Although Angelina Jolie is known for her many tattoos, but she recently shocked her fans when she debuted her most recent one spanning across her back.
To find out the meaning of the radical tattoo which was inked on Jolie by Thai artist Ajarn Noo Kanpai while directing her film, First They Killed My Father in Cambodia, RadarOnline.com spoke to an expert who has decoded the symbols.
According Justin McDaniel, a renowned religious studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania, the actresses newest ink is a supposed to be a form of protection.
“I think this is an ‘araham” yantra’ or ‘araham sak yan’ … a protective ritual graphic representation of powerful and protective Pali incantations that come out of the Hindu-Buddhist traditions of Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand,” McDaniel, who specializes in Southeast Asian Buddhism, told Radar.
Jolie’s new tattoos hold a very high spiritual significance as well, according to the expert.
“This seems to be an adaptation of a common yantra used to magically connect the body of the Buddha (actually five previous Buddhas) to the parts of the human body, the 5 major sounds of the mouth (dental, labial, nasal, palatal, etc.), and other aspects of physical reality,” McDaniel explained.
“The point of these protective diagrams is to connect the microcosm of the human body to the macrocosm of the universe,” he said. “The person is both grounded in the body, but in touch with the powers of the universe more broadly.”
