Note on vile magical practices

Note: this text is extracted from Book V, chapter 25:

Then the boy in his recklessness struck the skull with a piece of wood lighted at the top and clove it. The brains spouted up from it and entered his mouth, like the initiation into the practices of the Rākṣasas, bestowed upon him by the funeral flame. And by tasting them that boy became a Rākṣasa, with hair standing on end, with sword that he had drawn from the flame, terrible with projecting tusks: so he seized the skull and, drinking the brains from it, he licked it with tongue restlessly quivering like the flames of fire that clung to the bone. Then he flung aside the skull, and lifting his sword he attempted to slay his own father Govindasvāmin. But at that moment a voice came out from the cemetery: ‘Kapālasphoṭa, thou god, thou oughtest not to slay thy father. Come here’”.

Although at first sight the disgusting method by which Vijayadatta becomes a Rākṣasa may appear merely fantastic and revolting, the idea is based on practices which enter into the Tantric rites of the Śākta worshippers of Dēvī, in one of her various forms, as Kālī, Durgā, Cāmuṇḍā, etc. Apart from the cannibalism and human sacrifices connected with this worship, we find similar and even more loathsome practices among the Aghorī caste, who are not even extinct to-day (see p. 90n³). Members of this caste eat the most disgusting things imaginable, including putrid corpses, human and animal excretions, etc.

As Crooke points out (“Aghorī,” Hastings’ Ency. Rel. Elh., vol. i, p. 212), these vile practices may perhaps be accounted for by similar ones which existed, and in some cases do still exist, among wizards and medicine-men of savage tribes. The idea at the root of such practices is that the unusual and filthy food thus consumed enhances the spiritual exaltation of the eater. I consider it is really the same principle as we saw (p. 117) existed in the minds of people who perform rites in a state of nudity.

The following examples of eating disgusting food for magical reasons have been collected by Crooke (op. cit., p. 212): According to Haddon (Report Cambridge Exped., vol. v, p. 321), at Mabuiag in Torres Straits, the Maidelaig, or sorcerer, “ made a practice of eating anything that was disgusting and revolting in character, or poisonous or medicinal in nature, not only during the course of instruction, but subsequently, whenever about to perform a special act of sorcery. For instance, they were said frequently to eat flesh of corpses, or to mix the juices of corpses with their food. One effect of this diet was to make them ‘wild’ so that they did not care for anyone, and all affection temporarily ceased for relatives, wife and children; and on being angered by any of them, they would not hesitate to commit murder.” In parts of Melanesia, according to Codrington, Mana, or spiritual exaltation, is gained by eating human flesh; and in this way people obtain the power of becoming vampires, the ghost of the corpse which was eaten entering into friendly relations with the eater (Joum. Anth. Inst., vol. x, p. 305; Melanesians, p. 222). In Central Africa, according to Macdonald, witches and wizards feed on human flesh, and anyone tasting a morsel of such food becomes himself a wizard (Joum. Anth. Inst., vol. xxii, p. 107). Among nearly all the Bantu negro races there is a lingering suspicion that the sorcerer, or person desiring to become a sorcerer, is a corpse-eater, a ghoul who digs up the bodies of dead persons to eat them, either from a morbid taste, or in the belief that this action will invest him with magical powers. In Uganda, as well as in many parts of Bantu Africa, there is believed to exist a secret society of such ghouls, who assemble at midnight for the purpose of disinterring and eating corpses. People cursed with this morbid taste are in Uganda called basezi (Johnston, Uganda, vol. ii, pp. 578, 692 et. seq.).

Stories similar to those in the present work are still told in India (Pañjab Notes and Queries, vol. ii, p. 75; Steel and Temple’s Wide-Awake Stories, p. 418). Even at the present day the Oḍi magicians in Malabar are said to eat filth as a means of acquiring power (Fawcett, Bulletin of the Madras Museum, vol. iii, p. 311).

For further details reference should be made to Bourke, Scatalogic Rites of all Nations, see especially ch. xliii, under “Witchcraft,” etc.— n.m.p.