Human Sacrifice is a term used to describe the ritual act of sacrificing a human being.
Human sacrifice was not common in Hindu religious life in
the past, but it was 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
aren't sure how often this was done.
The demon king Ravana, for example, is said to have cut off
nine of his ten heads before the god Shiva granted him divine power.
The Bengali saint Ramakrishna is also credited with the
determination to carry out this act, though the goddess Kali intervened before
he could do so.
The temple of the goddess Kamakhya in Assam was the one
place where human sacrifice was unquestionably a regular practice.
This temple is part of the Shakti Pithas, a network of
Goddess-sanctuary sites that stretches across the Indian subcontinent.
Each Shakti Pitha commemorates the location where a piece of
the dismembered goddess Sati fell to earth and took on the form of a new
goddess.
The body part in this case was Sati's vulva, and Kamakhya
became a very powerful goddess due to the presence of such a highly charged
part of the female body.
She was reportedly offered the heads of 140 men when the new
temple was dedicated in 1565, and this practice continued until the British put
an end to it in 1832.
The men who were offered as human sacrifices were said to be
volunteers who believed they had been summoned by the goddess to do so; in the
time between announcing their intention to be sacrificed and their deaths, they
were treated as virtual divinities, having been consecrated to the goddess.
For more information, see E. A. Gait's 1963 book, A History of Assam.
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