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There are essentially two situations in which witches might practice nude in New World witchcraft: alone and in groups. However, even here there are some gray areas, because when a witch is “alone,” they are often not entirely alone. They may be meeting an for an rite, for example, and be expected to offer their body up for sexual congress, or even a simple washing ritual. In , however, the favors were not always sexual, as some initiation rites involved offering a literal piece of one’s body, where “the devil is granted your soul in exchange for some talent, gift, or magical power, it is thought that he then receives some gift of the body in return. This could be a fingernail or even a withered finger.”
A fantasy makeover occult heathen ritual pagan goddess woman girl nude naked holding a deer skull and antlers
Overall, there is no unequivocal evidence that any ancient religion of the European and Near Eastern world held rites in which even one or two nude people had a regular place. Even the young men who ran around ancient Rome in the Lupercalia festival, sometimes described as unclothed, wore leather jockstraps. Where stark nudity is described in a ceremony, it is associated with special rites of passage, such as the naked man who lit a funeral pyre in Ibn Fadlan’s description of pagan Russia in the 920s. He also walked backwards, further setting him apart from normal humanity. However, this summary misses out an important area in which ritual nudity had a regular part: initiation into mystery religions.
All this seems to be suggesting that ritual nudity had a place in ancient European and Near Eastern religion at certain key moments of transformation, but that any other role for it is unproven and it vanished from the Western religious tradition at the end of antiquity. Any such conclusion, however, ignores the alleged association between mixed-sex nude rites and Christian heresy.
Across the rest of the globe the ancient European pattern seems to be reproduced: ritual nudity is restricted to exceptional moments or to special individuals playing particular roles. The nakedness of Indian fakirs set them apart from the conventional human world and should perhaps be termed symbolic rather than ritual nudity. Two naked men, personifying spirits, presided over sacrificial rites among the coastal tribes of British Columbia. In Samoa, a sacred virgin would appear nude at the rite by which she made the transition to a married woman. In the Marquesa Islands, women danced naked at the funeral of a chief, apparently as representations of life. In southern India, until recently, people would run a few miles nude to the temples of the goddess Renukamba as an ordeal to fulfill a vow or obtain a wish.
