The latest portion in the Guide features more lengthy academic publications exploring Body modification. Starting a multi-part series with Hewitts’ Identity In Blood and Ink, the book offers a fascinating macro historical-sociological, anthropological interpretation of the practices’ multiple forms. The first entry drawing an excellent delineation through established contemporary Western views of participation in the animistic, rather than separating, instead perhaps held as a deeper recognition of the ‘whole’
| ‘Marking the Human Body may be not only the most ancient art form but also the oldest practice of religion as a systematic expression of a belief that unseen extraordinary powers affect the course of natural and human events, and that humans have the ability to affect these supernatural forces. Many ancient cultures inscribed the body with protective symbols and manipulated the body in rituals designed to communicate with gods and spirits. As a form of prayer, this supplication offers the human body as Religious text upon which spiritual beliefs can be written and read. Eventually humankind supplemented the language of the body with spoken language, and began to substitute other behaviors for marking and modifying the human body. As the structures of societies changed, religions also changed. Written language gained prominence and in the Western world expansive systems of social hierarchy required new forms of social control. Many contemporary religions still encourage ritualistic fasting, symbolic baptism, and other uses of the body to augment religious devotion, but place more importance on organized churches, leaders, and texts to convey religious doctrine and provide an avenue for participation and redemption.
However, in many societies the body has remained the fundamental medium for expressing spiritual beliefs, and an integral part of religious practice. These practices are often disparaged as superstitious, primitive magic by adherents to modem organized religion, rationalists, and many members of the psychological community. The magical world view acknowledges the validity of alternative states of consciousness, which have been dismissed by post-Enlightenment thinkers and pathologized by modem medicine.
Only recently have transpersonal anthropologists, psychologists, and ethnologists begun to investigate the pragmatic uses of magical religious practices and beliefs and their real repercussions. If we hope to understand the nature of humankind and their interaction with the cosmos it is important to step beyond the dualistic models of culture versus biology, and body versus spirit. Only then can we realize the implications of religious practices, cultural trends appropriating customs of other belief systems, and the importance of humankind’s compulsion to alter the body… | continue
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