Every pagoda, says La Crose, has a certain number of prostitutes annexed to it, dedicated to its use by pompous and solemn ceremonies. They choose the handsomest, and educate them in such a manner, that when they come to a proper age they may bring the greatest gain to the temple by the price of their prostitution. They can never marry, or leave the idol; and their children, if they have any, are also dedicated to it.
Some, says Mr. William Chambers, devote their own children to this profession. This is customary in the Decan, but not with the Hindoos of Bengal or Hindoostan proper. He says this custom was probably derived from the religion of Buddha. But almost all the ancient heathen religions had the same custom. It is described at large by Herodotus, as it was practised at Babylon in his time; and it is frequently alluded to in the Old Testament. Lucian in his Treatise on the Syrian goddess, says that those women who refuse to cut off their hair on her festival, must prostitute themselves during one day; and that what they receive on that account is given to the goddess for a sacrifice. In Malabar it is reckoned meritorious to bring up girls, who are commonly bastards, for the service of the temples, and they are taught music and dancing. When they are of a proper age, they go through the ceremony of a marriage to the god.
The Shastrus declare that the daughters of Brahmins, till they are eight years old, are objects of worship as forms of the goddess Bhagavatee. Many persons performed the worship of these girls daily. They took the daughter of some neighbouring brahmin, and placing her on a seat, with flowers, paint, water, garlands, etc., performed her worship, and then presented to her, if they were rich, offerings of cloth, ornaments, etc. At the close, the worshipper offered incense, and prostrated himself before this girl. At the worship of some of the female deities also, the daughters of Brahmins have divine honours paid to them. Many of the Tantra Shastrus, and particularly the Roodru’yamulu, the Yoni-tantra, and the Neelu-tantra, contain directions for a most extraordinary and disgusting puja, which is understood in a private manner amongst the Hindoos by the name of Chukru.
These Shastrus direct that the person or persons who wish to perform this puja must first, in the night, take a woman as the object of worship. If the person who performs this worship be a dukshinacharu, he must take his own wife, and if a vamacharu, he must take the daughter of a dancer, a kupalee, a washerman, a barber, a chundalu, or of a mussulman, or a prostitute, and place her on a seat or mat; and then bring boiled fish, flesh, fried peas, rice, spirituous liquors, sweetmeats, flowers, and all the other offerings and things necessary for the puja. These offerings, as well as the female, must next be purified by the repeating of incantations. To this, succeeds the worship of the person’s guardian deity; and after this the worship of the female, with all the ceremonies included in the term puja. The female must be naked during the worship…. Here indecencies not fit to be recorded in the present age and country, are contained in the directions of the shastru for this worship, relating to every part of the body in turn. Ward said that the learned Brahmin who opened to him these abominations, made several efforts—paused and began again, and then paused again, before he could pronounce the shocking indecencies prescribed by his own shastrus.
As the object of the worship was a living person, at the close of the puja she partook of the offerings in the presence of the worshipper or worshippers. Hence she drank of the spirituous liquors, ate of the flesh, though it was that of the cow, and also of the other offerings. The orts were to be eaten by the person or persons present, while sitting together, however different their castes may be, nor might any one despise any of the offerings, or refuse to eat of them; the spirituous liquors were to be drunk by measure. The company while eating had to put food also in each other’s mouths.
Ward wrote:—“The person who performs the ceremonies, in the presence of all, behaves towards this female in a manner which decency forbids to be mentioned. The persons present must then perform puja in a manner unutterably abominable, and here this most diabolical business closes. At present persons performing these abominations are becoming more and more numerous. They are called vamacharees. In proportion as these things are becoming common, so much the more are the ways of performing them more and more beastly. They are done in secret: but that these practices are becoming very frequent among the Brahmins and others is a fact known to all. The persons who perform these actions agreeably to the rules of the Shastrus are very few. The generality do those parts that belong to gluttony, drunkenness and whoredom only, without being acquainted with all the minute rules and incantations of the shastrus.”
Pratapuchandra Ghosha, in reading a paper before the Asiatic Society of Bengal, in September, 1870, said:—“In the earliest portraits of the Aryan race, as delineated in the Vedas, we find their ideas and their thoughts centred in their homes, their cattle, their fields, and in the discomfiture of their enemies. Their wants were few, and their prayers, therefore, were less varied; and their ceremonies were, probably, equally simple. But this simplicity wore within itself the seed of a very complex system of thought. Everything that was useful in some way or other, everything that was beautiful or awful in nature, or that excited unusual feelings, or suggested new ideas, was estranged from the ordinary and associated with the supernatural. A new current of thought soon after set in. In the freshness of imagination during the primitive state of society, comparisons, metaphors, and allegories, were soon changed into real entities, and mythology rapidly gained ground in men’s minds. Thus, the Puranas, by a natural poetical idea, made the sun and the moon, which witness all that is done on the earth, the spies of the divine ruler—a myth describing the all-pervading nature of their rays. In the Vedas, they are regarded as the universal witnesses of all ceremonies. The Ráhu, the ascending node, is derived from the verb literally meaning to abandon, void, hence also black, darkness, shadow, etc., and is represented in mythology as having no body, the umbra of the astronomers. The umbra may be said to devour as it were the luminaries. Later mythology makes Ráhu a trunkless head, an ingenious mythological adaptation of the umbra which devours, but inasmuch as it has no body, the moon comes out from the throat. Again, poetic imagination or extreme fear, personifies qualities, and that to such an extraordinary extent, that while describing the bloodthirsty vengeance of Sakti, she is said to have, in the Chhinnamasta incarnation, cut off her own head from the trunk, and with the gaping trunkless skull gluttonously drank her own blood which springs with the warmth of life. However hideous the conception is, it is the result of the license allowed to poets to use partial similitudes. To such flights of unshackled imagination, the variously formed sphinxes of the Chaldeans are but mere flutters of the wings. As allegories illustrative of the concentration of force to overcome difficulties, and the adaptation of means to a purpose, the achievements of Durga offer many interesting instances. On the occasion of vanquishing the mighty Asuras, Sumbha and Nisumbha, and their general, named Mahishásura (the buffaloe-demon), the several gods are made to direct their energy to their weapons for the purpose. The goddess Durga, representative of this union, sprung forth with ten arms, fit to crush several Asuras at one fell swoop. Káli, another incarnation of Sakti, in the war with Raktavija, a demon multiplying his race, as his name implies, from the drops of blood flowing from his body, and touching the earth, is represented as having licked up the blood as it streamed forth from his person with a view to arrest that dreadful propagation.
“Many of these myths, again, may be traced partly to oriental hyperbole, and partly to the many-sided meanings of the words used in describing them: figurative expressions were seized and new myths were invented in illustration of them. Others again are illustrative of national customs; thus the protruded tongue of Káli has been the theme of several fanciful tales. With some, in the heat of the battle, Káli was so maddened, that the gods despaired of the world, and sent Siva, her husband to appease her. Siva crept among the dead soldiers lying in the field, and contrived to pass under the feet of Káli, who no sooner perceived her husband trampled under her feet, than she became abashed, and in the fashion of the women of the country, bit her tongue as expressive of her regret and indelicacy.
“It is amusing to follow the line of argument put forth in the Puranas in support of these myths. In some instances, they approach so near the ludicrous, that were it not for their thorough adaptability to the state of native society of the time, their fallacies would have been long ago exposed, and the whole Puranic system spurned and despised.