I Heard The Baby Owl Call My Name
at 3:35 am (Self Writ, Literature, The King of Terrors)The relationship between the Gooroo and his disciple is accounted the most holy that can be formed, and subsists to the latest period of life. A Thug may betray his father, but never his Gooroo.
So wrote the redoubtable Charles Mackay in his ever popular Memoirs of Popular Delusions on the Thuggee cult: the wandering ritualists who, whether moving in small groups or in vast gangs, despite extreme affability were less admirable on a walking tour than, say, Christian Andersen’s Travelling Companion. Revisionists have downplayed the millions of alleged murders, as imperialist slander, and as in all these cases, it can be assumed that the count is unknown; that it is vastly inflated; but that even if they killed hardly anyone, the perpetrators were not nice people.
Meadows Taylor’s famous Confessions of a Thug is reviewed here, and here. Dr. Mike Dash wrote a more recent work, Thug, and a newspaper review mentioned that ‘Only once they had found a suitable place for disposing of the bodies would the signal be given — often the victim would be invited to look skywards’ ( Look Upwards Angel ! ) — then the chief strangler would make like Tod Slaughter. The various superstitions attached to the cult added some element of chance to the business: people were safe if employed as an Elephant driver or washerman; but blacksmiths and carpenters were only disallowed if travelling together. If in temporary possession of a cow, you were safe; good thugs couldn’t start the day off until they had heard a partridge; yet to hear a baby owl in daylight presaged disaster — not to the victims, though.
