Why tonsure

The practice was in vogue till the Roman Catholic Church abolished the practice of tonsure in Tonsuring is also a religious ceremony in Hindu religion. According to the rules of the Vedas, the Chudakarana tonsuring of hair should be performed either in the first or the third year of the child. It is practiced even today in most Hindu communities. In Buddhism, tonsure is a part of the rite of becoming a monk. This involves shaving the head and face.

This tonsure is renewed as often as required to keep the head cleanly shaven, and some Chinese Buddhist monks also have 6, 9, or 12 dots on the top of the head as a result of burning the shaven scalp with the tip of a smoking incense stick. In Islam, it is often customary for pilgrims on the Hajj to shave their heads before entering Mecca as a sign of their rejection of vanity and for cleanliness.

Jain monks pluck their hair so as to keep their scalp bare and devoid of lice. They do not use blade or knife. Tonsuring is a common ritual rite in the temple town of Tirupathi South India and daily both men and women tonsure in thousands. Hindu devotees offer their hair to Lord Balaji for favors received, to show gratitude and respect. Both men and women offer their hair.

It is interesting to note that more than 1, women partake in the ceremony daily. Temple authorities sell the hair thus obtained. In , Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanams sold human hair worth million Indian rupees. The tonsured hair from men is used to extract l-cysteine.

It is a precursor in the food, pharmaceutical, and personal care industries. One of the largest applications is the production of flavors. Paul — chose to shave their entire heads in what's called an eastern style. Then, there was a Celtic or Simon Magus tonsure. Like the name suggests, it was common in the British Isles and Ireland, but its exact characteristics are debated.

Some say Celtic monks would shave the fronts of their heads from ear-to-ear while leaving the rest long, while McCarthy's research suggests heads were shaved to include a fringe across the front. No one is completely sure because the Celtic tonsure was outlawed in According to Kaliaperumal Karthikeyan of the Sri Manakula Vinayagar Medical College, Celts had been sporting the tonsure well before they met anyone who ever called themselves Roman.

There was no religious belief or basis for the head-shaving that historians have been able to determine , and when Christianity came to the Celts, they decided to keep wearing their tonsures in the same way they always had. McCarthy says that was a huge problem for a few different reasons, and the church's outrage over this different hairstyle was so great there was call for clerics who wore it to be excommunicated.

English Heritage says the different monks' tonsures were a visible sign of something the Christian church absolutely didn't want: different views not just on hair, but on other traditions, too. The bigger point of contention was how the date for Easter was figured out each year. Both traditions used the lunar cycle to find the date, but the methods were so different that the Roman and Celtic dates could be as far as a month apart.

And it wasn't just a few people following one tradition or the other — even royal households were divided down the middle. This was a huge deal, and as Bede put it in his eighth-century writings, "This dispute rightly began to trouble the minds and consciences of many people, who feared that they might have received the name of Christian in vain. Test Your Vocabulary. Can you spell these 10 commonly misspelled words?

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