World Famous Cults and Fanatics (8 page)

The method was always the same.
The advance guard would locate a band of travellers, then one or two of the Thugs would approach the group and ask if they might travel with it – for
protection.
A few days later, a few more Thugs would make the same request.
This would continue until there were more Thugs than travellers.
The killing usually took place in the evening, when the
travellers were seated around the fire.
At a given signal, three Thugs would take their place behind each victim.
One of them would pass the strangling cloth (or
ruhmal
) around the
victim’s neck; another would grab his legs and lift them clear of the ground; the third would seize his hands or kneel on his back.
Usually, it was all over within seconds.
The bodies of the
victims were then hacked and mutilated to prevent recognition, and to make them decompose more quickly.
The legs were cut off; if there was time, the whole body might be dismembered.
Then it was
buried.
It was now time for the most important part of the ritual – the ceremony known as
Tuponee.
A tent was usually erected – to shield the Thugs from the sight of travellers.
The
kussee
, the consecrated pickaxe (their equivalent of the Christian cross), was placed near the grave: the Thugs sat around in a group.
The leader prayed to Kali for wealth and success.
A
symbolic strangling was enacted, and then all who had taken an active part in the murder ate the “communion sugar” (
goor
), while the chief poured consecrated water on the grave.
One of the captured Thugs told Sleeman: “Let any man once taste of that
goor
and he will be a Thug, though he know all the trades and have all the wealth of the world.”

William Sleeman was a captain in the British army; born in St Tudy, Cornwall, he had served in India since 1809.
He was fascinated by Sherwood’s paper, and in the early 1820s, he began to
study the Thugs in the Nerbudda valley.
The revelations he made in 1829 caused a sensation throughout India.
Sleeman revealed that Thuggee was not a local religious sect, but a nationwide
phenomenon that claimed the lives of thousands of travellers every year.
Sleeman became the acknowledged authority on the subject, and in 1830, Lord William Bentinck appointed him to suppress the
Thugs.

Fortunately for Sleeman, the organization had already become corrupt and degenerate.
In its earlier days, the members of the sect had been strict in their observance of the rules.
It was
forbidden to kill women, because Kali was a woman; it was also forbidden to kill religious mendicants, carpenters, metal workers, blind men, pariahs, lepers, mutilated men, and men driving a goat
or cow.
Greed had caused a gradual relaxation of the rules (it must have been infuriating to let a rich caravan escape because it contained a carpenter or blind man); and it was to this
disobedience that the Thugs attributed their decline in fortunes.
In a sense, this was true.
Haste and greed meant that bodies were sometimes left unburied, so a search could be instituted more
quickly.
And in some cases, lack of preparation meant that the killing was bungled – Sleeman mentions a case in which the Thugs were pursued back to their own village, and saved from arrest
only by the intervention of the villagers (who had been well bribed).
When Sleeman’s researches were published, travellers became suspicious of “holy men” or poor Moslems who
asked for protection.
Better roads (built by the British) meant that Thugs could be pursued more easily.
Many of them became informers (or “approvers”) to save their own lives.
Within a
few years, thousands of Thugs had been arrested and brought to trial.

Sleeman was the first to understand the fundamentally religious nature of Thuggee: that the murders were sacrifices offered to the dark mother, Kali (also known as Durgha and Bhowani).
Because
he was deeply religious, the Thug was usually scrupulous, honest, kindly and trustworthy; Sleeman’s assistant described one Thug chief as “the best man I have ever known”.
Many
Thugs were rich men who held responsible positions; part of their spoils went to local rajahs or officials, who had no obiection to Thugs provided they committed their murders elsewhere.
Colonel
James Sleeman, grandson of Sir William, described Feringheea as “the Beau Nash of Thuggee”.
Like the Assassins, most convicted Thugs met their deaths with remarkable bravery, which
impressed their British executioners.
It is this Jekyll and Hyde character that makes the Thugs so baffling.
One old Thug was the nurse of a family of British children, and obviously regarded his
charges with great tenderness; for precisely one month of every year he obtained leave to visit his “sick mother”; the family found it unbelievable when he was arrested as a Thug.
For
the Thugs were capable of murdering children as casually as adults.
A Thug leader described how his gang decoyed a group of twenty-seven – induding five women and two children – away
from a larger group of travellers (arguing that they could travel more cheaply).
At midnight they stopped to rest in a grove – already chosen in advance as the murder place.
There the Thugs
strangled the adults; the children – two three-year-old boys – were given to two Thugs; but one of them kept crying for his mother, whom he had just seen murdered.
The Thug picked him
up by his feet and dashed out his brains against a rock.
This was one of the few occasions when retribution followed.
The adults were buried, but the Thugs overlooked the boy’s body.
It was
discovered the next morning by the local landowner, who set out to hunt the Thugs with armed men.
After a chase, the Thugs were located; when the armed men opened fire, they scattered, leaving
behind much of their booty.
Four Thugs were arrested, and kept in captivity for a few years.
(Sleeman points out that the landowner’s motive was not a sense of justice, but to seize the
spoils.) The other boy was brought up as a Thug.

The male children of Thugs were automatically initiated into the sect.
They were first placed in the care of a Thug tutor, who insisted upon absolute obedience, and acted as their religious
instructor.
(It must be emphasized that the killing was only a part of the ritual of the Thugs, as Communion is of Christians.) At the age of nine or ten, the boys were allowed to act as scouts,
and later to watch the killing.
At eighteen they were allowed to take part in the killing and eat the
goor
.

By the year 1850, Thuggee had virtually ceased to exist in India.
Over 4,000 Thugs had been brought to trial; some were hanged, others sentenced to transportation or life imprisonment.
Sleeman
came to know many of them – even to establish a kind of friendship; for example, he was instrumental in getting the notorious Feringheea a pardon (in the face of some opposition, for when the
Thug leader was caught, he admitted that he had just returned from an expedition in which 105 men and women had died).

The mystery of the origin of Thuggee is still unsolved.
Feringheea told Sleeman that all the Thug rituals were portrayed in the eighth-century carvings in the caves of Ellora.
(Ellora is a
village in north-east Bombay province, and its Hindu, Buddhist and Jain temples extend for over a mile, with some of India’s greatest sculptural treasures, whose dates range from the third to
the thirteenth century.) If this is true, then the Thugs predated the Assassins by three hundred years.
In his book
The Assassins
, Bernard Lewis suggests that the Thugs may have been
connected with the stranglers of Iraq – the heretical sect that sprang up after the death of the Prophet.
But these stranglers flourished in the first half of the eighth century, and four
more centuries were to elapse before the Moslems made deep inroads into India.
(The greatest of the early Moslem invaders of India, Mahmud of Ghazni – Khayyam’s “mighty
Mahmud” – confined himself to the Punjab, in north-western India: Delhi fell to Mohammed of Ghur in 1192.) So it is altogether more likely that Ismailis, fleeing from persecution after
the fall of Alamut, discovered that India already possessed its own Order of Assassins, and formed an alliance with the Thugs.
Other Ismailis formed their own sects in India, and continued to
regard the Persian Imam as their head.
In 1811, the French consul Rousseau observed that Ismailis flourished in India, and that they regarded their Imam almost as a god.
In 1850, a sect of Ismailis
known as the Khojas decided to settle a religious dispute by their old methods, and four dissenting brethren were assassinated in broad daylight.
The four killers were hanged.
The quarrel centred
around the question of whether the Khojas of Bombay province still owed allegiance to the Persian Imam.
This Imam was known as the Aga Khan; and a few years later, he was forced to flee to India
– after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Shah of Persia – and became the spiritual head of the Ismailis – not only in India, but also in Persia, Syria and central Asia.
And so the homeland of the Thugs became eventually the homeland of the descendants of the Assassins.

To find a parallel to the fanaticism of the Assassins and the Thugs, we have to turn to some of the bizarre sects of Old Russia.

***

***

The Khlysty and the Skoptzy

In the section on Rasputin (
see
here
), I have deliberately said nothing about the strange religious cult to which he belonged, for it would have led to a long
digression.
In fact, when the young Rasputin visited the monastery of Verkhoture with a novice called Mileti Saborevsky, he learned that it was also a kind of prison, a place of detention for
certain members of heretical sects, the chief of which were the Khlysty, or Flagellants, and the Skoptzy, or Mutilators.
During his four months in the monastery, Rasputin enjoyed speaking with
these heretics, and he learned that the Khlysty believed that the Kingdom of God can only be attained on this earth by the Elect.
They, of course, were the Elect.

He also learned that one of the reasons the Khlysty were so disliked by the Orthodox Church was that their ceremonies were regarded as scandalous and immoral.
Since Rasputin was young and highly
sexed, he probably felt that this was something that deserved looking into.
At all events, he became a member of the Khlysty, and his enemies later declared that he had carried his beliefs back to
his home in Pokrovskoe, and made them the excuse to seduce half the women in the village.
There is undoubtedly an element of truth in this accusation.

But in order to understand the Khlysty, and their even stranger offshoot, the Skoptzy, we need to know a little about the great religious controversy that split Russia into two warring camps at
about the same time that Sabbatai Zevi was causing so much ferment in the Middle East.

The man who was to blame was, in many ways, very like Grigory Rasputin.

Nikon Mordvinov was a peasant who turned to religion when his three children died.
He made the acquaintance of the Tsar Alexis on a visit to Moscow in 1645, became a favourite, and was soon the
most powerful man in Russia.
He was appointed Patriarch in 1652, and while the Tsar was away at the wars, Nikon acted as his regent and governed Russia.

Nikon was a fanatic and a bully, and he decided to reform the Church by force.
Things were slack in the Russian Church; the priest was usually regarded as of small importance, and could be
ordered about by the village commune.
Nikon treated the priests sternly; he ordered them to demand respect and obedience, and when he thought they were not fulfilling their duties, he had them
tortured and imprisoned.
He also decided to revise the service and prayer book of the Russian Church.
Some of these revisions sound absurd.
He ordered a slight change in the spelling of
“Jesus”, and decreed that believers should cross themselves with three fingers instead of two.
He also made many arbitrary changes in the prayer books – for example, changing
“temple” to “church”, and vice versa.

The violent resistance that he met was almost certainly not due to the changes he proposed, but to dislike of being bullied.
Those who resisted him called themselves Old Believers.
After twelve
years, Nikon overreached himself and lost the Tsar’s favour; his chief enemy, Avvakum, was recalled from a Siberian exile, and took Nikon’s place as the Tsar’s favourite.
But the
Old Believers had not won.
The struggle went on with increased bitterness for the rest of the century.
Huge numbers of Old Believers committed suicide – sometimes
en masse
by burning
themselves on huge pyres.
(Mussorgsky’s opera
Khovanshchina
ends with such a scene.)