Human Sacrifice

The practice of human sacrifice was
uncommon in the history of Hindu
religious life, but not unknown. One of
the common mythic motifs in the worship of certain fierce and powerful
deities is for devotees (bhakta) to offer
their own heads to the Goddess as the
ultimate sacrifice and act of devotion,
but experts are uncertain how frequently this rite was performed. One
mythic example of this is the demonking Ravana, who cuts off nine of his
ten heads before the god Shiva grants
him divine power. The resolve to commit this action is also attributed to the
Bengali saint Ramakrishna, although
the goddess Kali intervened before he
could carry it out.
The one place where human sacrifice was undoubtedly a regular practice was at the temple of the goddess
Kamakhya in Assam. This temple is
one of the Shakti Pithas, a network of
sites sacred to the Goddess that
spreads throughout the subcontinent.
Each Shakti Pitha marks the site where
a body part of the dismembered goddess Sati fell to earth, taking form
there as a different goddess. In this
case, the body part was Sati’s vulva,
and the presence of such a highly
charged part of the female body made
Kamakhya a very powerful goddess.
When the new temple was dedicated in 1565, she was reportedly offered
the heads of 140 men, and this practice continued until the British halted
it in 1832. The men offered as human
sacrifices were reportedly volunteers,
who believed that they had been
called by her to do this; in the time
between announcing their intention
290
Hrshikesha
to be sacrificed and their deaths they
were treated as virtual divinities, since
they were considered to have been
consecrated to the goddess. For further information see E. A. Gait, A
History of Assam, 1963. See also pitha.