DAILY STAR
Monks feared throughout India for feasting on human flesh use skulls as bowls to eat and drink booze from.
Everything the Aghori do is to bring them closer to Shiva, from covering themselves in ash to grabbing dumped heads from The River Ganges to use as sacred ‘kapala’.
Filmmaker Dakota Wint captured his encounters with the solitary Aghori as he embarked on a mission to understand their disturbing ways in one of the oldest cities on Earth, Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh.
Strolling along the riverbank for the Ganges – the holiest body of water in Hinduism – Dakota was stunned to finally spot an Aghori carrying what appeared to be a pair of human skulls.
He claimed doing so was to ward off bad spirits.
The monk told Dakota: “I found a body in the Ganga and I took the skulls. They mean a lot. They keep the spirits away. If someone performs rituals with these the bad spirits leave.
Soon after, another monk went so far as to admit to eating a human, something he first practiced in as a 14-year-old boy.
Holding up his kapala (human skull), the second Aghori explained: “This is for eating food, drinking tea, alcohol, to do everything.”
Back beside the river at Manikarnika Ghat, a guide called Kashi Baba revealed what it’s like when an Aghori stops by the water.
He said: “Aghori season, they come here, do meditation, and they take some of the flesh of the body and eat it and walk away.
“Normally people can’t see the Aghori and he’s standing near the body. Doing meditation, meditation, meditation and he puts his hand like this and takes a piece of the body and just walks away and goes to some different place to eat it.
“After taking Ganga water three times drinking, he walks away and then comes for meditation.”
As the Aghori striving to lead a life essentially without committing wrongdoing, their fancy for human flesh comes from the belief that it will not only help them spiritually but prevent aging.
An Indian TV crew claim to have spotted behaviour that contradicts the sect’s vow to only feast on corpses voluntarily granted to them.
This was reportedly witnessed when one Aghori could be seen eating a corpse floating in the Ganges.
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