There are some pretty odd religions and cults on this weird world of ours, and there’s none quite as strange and disturbing as the Aghori. If you can find one let us know, I bet you can’t. The Aghori are a Hindu sect which has been being disturbing since the 14th Century as far as the scholars can tell. They are devotees of the deity Shiva and their practices include cannibalism and much, much worse. They have been featured in Dirty Sanchez and the Jackass spin off Wildboyz, but these cults certainly aren’t playing up to the camera. They are very real.
Shiva is the goddess of destruction and this is their thought process in a nut shell: Shiva is perfect, therefore everything that has been created by Shiva (i.e. every thing, thought and action) is also perfect, to deny that is to deny the sacredness and perfection of life and Shiva. What that means in practice is that anything goes, there shouldn’t be any states of fear or disgust in Shiva’s perfect world.
Their rituals are basically subversions of taboos; they do the rankest things they can think of as a defiant “F you” to more mainstream Hindus. Most Hindus in fact don’t acknowledge them as Hindus because everything they do is so shamelessly opposite to their normal practices, beliefs and morals.
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They eat rotten and left over food and often walk about naked. You may have come across videos or pictures of some of them twisting their knob with sticks, they like to do that too. One of the practices they indulge in, as you may have guessed from the title, is cannibalism. The Aghori don’t even necessarily cook the body before tucking in, some take floating bodies out of the Ganges, one of the most polluted rivers in the world, and feast on their rotting flesh.
That’s a pretty stomach churning thought, the Ganges has more than one hundred times more poop in it than even the Indian government deems acceptable. Even eating a delicious Malteser pulled out of that river would be foul, let alone a semi-putrefied human cadaver. I don’t understand how any of them grow to be old men? I guess if you survive that you can pretty much survive anything.
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They hang around and sleep in charnal grounds (equivalents of our graveyards), use skulls as drinking bowls, smear cremation ashes over their bodies and meditate whilst sat on a corpse. Unsurprisingly, people in small, remote villages fear them and respect their supernatural powers. They don’t just eat bodies though, they also eat (and smear themselves with) poo poo (coprophagy) and pee pee (urophagia).
If all of that info hasn’t put you off yet, here’s the clincher: once you’ve become one of their members you have to leave your home and wander India, sleeping in graveyards for the rest of your life, never being allowed to see your friends or family again. The only positives the Aghori have to offer are rituals involving alcohol and opiates. I’m not sure that’s enough to swing it for me.
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