Why Was Tattooing Abandoned In Western Culture?

Do the Orthodox not believe that all creation fell with Adam and Eve's fall? If so, then there are no incorruptible materials to use for the icons, which are themselves only pointers or reflections of the actual sanctity. Paint flecks, wood rots, stone crumbles. Moth and rust doth corrupt.

In any case, it could be the tattoo itself, not the person bearing it, that is considered to be the icon.

All persons bleed at one point or another, and especially for accidental reasons.

In the end, the human body is fallen because of ancestral sin. The question of emission is but one point in the greater scheme of humankind's fallen nature. The ancestral sin of the "first parents" in the Genesis primeval history and its tangible effects in the world precludes human beings as a canvas for the living images of God.

The body and the soul are merging towards sanctification (theosis), but are never at that point on earth. Would not an icon on a body suggest an exclusion from ancestral fallen nature that is not yet available for mortals?

Catholics often have the Sacred Heart or Our Lady of Guadelupe tattooed onto themselves. Catholicism has no problem with this given its Augustinian post-lapsarian theology.
 
perhaps they realised what we know now that there are
only 3 kind of people that wears tattoos, sailors, convicts
and hobos.

not considering I am a teacher with several tatoos. the children think they are awsome:p

I two really like the image of a Turkish warrior with a cross tatood on his face.
Iff the TL come's, please let me know:D:D:D:D:D:D:D:D
 
Do the Orthodox not believe that all creation fell with Adam and Eve's fall? If so, then there are no incorruptible materials to use for the icons, which are themselves only pointers or reflections of the actual sanctity. Paint flecks, wood rots, stone crumbles. Moth and rust doth corrupt.

In any case, it could be the tattoo itself, not the person bearing it, that is considered to be the icon.

You've exhausted me. Why not ask an Orthodox or Eastern Catholic priest? I'm Roman Catholic, so I only know western theology well. My knowledge of eastern theology is limited only to its intersections with western thought.

In closing: perhaps it would be permissible to tattoo icons onto people. However, human beings, wood, and plaster are not the same substances. The complexity of human beings introduces many variables, including all of the aspects of ancestral sin (note: ancestral sin is not the same as the Augustinian "original sin" that Roman Catholics, Anglicans, and Lutherans subscribe to).

If you find out more on the subject of tattooing icons onto human beings, let us know. It's a fascinating topic.
 
That well could work. I know Tomb was also working on a TL in which a Nestorian saint goes out and proselytizes to the Turks sucessfully, sort of a Turkic Cyril or Columbanus.

Well that is set before the Turkic Migrations.
 
The reason, why Greek and Roman elites and those who considered themselves as such, did not have tattoos was the same why it has not been deemed acceptable among traditional western elites for the last couple of centuries. Because they considered those having tattoos, both within and without their respective ethnicities as socially and / or ethnically inferior. Celts, Picts, Scots, Scythians and other poeples outside the greco-roman world had tattos and since they were nothing but barbarian brutes for Greeks and Romans alike no greek citizen or roman patrician would ever wear any tattoos.

Only persons of questionable social status like slaves, gladiators, later sailors and soldiers or mobsters would have tattoos and much later those who considered themselves as non-conformistic like artists or people who were closely bound to seamanship, even among royalty. An example of the first group was Empress Elizabeth of Austria, who returned with a rose-tattoo from her sejourn on Madeira, simply to shock the arch-conservative imperial court in Vienna, an equally royal example of the second group was the late King Frederick IX of Denmark, who liked to present the tattoos on his chest and arms during sailing trips on his yacht.
 
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