A closer look
Skipping lunch for a vision quest is one thing, but ripping your own chest open while staring at the sun is next-level dedication. Before the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull enacted the Hanbleceya rite at its most extreme. He had 50 pieces of flesh sliced from his arms and danced for days without food or water, attached to a sacred pole by skewers driven through his pectoral muscles. The excruciating combination of agonizing pain, dehydration, and exhaustion shattered the veil of ordinary reality, granting him a crystal-clear hallucination of soldiers falling upside down into his camp.
