiting. Whether any protection existed outside their belief is impossible for me to establish but permanently putting it into the body tells me they weren't fucking around with what it meant.

We aren't nearly as far removed from that behavior as we'd probably like to think, although we've gotten incredibly good at borrowing the finished product without knowing the first thing about what produced it. Sacred imagery from the other side of the world can land in front of us stripped of everything except the part that photographs well, and tattooing gives us the unusual ability to take the piece we like and put it permanently into ourselves without ever having to meet the culture it came from. That doesn't scare me in some bullshityou accidentally summoned a demon with your tattoo way; what bothers me is how easy it has become to know exactly what a symbol looks like and absolutely nothing about what it means.

Somewhere in this mess is an artist getting handed a phone with a picture on it and being asked to make it permanent. The client may have spent twenty minutes looking for the design, the artist may have never encountered it before, and neither necessarily knows that what looks like an interesting arrangement of lines came out of a practice where the original recipient might have understood those lines as protection carrying obligations of its own. I'd trust the artist willing to say, “I don't know what the hell this is, let's figure it out,” far more than the artist willing to copy anything onto anybody as long as the money is right, which also says something about how people should be looking for artists in the first place.

That search is a big part of what Inker was built to change. Instead of treating tattooing like calling around until a shop has an opening, you can get into the artists themselves, look through what they actually do and start narrowing the search around the work before trusting anybody with your skin. None of that turns an artist into an expert on ancient religion, and Inker certainly isn't going to tell you whether the symbol sitting in your camera roll comes with supernatural fine print but getting closer to an artist who understands the type of work you're asking for gives both people a much better place to start asking questions. Sometimes the best answer an artist can give you is that they don't know, and there is a hell of a lot more value in that answer than confidently tattooing something neither person understands.

Para Sa Masa taught me to ask those questions in a completely different setting, and there's plenty about what happened during that project I'm deliberately leaving out here. Some of it scared the shit out of me, some of it still doesn't fit comfortably inside the explanations I went there looking for, and the rest belongs in the story I'll write about that experience when I'm ready to open it back up. The piece that matters here is the contract, especially after learning how easily participation can come before understanding what the fuck you participated in.

Protective tattooing dragged that word back into my head years later, only now there was a permanent mark involved and documented traditions behind it. People weren't carrying symbols that historians later decided looked spiritual; there are practices in which the people wearing those marks believed they were doing something with them, including asking for protection from forces they regarded as real, and in certain traditions what happened afterward could matter enough that the wearer was expected to follow rules connected with keeping that protection intact. Whether the supernatural side of any of it existed isn't something history can settle for us, and dressing speculation up as fact would make the actual human behavior less interesting anyway.

We have the luxury of seeing those same symbols differently. We can admire the geometry, save the picture, change the placement and make the mark ours without accepting a single belief held by the people who carried it before us, which may be exactly where the story ends. Ink goes into skin, nothing comes looking for payment, and a design once connected to protection becomes another tattoo on another body thousands of miles away.

I can't tell you there is anything wrong with that. After what I experienced during Para Sa Masa, though, there are certain things I'm no longer comfortable participating in without knowing what the fuck they mean, and permanently putting one of them into my skin would probably be a good time to ask.