I saw them in Varanasi, the holy city of the Hindus. They live near the funeral pyres, feed on corpses and sewage that have not burned out on the funeral pyres, and perform terrible night rituals over the remains of people and animals.
They are smeared from head to toe with cremation ashes, and they wear necklaces made of bones around their necks. From beneath a matted head of hair that has not been washed for an eternity, eyes look drugged with opium, charas (a hemp drug) and alcohol. Their drinking bowl is a human skull. This is Aghori …
The path to enlightenment
There are many gods in India, they are worshiped by both old and young. Most Hindu families have altars, and the day begins with a prayer to the gods and a word of praise to the teachers - the guru. For Hindus, spiritual enlightenment has always been the highest life task, the only thing that gives it meaning, gives a goal. Moreover, enlightenment is a state of being that, in principle, is attainable by everyone.
An ordinary person, however, needs to go through many incarnations in order to become enlightened, to see the supreme gods, to become one with the absolute, to merge his mind with cosmic consciousness - in other words, to become a saint. From time immemorial, the shortest path has been available for people who want to achieve enlightenment in this life, and not in the next.
This is the path followed by the sadhus, the holy people of India. It should be noted that there are not so few of them. There are up to five million sadhus in the country, which is half a percent of the total population (by the end of 2025, India's population will be over a billion).
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Sadhus break all family ties, give up shelter, property, walk almost or completely naked and eat meager food. They usually live on their own, outside of society, and spend their days worshiping a chosen deity.
But this desire for holiness often turns into obsession, as the Aghori prove.
Freed from fear
Aghori is a Hindu ascetic religious sect that goes back to the ancient order of the kapaliki ("wearing the skull") - mendicant monks who worship Shiva, the god of destruction.
It is difficult to find a more terrible deity in the Hindu pantheon. On his forehead is a tripundra (three transverse lines) made from sacred ash, which is obtained from cow dung or burnt corpses.
Shiva wears a necklace of skulls or bones, which are turned into skulls; he is always in the company of spirits and ghosts, constantly intoxicated with drugs or alcohol, and behaves like a madman.
So why does Aghori in Hindi mean "not terrified"? Because Shiva is not only the destroyer god, but also the Conqueror of Death. He is called Aghora Shiva, which translates as "fearless", "good". He, being the king of fear, is able to liberate from fear.
By practicing scary things such as manipulating corpses and skulls, living on cremation grounds, eating decayed remains of animals and even humans, the Aghori try to achieve a whole consciousness beyond attraction and aversion, they strive to become like the Moon and the Sun, wind, water and time - to all those things that give and take away the life of all matter in the Universe, without distinction between high and low, bad and good.
They try to enter the dwelling place of God by a narrow, dark path, which is given to only a few to walk.
Aghoris willingly break all ascetic taboos, convinced that by replacing all values with the opposite, they will accelerate enlightenment. While all sadhus are supposed to be vegetarians and teetotalers (as well as all Hindus), they eat meat and drink alcohol.
They are credited with even more repulsive habits: they eat rotten flesh of corpses, excrement, drink urine; meditate sitting on a corpse; insult people with dirty expressions; surround themselves with objects of death, such as human skulls, from which they drink and with which they perform magical rituals.
Their tongues are black and burnt - after all, when the Aghori eat what is left of a burnt corpse, they pick it up from the hot coals with their mouths to avoid touching them with their hands, because it may turn out to be the corpse of a woman, which they are forbidden to touch.
These people say: to become Aghori means to accept everything that exists in the Universe as a part of God.
Varanasi - the city of Shiva
Now in India there are about a thousand active members of the sect who have completely renounced the world. Outwardly, they are easy to recognize - they are hung with garlands of snake bones and everywhere they carry human skulls, which are used in all rituals and in cooking.
Despite the shocking rituals, the Aghoris in India are quite tolerant and even respectful. They are believed to have supernatural powers. Many are convinced that if they prevent the "chosen ones of Shiva" from eating the dead and performing their rituals, then their souls will be cursed. According to Indian lawyers, there are no restrictions for Aghori existing in the country.
Most likely, they can be seen at the shmashan - the place of cremation of corpses.
One of the main Aghori pilgrimage sites is Varanasi - the world's oldest existing city, which is already five thousand years old! Varanasi is the city of Shiva, whose destructive power is directed not against man, but against everything that is illusory in this world. He destroys death itself and time, for everything that exists in time is perishable and doomed to death. By freeing the believer from the fetters of time, Shiva puts him outside of time.
The entire old city looks like huge ruins, in which, however, life is in full swing. Among the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who every year rush there from all over the vast India and from other countries, there are many old people, hopelessly sick and infirm.
They come to the holy city hoping to die there: according to legend, death among the countless temples and other shrines associated with the legends and tales of the god Shiva opens the soul of the deceased a direct road to heaven. Every Hindu dreams at least once in his life to undergo a ritual ablution in the waters of the Ganges.
The river is crowded and bustling from early morning until evening. And only with the onset of dusk, the coast becomes empty: people go to temples, hotels and shelters, so that in the morning, with the first rays of the sun, they again descend the steps into the sacred water.
The embankment of the river itself is a gigantic temple in which services are held around the clock: people pray, meditate, perform yoga asanas. Corpses are burned here.
It must be said that only the bodies of those people who require ritual cleansing are burned; the bodies of sacred animals - snakes and cows, as well as monks, pregnant women and those who died of skin diseases, are considered already purified suffering, and they are thrown into the Ganges without prior cremation. Swollen in the heat, like balls, dozens of corpses float in the river.
Directly on the banks of the Ganges, in two specially designated places known as Manikarnikaghat and Harishchandraghat, special sites for funeral pyres are equipped, where dozens of bodies of people who have departed to another world are put on fire every day while reading mantras. Aghori can be seen most often here.
The world is like fire
Each person sees the world in his own way. Someone sees it as love, and the aghori as fire. If the border between clean and dirty is destroyed, many other restrictions fall, the threshold between good and evil is erased. If you look at the world as energy, fire, then there is nothing impure. Aghori say:
- If God created this world, then every part of his creation is sacred, which means that there can be nothing vile or disgusting in it.
By performing strange actions, the Aghori break their perception of reality, changing it to one that is inaccessible to our understanding. They take a shortcut to heaven. Rejecting good and evil and changing your perception of reality is perhaps the first step to enlightenment.
Nikolay SANTALOV
