The Origins of the Sacred Mark
by Vince Hemingson

The concept for The Vanishing Tattoo found its origin in a personal fascination with tattoos and tattooing. As my own collection of personal tattoos grew, so too did my attempts to understand the psychology underlying the act of tattooing. To what purpose do humans, and it is unquestionably a nearly universal human practice, indelibly mark ourselves, often at times to great peril to our health and physical well being? What emotional, spiritual and psychological benefits do we derive from tattoos that so clearly outweigh the costs of pain, mutilation, blood, sickness and even occasional death? All tattoos are undeniably symbolic forms, some mere decoration, others of a clearly more profound nature, symbols of transformation even, but to what part of the human psyche do tattoos allow us unique access? The documentary is an attempt, like ancient diviners with a willow rod in pursuit of an underground river, to discern the underlying source of the extraordinary power that tattoos wield in cultures both primeval and modern. It is also an attempt to discover whether that source is the nexus for all tattoos.

Early man, in a pre-agricultural world, was a hunter-gatherer. Much of the world, the movement across the sky of the sun in day and the moon and the stars at night, the passage and cycle of the seasons, the migrations of the birds and animals they depended on for their very survival, must have seemed an unknowable mystery. The greatest mystery of all must surely have been the nature of life and death. In order for a tribe of early humans to survive it was necessary for them to kill and eat a wide variety of animals. It was clear that in order for some to live, others had to die. From the death of the animal came life for the tribe. There is ample evidence to show that early humans deeply pondered the nature of their relationship with animals that they killed. That they saw themselves and the animals they relied on as part of an elaborate construct with specific roles to be played that defined and delineated the relationship between them.

And what was to be made of death in your midst? In one moment a member of the tribe was beside you, warm, talking perhaps, their eyes bright and in the next something unfathomable had transpired. They ceased to breathe, their eyes grew dull and their body cold. The body was still beside you, but it was changed somehow, the essence of the individual was gone. In time, the body grew cold, decay set in and the body began to rot. But what had happened to the essence? In time a body of myths and stories grew in every culture to explain this and the other mysteries of life. What was once unknowable was explained in creation myths and the myth of the afterlife. The relationship with the animals of the woods and the plains and the air and the rivers and the seas was explained in stories and myths handed down from generation to generation. Central to nearly all these stories is the presence of a hero who through a quest, a sacrifice or a display of great courage and skill acquires the knowledge, the animal or the objects that are central to the culture. The hero myth not only explains the unknowable but perhaps even more importantly it serves as a paradigm for an idealized pattern of behavior within the culture.

The human body to early man was clearly the vessel for something unique and special, something that came to be held as sacred, that essence of life, individual consciousness. I believe that early man saw the tattoo upon the body as a sacred mark that served the consciousness, both in the interests of the individual and in the larger interests of the collective community. I believe the tattoo allows us as individuals to access two universal human desires. The first is to divine an understanding of the basis, the core root, of our underlying spirituality. The second is to reach some rapprochement, if only at a basic level, with death.

Every culture, every tribe, has a mythology, and central to every mythology is the story of the Hero’s Quest. I believe the act of tattooing allows the individual to access and identify with, at what is often times a crucial transitional period in the individuals personal life journey, the role of the Hero. In most cultures, the mythology of the Hero centers on a journey, either physical or spiritual. It is not accidental that many of these Heroes must undertake a quest that requires them to enter the Underworld and confront the deities of that culture. This is so for the Iban of Borneo, the Maori of New Zealand, the Samoans, many of the North American tribal peoples and many other cultures around the world. The act of being tattooed allows the individual to vicariously experience the Hero’s journey on a personal level. The tattoo then becomes proof within our culture of our heroic virtues, those of bravery, the ability to withstand considerable pain with stoic endurance and resolve until our own personal journey is complete, the tattoo finished. The tattoo is a war act, a physical act, a sacrificing of ones self in the larger Quest of the Hero. The act of tattooing is a very conscious spilling of ones blood on behalf of the culture.

The act of getting tattooed is usually also the journey of the initiate. The tattoo is symbolic of the transition between adolescence and adulthood. By its very nature tattooing, because of the permanence of the tattoo and what it symbolizes, is a transformative act. The initiation ritual in most cultures requires a child to give up his childhood and become an adult. The child, the infantile psyche and personality must die in order for the adult psyche and personality to emerge. Therefore the motif of most cultural initiation rites is one of transformation, of death and resurrection. The tattoo, its pain, its blood, its intense suffering, is the symbolic death, the transformative act that leads to resurrection and rebirth. This is a fundamental human experience. The individual experiences childhood until the early teenage years and then the death of the dependent child which must occur and the resurrection, the emergence and the life of the independent, responsible adult on whom the survival of the culture is absolutely dependent.

Tattooing is unique in that it fulfills the needs of so many cultures in a single explicit act. The tattoo allows an adolescent to take ownership of the newly mature adult body. The tattoo explicitly symbolizes the difference between the body of the child and the body of the adult. It is a means for the mind, our adult consciousness, to take control of the body, which is the vehicle, which serves and carries the consciousness. Tattooing is often a symbol, an expression if you will, of the essential duality of man. The tattoo is a bridge, a connection between the conscious and the unconscious worlds of man, the physical plane and the spiritual plane. The tattoo connects for us that which we can see and that which we can only imagine.

The tattoo is the Sacred Mark, its origins usually found in the Myths of Heroes and Gods. In most cultures the practice of tattooing is a gift from the Gods or the Spirits to man. And in many instances the gift of tattooing is given only after a Hero has made a perilous and arduous journey to retrieve it. In many cultures it is thought that without ones identifying tattoos it is impossible to enter the Underworld or the Spirit World or the Afterlife. The tattoos are your mark of identification to the Gods and Spirits and allow you to make the journey after death unimpeded. Tattoos are sacred marks for this very reason alone.

I believe it is a very revealing act that most of the major organized religions of the West, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, all generally frown on tattooing and have often passed sanctions against its practice. They recognize the deeply spiritual nature of tattooing as the Sacred Mark within traditional tribal cultures and understand it is a threat to conversion. Tattooing connects us with a deep, more ancient spirituality, connects us with the ancient mythologies that are the foundation and bedrock of tribal cultures.

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