The Vatican is showing its scholarly side by hosting a tattoo conference for the first time ever–and before you get images of the Pope getting inked, it wasn't that kind of conference. The Washington Post reports:
“Into the Skin: identity, symbols and history of permanent body marks” was the brainchild of a Christian arts association and Israel’s ambassador to the Holy See, an unlikely expert in the field given Judaism’s prohibition of tattooing and the painful role that tattooed serial numbers played in the Holocaust.
Ambassador Mordechay Lewy acknowledged the paradox, saying the living memory of Auschwitz’s blue death stamps added another layer to Jewish aversion to tattooing, which many orthodox rabbis forbid because it alters the human body as a divine creation.
Yet Lewy is a respected expert within the field — and a fierce critic of what he calls today’s “commercialization” of an important aspect of cultural history that stretches from Jerusalem to Japan.
Tattoos “can symbolize a social rank, identify ethnic affiliation, indicate experience of religious pilgrimage or of a rite of passage,” he told the two-day conference that ended Tuesday. “They can also be a sign of rebellion or diversity.”
Oxford University scholar Jane Caplan was "gobsmacked" she was so surprised that the Vatican would host such a conference. She herself is a scholar of tattooing, having written an important anthology on tattoos in European and US history.
Warriors of the 11th century First Crusade branded crosses on their foreheads or shoulders before going into battle to show divine support for their mission. Mystics over time have claimed the “stigmata” — the wounds that imitate Christ’s wounds from his crucifixion.
And even today, many players of New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team sport the traditional tattoos of the country’s Maori indigenous peoples, said Sean Mallon, senior curator of Pacific culture at the Museum of New Zealand.
“It’s a tangible way of expressing the past,” he said.
“There are a lot of tattoos here,” he whispered pointing to conference participants and admitting his back was covered with them. “They’re just not visible.”
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