Apparently the father of a seriously ill child, after consulting with a local priest, was told that in order for his own son to heal, he must ritually sacrifice another child.
The victim was lured away from his home and the priest, together with the father of the other child and three other accomplices, took the victim to a shrine, where, after a religious rite, he was killed.
The five perpetrators have been arrested, but I am flabbergasted. Theoretically they are all hinduists. I understand that the hinduist religion had left behind all that “human sacrifice” business a long time ago. I cannot comprehend how somebody who calls himself a priest can have such a tremendously warped concept of his own religion… And that others can go along with what the priest said, without even stopping for a moment and saying “wait a minute…”
Yes, the father of the other kid was possibly desperate… But, holy crap, there are limits… This is an unmitigated tragedy for everybody involved.
Serious question: Was that Thuggee stuff from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom totally fictional, or did anything like that ever exist? (I’m talking about the human sacrifice element. I’m pretty sure that nobody has ever really ripped a guy’s still-beating heart out of his chest, and held it while the guy was lowered into molten lava.)
There’s likely never been any of that “human sacrifice” business. There are references to human sacrifice rituals in Vedic texts from as late as 1000 BC, but taken as a whole it seems to have been purely a symbolic ritual (tying people to stakes, then letting them go before actually setting them on fire).
There are parts of rural India and Nepal as backward as any place in the world. But this is just crazy person stuff, not some throwback to actual history.
Sort of. There is some evidence that the Thuggee cult did believe that ritual murder appeased Kali and kept her from smiting everyone. There is probably more evidence that the religious links were made up by British colonial authorities to justify anti-Hindu crackdowns and to encourage missionary work and so on. In all probability the thugs were just very organized criminals.
I’m asking because there’s a certain amount of historical revisionism about stuff like this. Many groups, for example, insist that ritual cannibalism is a myth, despite fairly compelling evidence for some groups.
Similarly, I was wondering if any groups in the India or thereabouts used to practice human sacrifice, and if so how recently it might have been going on.
I don’t know anything about the subject, but Wiki disagrees -
[It was agreed even by Colebrooke, however, that by the Puranic period—at least at the time of the writing of the Kalika-Purana, human sacrifice was accepted. The Kalika Purana was composed in Northeast India in the 11th century. The text states that blood sacrifice is only permitted when the country is in danger and war is expected. According to the text, the performer of a sacrifice will obtain victory over his enemies.[68] In the medieval period, it became increasingly common. In the 7th century, Banabhatta, in a description of the dedication of a temple of Chandika, describes a series of human sacrifices; similarly, in the 9th century, Haribhadra describes the sacrifices to Chandika in Odisha.[70] The town of Kuknur in North Karnataka there exists an ancient Kali temple, built around the 8-9th century AD, which has a history of human sacrifices.[70]
Human sacrifices were carried out in connection with the worship of Shakti until approximately the early modern period, and in Bengal perhaps as late as the early 19th century.[71] Although not accepted by larger section of Hindu culture, certain tantric cults performed human sacrifice until around the same time, both actual and symbolic; it was a highly ritualised act, and on occasion took many months to complete.[71]](Human sacrifice - Wikipedia)
Thank you! Hindus don’t practice human sacrifice. I’m sure some Hindus did, somewhere, but so has almost every other religion. It’s just crazy people. Our gods don’t even want animal sacrifices, for heaven’s sake (pun intended).
Remember that a lot of the history that comes out of India has been filtered by the Brits for like, 400 years. They were the rulers, and they told the stories they wanted. You can get more accurate stories, but it’s not that easy and of course they too are biased.
While I liked Temple of Doom, it was crazy stuff there too. The Thuggees were just criminals, as RNATB says above.