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majority who don't get pierced involve themselves in other activities such as fasting, singing, and dancing.
The festival is held in honor of the Hindu god Murugan. Body piercing is a way to show devotion, although some of the practitioners may also view it as a form of penance or self-punishment. Some of them reportedly go into a trance after being pierced, and this may help them endure the pain. At the end of the festival, the hooks and other sharp implements are removed. Although this is always done carefully, it is often even more painful than the original insertions.
The Scapegoat Once each year the priests of ancient Israel would perform a special ritual that supposedly transferred the sins of all the people to an animal called a scapegoat. This animal was then driven into the wilderness to die, taking the sins with it. The purpose of the ritual was to free the people from their sins and allow them to make a fresh start. It was repeated annually to get rid of all the accumulated sins that everyone had committed during the previous year.
The ritual was performed in early autumn on the annual Day of Atonement (also called Yom Kippur). The procedure actually required two goats, both of them males. One goat was chosen to be killed as a sacrifice, and the other was designated to be the scapegoat. After the first goat was killed, the high priest laid his hands on the head of the scapegoat to symbolically transfer the sins of the people onto it. The animal was then driven into the wilderness and abandoned there.
It isn't clear what happened to the sins after the scapegoat died in the wilderness. Possibly they faded out of existence as the body of the animal disintegrated, but some accounts suggest that they were transferred to a demon named Azazel.
