HOOKS

Hooks as a tool have been used throughout history to obtain food, fasten clothing, secure buildings and boats, handle animals, make tools, and create decorative or ceremonial objects. Hook-shaped pendants and ornaments have appeared in many cultures. Their meanings differ by place and period and may involve identity, protection, status, artistic symbolism, or anything and everything else.

Hooks work well because their curved shape catches, holds, or suspends something without requiring a complete enclosure. This simple principle has made them adaptable and useful across many technologies. Fishing hooks specifically are among the oldest specialized tools humans have made. They developed over tens of thousands of years as people found ways to catch fish for food, using materials like bone, shell, wood, stone, and eventually metal.

Many cultures have used piercing, suspension, or hooks in ritual practices, but those traditions differ greatly in their purposes and meanings. Some involve temporary piercing as an act of devotion or endurance; others use ornaments worn through the skin, or attach cords to piercings as part of a ceremony. None of these traditions are universal, and not all practices involving body piercing use hooks. Historically, piercing, hooking, and suspension have appeared in the religious ceremonies of various cultures as acts of devotion, sacrifice, thanksgiving, purification, or altered-state ritual. Suspension traditions trace back thousands of years to specific rituals, including the Hindu festival of Thaipusam and Charak Puja, as well as Native American ceremonies like the Mandan Okipa and the Lakota Sun Dance.

There is an incredibly important distinction to be made between a particular community's sacred ceremony and the physical act of piercing, suspension, or pulling on flesh hooks. Some piercing ceremonies are culturally restricted, but it cannot be assumed that every practice involving piercing, hooks, suspension or pulls is a closed Indigenous tradition. In the Sun Dance, the ceremony (not the physical act of piercing) is sacred, and protocols about participation, observation, photography, and sharing ceremonial knowledge vary by nation and community. The Mandan Okipa is a specific religious ceremony, not a general-purpose piercing ritual. It is that ceremony (not the act of piercing, suspending, or pulling) which is generally considered to be a closed practice. Flesh hooking, including body suspension, is not a closed practice in the sense of being restricted exclusively to a specific cultural or ethnic group, though it has deep and sacred roots in some Indigenous and religious traditions. 

Needle Playground does not practice or condone cultural appropriation of any ancient rituals or ceremonies which belong to specific cultures and are considered closed practices. Any information provided by Needle Playground regarding the use of hooks is in the context of them being used as tools in sharps play.