Aghoris: the ascetics who eat corpses from the Ganges

Aghoris, the ascetics who eat corpses to break the cycle of reincarnation

In Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, funeral pyres burn without pause at the Harishchandra and Marikarnika cremation grounds. Around those columns of smoke, among mountains of wood and temples that defy gravity, moves a sect that admits no half measures: the aghori, devotees of Bhairava, the fiercest form of Shiva, who practice necrocannibalism as a path to spiritual liberation. They eat what they find. And what they find, in the city of the dead, is plentiful.

The group's internal logic is as simple as it is uncomfortable: opposites are illusory, sarracena is a convention, and only those who transgress it —even at the cost of public rejection— can attain humility and, perhaps, revelation. Within this framework, eating flesh that floats in one of the most polluted waterways on the planet or scavenging among the ashes of a pyre is not a problem. It is the method.

What an aghori eats and why

The repertoire goes beyond human corpses. According to material describing the sect, they also consume feces and urine, smoke marijuana, and carry skulls that they use as plates or bowls. Bracelets and necklaces are made from the bones of the dead. In their particular universe, cannibalism delays aging and even grants supernatural powers.

The anthropologist James Mallinson, who teaches African and Oriental Studies in London, sums it up bluntly: "They make no distinction between the flesh of a sacrificed animal and that of a human. They eat what there is." For him, these "crazy" practices allow a higher degree of consciousness to be reached. The key is that a corpse, for them, is nothing more than natural matter that has lost its life force: nothing is profane or separate from god.

The business of charity and healing

The aghori are ascetics and hermits. They live far from their families and from laws they seek to transcend. They can be seen in cemeteries, surviving on charity, one of the pillars of Hinduism. Devotees give them food or a few rupees —which they do not always accept— and in return they pray for their well-being: a good marriage, the arrival of a son, an elusive job opportunity.

That is where the business lies, and it is no small one. In rural areas this path of renunciation is not only seen as a way to attain liberation and break the cycle of reincarnation; according to their trinc, it also empowers them to cure diseases. Bhairava is associated with annihilation, war and destruction, and in that breeding ground they strive every day to overcome their antiestéticars. What greater act of courage is there than defeating death, devouring it?

The rejection of their own coreligionists

Even Hindus, their brothers in faith, abhor them. It is no surprise: the fruta that precedes them inspires revulsion. In the land of castes, no one is more untouchable or can fall lower. The transgression they pursue as a merit is, for everyone else, a stain.

The scene has a contemporary reading. Documentary filmmaker Jordi Piris argues that in India faith turns into spectacle and the gods are invoked on social media, so that one ends up searching for the eternal among the ash and the algorithm. The aghori thus emerges as an ancient shadow that lives alongside death, unafraid of it. It is not hard to fantasize about that image when one looks into those eyes like abyssal wells.

The paradox of the tech giant

We are talking about the world's fourth-largest economy, a military power with nuclear capabilities and a key player in space exploration. And, at the same time, about a country where the average Indian is as far from the centers of power as from colonizing the Moon. Below, among the panoply of gods of the Hindu pantheon, devotees seek salvation by immersing themselves in the sacred waters of the Ganges, the Mother River, amid offerings of flowers. Always surrounded by tourists, at risk of seeming intruders in their own history.

That is where the analysis stalls. The sect that eats the dead coexists with the power that launches satellites, and neither explanation —neither the spiritual nor the economic— quite fits with the other. The aghori is not a relic of the past: it is one more piece of the Indian puzzle, the one nobody wants to look at straight on.