Now just follow through, and track through the history of tattoos. A little while ago - in 1991, some hikers in Europe found an alpine ice man. He was well preserved. He'd been there about 5,000 years; so that's about 3000BC when he lived.
The interesting thing was: he was tattooed. When they investigated his body, they found that it was quite a lot of bone damage, and quite a lot of decay in his body. He would have been in a lot of pain. It's quite likely that the tattoos were part of invoking Gods to bring healing on his life.
In 1891, there was 4,000 year old mummy from Egypt found - heavily tattooed. In fact as we looked through the various cultures, you'll find all over the place, right through every culture in the world, tattoos appear. There's almost no culture that tattoos don't appear, and always it's associated with the occult, and engagement with spirit powers, or with slavery - slavery, or occult powers, or both; so I'll just read for you a few examples...
South American head hunters used tattoos; so they would go hunting. They would get a head, and once they've captured the person, killed them, taken off their head, they would generally eat the body, and tattoo themselves as a sign of their victory, and what they'd done.
It's also done up in Borneo. I was up there among the Borneo people, and they would tattoo themselves after they had got one of the heads - chopped someone's head off, and shrunk it, and hung it up.
I was able to go into some of the villages, and you could see the shrunken heads of various people (including Japanese soldiers) - and they would put a tattoo on themselves. In fact if you were a young man, you could not become fully a man unless you took a head (took someone's head off), and then got tattooed. The tattoo was the indication you had passed.
Among Hawaiians, they have tattoo Gods; so they consult the tattoo Gods about when to get tattooed, and what kind of tattoo; and they look to the Gods to guide them - even in the pictures of the tattoos that they take.
The Chinese use the tattoos to ward off evil spirits. So did the Japanese. They appeased different Gods.
The Romans used tattoos to brand their slaves; so when Romans would take anyone prisoner, or they'd take someone as a slave, they would tattoo on them "Tax Paid"; and that tattoo was an indication they belonged to the Roman government.
Many of the Christians, when the Romans captured them, they tattooed them on the head: “Tax Paid” - they belonged to the Roman government.
Native Americans tattooed themselves heavily. Wherever you went in America, with the Native Indians, they tattooed themselves. With many of them, the tattoos were required, in their belief system, to ward off evil spirits; and to gain them access into the spirit world. They believed that if they didn't have a tattoo, they could never get recognised by the spirit Gods; and they could never get access to the spirit world.
In Alaska, the Eskimos tattooed themselves to appease the Gods, so they'd be able to survive. So the tattooing, for them, was about a covenant with a spirit being, so they would survive.
In the Babylonian, and Canaanite temples, the prostitutes that worshipped there all tattooed themselves with fertility tattoos. The male prostitutes also tattooed themselves, and it was all part of the temple worship. It was part of their allegiance and loyalty to their Gods.
In the primitive areas of India, when people get tattoos, often the person who does the tattoo is a shaman, or a witch doctor, or a sorcerer.