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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