must be emphasized that the killing was only a part of the ritual of the Thugs, as Communion is of Christians.) At the age of nine or ten, the boys were allowed to act as scouts,
and later to watch the killing. At eighteen they were allowed to take part in the killing and eat the goor .
By the year 1850, Thuggee had virtually ceased to exist in India. Over 4,000 Thugs had been brought to trial; some were hanged, others sentenced to transportation or life imprisonment. Sleeman
came to know many of them – even to establish a kind of friendship; for example, he was instrumental in getting the notorious Feringheea a pardon (in the face of some opposition, for when the
Thug leader was caught, he admitted that he had just returned from an expedition in which 105 men and women had died).
The mystery of the origin of Thuggee is still unsolved. Feringheea told Sleeman that all the Thug rituals were portrayed in the eighth-century carvings in the caves of Ellora. (Ellora is a
village in north-east Bombay province, and its Hindu, Buddhist and Jain temples extend for over a mile, with some of India’s greatest sculptural treasures, whose dates range from the third to
the thirteenth century.) If this is true, then the Thugs predated the Assassins by three hundred years. In his book The Assassins , Bernard Lewis suggests that the Thugs may have been
connected with the stranglers of Iraq – the heretical sect that sprang up after the death of the Prophet. But these stranglers flourished in the first half of the eighth century, and four
more centuries were to elapse before the Moslems made deep inroads into India. (The greatest of the early Moslem invaders of India, Mahmud of Ghazni – Khayyam’s “mighty
Mahmud” – confined himself to the Punjab, in north-western India: Delhi fell to Mohammed of Ghur in 1192.) So it is altogether more likely that Ismailis, fleeing from persecution after
the fall of Alamut, discovered that India already possessed its own Order of Assassins, and formed an alliance with the Thugs. Other Ismailis formed their own sects in India, and continued to
regard the Persian Imam as their head. In 1811, the French consul Rousseau observed that Ismailis flourished in India, and that they regarded their Imam almost as a god. In 1850, a sect of Ismailis
known as the Khojas decided to settle a religious dispute by their old methods, and four dissenting brethren were assassinated in broad daylight. The four killers were hanged. The quarrel centred
around the question of whether the Khojas of Bombay province still owed allegiance to the Persian Imam. This Imam was known as the Aga Khan; and a few years later, he was forced to flee to India
– after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the Shah of Persia – and became the spiritual head of the Ismailis – not only in India, but also in Persia, Syria and central Asia. And so the homeland of the Thugs became eventually the homeland of the descendants of the Assassins.
To find a parallel to the fanaticism of the Assassins and the Thugs, we have to turn to some of the bizarre sects of Old Russia.
***
The Median prophet Zoroaster who founded the ancient fire-worshipping religion of Persia, ate only cheese for thirty years of his life.
***
The Khlysty and the Skoptzy
In the section on Rasputin ( see here ), I have deliberately said nothing about the strange religious cult to which he belonged, for it would have led to a long
digression. In fact, when the young Rasputin visited the monastery of Verkhoture with a novice called Mileti Saborevsky, he learned that it was also a kind of prison, a place of detention for
certain members of heretical sects, the chief of which were the Khlysty, or Flagellants, and the Skoptzy, or Mutilators. During his four months in the monastery, Rasputin enjoyed speaking with
these heretics, and he learned that the Khlysty believed that the Kingdom of God can only be attained on this earth by the Elect. They, of course,