On the way to the aarti ceremony, which was to take place on the banks of the Bagmati River, we came across funeral ceremonies and pyres with burning corpses. According to the beliefs of the Nepalese, in order to allow the soul to reincarnate, the body of the deceased must be returned to the river. Water, as in many cultures, is the passage from the material world to the spiritual world. In addition, the river carrying the ashes of the deceased, feeds the soil with them, plants grow from the soil to provide food for animals, and the smoke from the burned body rises into the air and ether. This allows the entire body of the deceased to return to the natural world, thus allowing reincarnation. In order for the deceased to have good luck in the afterlife, a piece of gold is placed in the teeth of the deceased. Shrouded in a white shroud and adorned with flowers, the body is placed on a pile of solid beams, and during the ceremony, the master of ceremonies adds more beams of wood and lots of dry grass to the pile. After the body is completely burned, the ashes of the deceased, along with the charred wood, are shovelled into the river. In the river, young boys are enthusiastically searching the water for that piece of gold that the deceased fortunately got in the afterlife. Neither the family nor the master of ceremonies prevents them from seeking their fortune. The whole ceremony lasts at least from morning to evening, and the principle is that the body is completely burned.
On the bank of the river, I noticed a sadhu, a wandering ascetic with a white face and dreadlock-braided hair. The sight of them is impressive, they look quite menacing, like creatures out of this world…
I started asking about sadhus and I heard this story…
Sadhus are itinerant people seeking enlightenment. Their name comes from Sanskrit and means “good man”. They spend their lives meditating and wandering to holy places, they are gladly welcomed into believers’ homes, hosted and fed. Sadhus don’t have much, they carry all their possessions in bundles, they live on donations and the hospitality of their followers. The motto of the holy wanderers is asceticism and meditation on spiritual enlightenment. Tourists can always take a photo with a sadhu, of course for a fee😊
But there is a faction of holy men that is particularly focused on burial practices. These holy men are especially focused on death, and their lives are literally directed toward attaining death in life. Sounds strange? How can one achieve death while alive? Well, listen…
Aghori, as this ascetic trend is called, originated in Varanasi in India and most of the representatives of this mysterious community still live there. But you can also find them in other countries, including the United States. Aghori live as close to death as possible, usually in cemeteries or in the immediate vicinity of cremation pyres. Like sadhus, aghoris paint their faces white, but in their case they use ashes from funeral pyres instead of face whitewash. For their rituals, which are shrouded in terror and mystery, they use human bones.
Because the behaviour of the aghori is highly eccentric, they were originally given this name as fearless (a-ghor-i). In order to deserve this name, an adept of this faculty must take actions that show a lack of fear and disgust, including eating not fully cremated human remains. Since such behaviour is considered impure by Hindu religions, today aghori means disgust and impurity. However, this does not prevent the practitioners of this direction from being considered saints endowed with magical abilities.
The Aghori, however, don’t really care about public perception. They believe, like other Hindus, in liberation (moksha) from the cycle of reincarnation (samsara). However, they maintain that all opposites are identical, one cannot exist without the other, so the dualistic nature is illusory. So they transform social taboos into their practices in such a way as to negate the accepted order and shock.
The Aghori believe that the gods are perfect and responsible for every living being and every thought. Therefore, everything that exists must be perfect. To deny the perfection of the world around us is to deny the perfection of the gods. Hence, the behaviours and practices of aghori are supposed to destroy the taboos that exist in societies, they provoke with their eccentric behaviour, looking for beauty and perfection in everything. One such taboo is necrophagy, and the aghori believe that eating human flesh, even from decomposing corpses, is just as good as eating any other food. The Aghori also believe that their way of life builds a bridge between life and death. They walk around dressed in a shroud taken from a corpse, often taking a dog as a companion, because the dog is considered a symbolic steed of Shiva, with whom they identify. They say about themselves that they live like dogs, sleep like dogs, eat like dogs.
The pinnacle of aghori attainment is transcending the duality of life and death during meditation and becoming a living corpse in life. Such a state ensures connection with Shiva, it is believed that the yogi has consciously left the body, and such death is not the same as physical death. This moment occurs when the yogi has attained a complete understanding of his physical karma and usually chooses the date of his own death. Swami Rama, in his book “Living Among Himalayan Monks” lists several ways for aghori to leave the body: freezing to death while meditating, holding one’s breath in the deep Himalayan waters, instantly self-immolating through meditation focused on the solar plexus, and opening the vault of the skull.
Once it is known that the dried aghori is not meditating, but has passed away, his body is not cremated in a traditional cremation ceremony, but buried in the same position as he was found during meditation in a special container. Above the buried aghori there is a mahasamadhi, or mortuary temple. In Hinduism, this type of death is not considered suicide and, of course, is deliberate. Temples built on the corpse of an aghori become places of worship and miracles.
The popularity of this cult is growing both in India and in the West. In India, many practitioners come from the Indian middle class.
In Nepal we saw only sadhus, we didn’t meet aghori. Maybe it’s because bodies in Nepal are completely cremated. But it is very likely that they are in many parts of the world in the vicinity where the cremation of bodies is carried out, because the aghori think that the whole world is one big cremation field…