Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/410

400 thousand years! while by the blood of three men, slain in sacrifice, she is pleased a hundred thousand years!”

This is the patroness of these Thugs, these professional murderers, who, when their victim is in the agonies of strangulation beneath their knees, on the ground, are engaging in acts of prayer—offering to Kalee the life that is passing away—and to this abomination, thus said to feed on the human soul, have the mothers of India for ages immolated their daughters!

So popular is she and her worship, that even the English Government cannot keep the public offices open during the term of the “Durga-Poojah” holy days, from the first to the thirteenth of October, for all Calcutta then runs mad upon this idolatry. I have seen her image, larger than the human form, painted blue, with her tongue represented as dripping with gore upon her chin, her bosom covered with a necklace of human skulls, and her many arms each bearing a murderous weapon, carried in proud procession through the streets of Calcutta during those holidays, accompanied by bands of music and tens of thousands of frantic followers.

Of this teaching and worship Thuggeeism was the natural result, combining rapine with religion, the service of their goddess with love of plunder—the life for her, the booty for themselves. It raised ruffianism to the dignity of a fulfillment of duty, and swelled the numbers of these religious murderers to a fearful height, till the public thoroughfares were haunted by these wretches, as well as by the brigands and plunderers who imitated them in their lesser guilt. It was on the discovery of thirty dead bodies in different wells of the Doab, (when these assassins had grown to be so reckless in their work that they were ceasing to act with their usual caution in burying and concealing the bodies of their victims,) that Thuggeeism was first brought to the knowledge of the English Government in 1810; and so determined were the measures taken by them for its suppression, and so faithfully have they since been followed up, that the Thug had to disappear from the roads of British India, and confine his limited depredations within the