The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (30 page)

Fifty years ago, when I was a boy in the then remote and sparsely peopled Mississippi valley, vague tales and rumors of a mysterious body of professional murderers came wandering in from a country which was constructively as far from us as the constellations blinking in space – India; vague tales and rumors of a sect called Thugs, who waylaid travelers in lonely places and killed them for the contentment of a god whom they worshiped; tales which everybody liked to listen to and nobody believed, except with reservations.
³

This striking depiction of the goddess Kali clearly shows her famous necklace of skulls and girdle of severed arms, embellished here with a few recently-severed heads, but looking far more vigorous than the corpse-like creature often used to represent her.

Yet, though it seemed that ‘nobody believed' in these tales, the exoticism of the stories nevertheless complemented the West's romantic, overblown vision of Oriental life and what it meant to live on such a dark and terrible continent where an abundance of gods were worshiped, all of whom were, according to the politician and anti-slavery campaigner, William Wilberforce, in 1813, ‘absolute monsters of lust, injustice, wickedness and cruelty.' A little less than a decade later, Captain William Sleeman began making the first of his enquiries into the murder of several travelers whose bodies had been located in a series of shallow graves. They had all been strangled. It was Sleeman, in fact, who first alerted the Western world to the existence of India's Thug cult, although his very staid and factual reports were soon reworked by the general press in order to satisfy their readers' taste for the sensational. Victorian England thirsted for tales of dark and terrible deeds – especially those committed in the far-flung reaches of Empire. They thrilled to stories of Indian widows practicing suttee; the ritual of burning themselves to death on their husbands' funeral pyres. In literature, stretching as far back as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and nearly every inclusion of an Oriental character made mention of their criminal and sexually aberrant nature. The Oriental was to be mistrusted, treated with scepticism, kept at arm's length, although in the same breath he was also painted as being highly alluring and mysterious – the type of person who, while plotting your murder, would simultaneously befriend you. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Captain Philip Meadows Taylor's novel which Queen Victoria had been so eager to read:

Gradually my band arranged themselves around their new victims. All were at their places, and I eagerly looked out for the first scout who should give us intelligence that the
bhil
was ready. A strange feeling it is, Sahib, that comes over us Thugs at such moments: not a feeling of interest or pity for our victims, or compunction for the deed we are about to do, as perhaps you might expect to hear, but an all-absorbing anxiety for the issue of the adventure, an intense longing for its consummation, and a dread of interruption from passing travelers; and though I had become now callous in a great measure, still my heart was throbbing with anxiety and apprehension, and my replies to the Sahoukar's witty and jolly remarks were vague and abstracted; my whole thoughts were concentrated upon the affair in hand, and it was not to be wondered at. He remarked on my altered behavior, and I rallied myself, and was soon able to amuse him as I had done before.

But at what point did fiction separate from fact? How much of Meadows Taylor's sensational novel was based on truth? The answer is, quite a substantial part, for although the more exotic side of his story owes a fair amount to the novelist's vivid imagination, nothing can really prepare one for the enormity of the Thug crimes. Setting aside the lurid nature of the murders themselves, the sheer number of Thuggee victims is astonishing – estimated at anything between one and three million over a period of 100 years – and underlines the fact that what was taking place in India during this period was a ‘religion of murder,' a deep-rooted belief system that demanded blood be shed. At its center sat the Hindu goddess Kali.
⁴

The name Kali derives from the Sanskrit word for ‘time' or ‘dark'; but it is also supposed to mean Black Female, which is quite appropriate considering the nature of her influence. Cemeteries, blood and skulls are all associated with her worship, while in paintings she is represented as a black woman with an azure face, often streaked with yellow. Frequently her hair is braided with green serpents and she wears a long necklace of human skulls, a girdle of severed arms and worst of all, sometimes babies' corpses as earrings (although these are supposed to represent infant mortality as opposed to the murder of infants.) In nearly all representations of Kali, her mouth is shown to be bleeding and her tongue is often poking out as if in some gesture of defiance. Kali's eight arms normally brandish weapons or sometimes the severed head of a demon. Despite all this gruesomeness however, in southern India and in Kashmiri tradition, Kali is not an evil deity, but a curious kind of life force. Indeed her law-abiding devotees (as opposed to her murderous ones) have built a vast amount of beautiful poetry around her, often depicting the goddess as a tender, loving mother. To this end she has had temples built in her name, in particular in Kolkata, west Bengal, and in Kamakhya in Assam. All of the above is well documented, but in his book
Thug, Or a Million Murders
, William Sleeman's grandson, Colonel James L. Sleeman, reveals how it was that Kali became linked with the Thuggee to the extent that she did.

According to Thug legend, there was a time when the world was pestered by a terrible demon whose main aim was to devour mankind. As fast as children were born so the demon ate them. Kali tried to put a stop to this murder by killing the demon with a sword, but every time she struck it and blood was spilt, up sprang a new demon, [ …] until the hellish brood multiplied to such a degree that she realised the impossibility of completing her task unaided. In this dilemma Bhowani [Kali] brushed the sweat from her arm and from it created two men, to each of whom she gave a strip of cloth, torn from the hem of her garment, and commanded them to strangle the demons, thus overcoming the blood difficulty. These legendary progenitors of Thuggee worked with such skill and vigor that soon all the demons were slain, and the goddess gave the
ruhmal
, or strip of cloth, as a reward for their assistance, bidding them transmit it to their posterity with the injunction to destroy all men who were not of their kindred.
⁵

James L. Sleeman then goes on to explain that although this perpetrated a ‘cult of murder,' there were certain rules which had to be adhered to; for instance, it was unlawful to kill women or those suffering from leprosy. Fakirs were also off limits as were religious mendicants, goldsmiths, potters, dancers and musicians. Nevertheless, over a period of time, the Thugs slowly began to ignore these laws and soon any traveler, be they female or otherwise, was a potential Thug victim.

An unnamed artist created this image of Thugs in captivity in a prison in Aurungabad for the
Illustrated Travels
journal around 1860

By the nineteenth century, nearly 40,000 deaths were being recorded each year as a result of Thug activity, although by this time the religious significance of the slaughter had all but disappeared. Straightforward robbery was now the motive, clear-cut murder with the intention of stripping the victim of his or her valuables. Many Thugs grew rich on their spoils and became influential citizens whose veneer of respectability deflected suspicion. Indeed, when they weren't committing murder the Thugs were model citizens who, Sleeman Jnr. points out, were more often than not, committed to their families, to the rearing of their children and to the supporting of their wives. To illustrate this, Sleeman Snr. recorded the case of an Englishman, Dr. Cheek, who employed a young Indian bearer to look after his children. The man was exceptionally good at his job, gentle and kind to the children and every year took one month's holiday in order to visit his elderly mother. Later however, it was discovered that this man was a Thug and that while he was an exemplary employee for eleven months of the year, during the twelfth he devoted his time to strangulation.

William Henry Sleeman made meticulous investigations into crimes such as this, becoming an expert in the cult. Much of the information to which we are privy stems directly from his involvement with the hunting down and subsequent trial and execution of these villains. It was Sleeman Snr. who calculated the figure of 40,000 murders per year by patiently interviewing all the captured Thugs whom he quickly discovered belonged to several generations of the cult and of whose crimes his present-day prisoners were extremely proud.

It was family tradition and therefore this made it possible for Sleeman to calculate the number of murders which had been committed by the fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers of his prisoners. One Thug in particular, by the name of Gholam Hossyn, believed his lineage stretched as far back as Alexander the Great and Sleeman recorded in some detail the type of rituals his prisoners' ancestors performed before and after each killing.

A typical Thug murder, according to Sleeman, would have run thus: first of all a gang of Thugs (anywhere between 10 to 200 men) would befriend their prospective victim or victims by pretending to be merchants or soldiers traveling without weaponry in order to waylay any suspicions the target might harbor. The Thugs would then travel alongside their victims, cooking for them, assisting with campsite chores, telling them stories and generally acting in as courteous a manner as possible, until everyone felt at their ease. The journeys could take as long as two weeks or more for, as Sleeman Jnr. explains, ‘Sometimes they traveled long distances together before a suitable opportunity for treachery occurred; a case is on record where a gang journeyed with a family of eleven persons for twenty days, covering 200 miles, before they succeeded in murdering the whole party without detection.'
⁶
The next step would normally take place at night, around the campfires while everyone was mingling together, telling each other stories, smoking, drinking and singing. This was the time when the Thugs would drug their targets and once the drugs had taken effect and at a pre-arranged signal – normally a code phrase such as ‘bring the tobacco' – they would then whip out their
ruhmals
(handkerchiefs weighted with stones) and strangle their prey. The murders would be very swift, with the stones in the
ruhmals
breaking the victims' necks. Afterwards the Thugs would dedicate the corpses to Kali and more often than not hold a sacrificial feast of consecrated
gur
(an unrefined sugar believed to increase the desire for Thuggee) which, or so legend would have it, once tasted would ensure a Thug's dedication to murder for the rest of his life. The feast would carry on late into the night after which the bodies would be gathered together and buried before the thieves made off with their spoils.

The Thugs were also, according to Sleeman, highly superstitious, believing that Kali could communicate and express her wishes to them through the cries of wild animals. Lizards, jackals, crows, cranes and especially baby owls, were those to which they paid particular attention.

Sleeman goes on to describe how members of the group would often be given specialized roles. According to him, new recruits to the cult would be given the role of scouts, or
bykureeas,
and once they had mastered this role they rose to the position of buriers of the dead, or
lughas
. Both roles were very important, but the top two jobs were as the holders of limbs (while the victim was being strangled) otherwise known as
shumseeas,
and finally the stranglers, or
bhurtotes
, the most highly regarded position of all. In fact belonging to the Thugs was like being part of an army in that it was a highly disciplined organization where everyone knew their place and role.

Fascinated by the nature of Thuggee, Sleeman interviewed hundreds of the Thugs in an attempt to understand their cult more deeply. In one interview, he asked the detainee how he could murder innocent men, women and children and then speak of these crimes with such nonchalance?