Blood & Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain

by Ronald Hutton

There, between 1820 and 1850, their administrators engaged in a series of well-publicized campaigns against Hindu customs that they had come to regard as pernicious. Three, in particular, made a deep impression on the British public. One was sati, or suttee, the burning of a widow alive upon the funeral pyre of her husband. The second was human sacrifice, represented in particular by the cult of thagi or Thugee, in which travellers were ritually murdered as offerings to the goddess Kali, by devotees of her cult based at the temple of Bindhachal. The third was the practice of offering oneself as a sacrifice by committing ritual suicide before the image of the god Krishna in the city of Puri. The traditional method was to throw oneself under the wheels of the carriage bearing the huge statue of the god, known as the Juggernaut, as it was dragged in procession through the streets. The efforts to suppress the last two customs have made a permanent impact on the English language, in the words ‘thug’ and ‘juggernaut’.