Tattoos for Magic

I on the same boat and your right, there isn't a lot of info on it. However, as you most likely know, you have to go through it to understand the effect.

The vast majority of people I know who have tattoos have done them ritually or the tattoos have personal meaning or symbolism. There's tons of info available on tribal stuff, maori, etc. Look up Fakir Musafar at the very least.

If I ever worked with, say, an indigenous group of people who used tattoos as part of their initiatory process, I would have the marks appropriate to my involvement.

I have no tattoos, nor would I seem likely, at my age, to ever start. The main reason for me not having tattoos, even though I have strong connections to symbols in my own AOS for example, comes down to permanence. Whenever I have thought about making some image indelible, I find myself freezing in situ and thinking "no, I need stay fluid in mind" ... as simple as that.

I do, however, use body/face paints in ritual, at times, and find that most effective to impress the mind.

Su

Some nine months ago, I'd still have firmly stated that tattoos were a permanent modification and that since the river is never the same twice, I would never have one.

Besides, inwardly, I had this naggging intuition (rightly or wrongly, doesn't matter) that tattoos were once (?) used as a sacrficial pledge to the land... that it somehow meant you'd be willing to "engage in the myth of the eternal return" to safeguard the earth that gave you life... (?)... and I thought that I'd never willingly return...

Never say never.

He died.

Tattooless because I had argued him out of it... funny how life is...

And I carried on like a mad banshee and later on, I wrote a ton of words and waved my magic mouse around until my fingers ached...

"Love does unexpected things to a person. It gives him or her the ability to look past the incidentals of their lives and offers instead the unparalleled opportunity to recognize and gaze fondly at the God/dess
spark dwelling within each other.
It's killing me, this drowning sense of both pure unselfish & selfish love
and overflowing longing for the Beloved who disguised as the beloved, oh
so gently tapped open the door into my heart and blew it to smithereens...
leaving a gaping door behind in the wake of his passing... there's nothing
left now for me to see except the whole world, the stars, the moon & so
many pairs of glinting eyes that words fail me.
I could shatter things, I could shout, I could whisper, I could kiss the ground beneath me and press my forehead against each pair of hands that fold in front of me. But I just sigh and smile instead, with a tear meandering in the eyelashes, the message is already out. It's been out in circulation since before the time of the Vedas. Siddhartha contemplated It. Yeshua lived It. Rumi longed for It. St. John stayed awake through his long night for It. Meister Eckhart craved to give birth to It. With the advent of quantum physics, It has outfitted itself with the glittering gown of monistic idealism.
Everyone and everything is in the Beloved.
Pain can be such a paradoxical doorway into the numinous beauty of Life...
yet how I wish not to have been dragged across its threshold...
All I can tell you is that love transcends space-time.
We are individual structures in the tangled hierarchy of the Quantum
Consciousness.
We are cells in the body of God/dess.
Parallel meanings in the languages of science and religion...."

And I went to get a tattoo of my own design in memory of the Beloved's mask.
The process lasted almost four hours and it was painful, yes.
But, seeking to relief a larger pain with a minor one doesn't work.
That part of the process was based on human error.
But as a symbol of my surrender to the Beloved, it served its purpose.

Sorry for the length of this post, it started as a short thing...

Eddie I think that tatoos for ritual purposes are more common than you think. Since I tuned myself in to the frequencies of the western occult I've noticed a great many "interesting" looking people with occult symbols tatooed on their hands and forearms. Also I've noticed a number of recurring symbols much smaller and simpler in nature that seem to dentoe group affiliations. Granted I do live in a city which claims to be the occult capitol of North America, with good reason.

I'm in the opposite boat. It is for ritual purposes that I keep my body completley unmodified. The nature of my magic is constantly changing, and I don't believe that to simply change your outlook on a symbol would change the way that symbol interacts with the aether in your aura or the general akasha. For the same reason I wear no amulets or jewlery or antyhing of the sort, allthough I may be inclined to the latter at some other point in my life.

I think that tatoos are a great form of magckal expression. I've used them my self. After a series of rituals to stabilize some anger management issues I had in my 20's, I had a tatoo done that both symbolizes the personification of my inner anger (as part of the naming and reconciliation process). For me, both the image it's self and the location are symbolic, as I also do a lot of qabalistic work, it's tattooed where the 'sphere' of geburah/mars would be to further the identification.

It's worked well in it's intent. Such a tatoo is like a sigil that one sees daily every time one looks in the mirror. Combined with the actual physical process of pain and process and intent that goes into a personal tatoo it' seems to be a natural match. Especially for long term change in one's life. One can loose a sigil or forget an intent, but a tatoo stares back at you at every turn till you visit the plastic surgeon with the laser....

I have three sigil tattoos.
one is just a monogram in honour of my old name,
the other two are alphabet of desire tatts.

One design I waited until I forgot what it was for before I had it tattooed.

The other I remember, but tell no one.

my two cents
Azi

Yes I am in the process of using magik with my newest tattoo. The dragon is something deep and primal and I'm doing this as a gift to my dragon. My dragon protects me and teaches me hard lessons in life. I don't really like to talk about it much, since it has a lot of deep meaning to me, and is very very personal. So I'm not going to going any further.

thanks
Eeklsy

As the first examples of tattooing (at least that we've discovered so far) were magical, I am amazed that they seem to be used very rarely for this purpose nowdays. I am both a tattoo artist & heavily into chaos magic (I worship Set, via myself) & do a few magic-related tattoos but nowhere near as many as I would have thought. The earliest recorded examples of tattooing discovered to date were found on an Ice-age Scythian hunter found frozen in a glacier. They consisted of various patterns and totem animals over the arms leading into a trail of reindeer across the upper back. It is theorised that their purpose was to attract the animal & bring success in the hunt

Check out my new chaos dragon!!!

I have a tattoo of Zain on my middrift, eye of horus above a serpent. Rather large. A black cobra on my left lower back. In the future, I plan to get another cobra on the right hand side and a dragon on my spine.

Ok, this is a subject near and dear to my heart. At the ripe old age of 41 (almost 42) I've had the desire for a tattoo. I have thought of sigils but I would like my first one to be of Cho-Ku-Rei, the Reiki symbol. What prevents me is the fact that I have a lot of allergies. Is there any way to find out if you are allergic or not to the ink? I have heard of people have reactions. That bothers me more than anything.

okay, i'll admit it, i got a big tattoo from a magick book. the artist put in on clean, it is obvious. i didn't ritualize anything besides photocopying it, presenting it, and sitting through it getting put on. sometimes i make believe that people who use it for magickal purposes, i might get blown a spell. i like getting nervous when i'm bare backed, like someone is going to recognize it and their eyes will squint with disapproval, like i didn't make the glamour cut....

All my tattoos have spiritual/esoteric symbolism. I didn't really think of them as sigils at the time(because I wasn't familiar with them at the time), but they definitely have that aspect. There was enough pain with my tattoos to charge them up good. I'd say I definitely an influence from them in my life, and I look forward to more magickal tattoos in the future.

Deadjellyfish gave an excellent retort when confronted with this question.

I will paraphrase: If you are okay with destroying it after you charge it. Things can, and often do, go awry. You won't want to keep the tattoo after you have made a magical association with it.

I would say, "Fogetaboudit." But, maybe you like sandpaper, laser, or whatever to remove tattoos that didn't work out magically?

The best laid plans of mice and men.....