I don´t know who Dakota of Earth might be, but his channel is supposedly about "weird spirituality" (and psychedelic drugs). In this episode, he goes all in with the weirdness and actually gets in touch with the Aghori during a visit to Varanasi in India.
The Aghori are a Tantric-Shaiva sect notorious for their antinomian and transgressive behavior, including cannibalism. The US reporter Reza Aslan got in considerable trouble about six years ago when he participated in an Aghori ritual. Dakota never gets that far (just as well), but the clip above is bizarre anyway. Together with a friend, Dakota joins an Aghori who tries to find a dead body at the far side of the Ganges river in order to do "tantra, mantra and yantra" (and perhaps "puja" as well), whatever *that* means exactly. It certainly includes sitting on the corpse meditating, but does it also include eating it?
Dakota and his buddy also meet an old sadhu who drinks and eats from a skull-cup (yes, he shows them human skulls), but it´s not clear whether he is an Aghori or something else entirely. As usual, I get strong sympathies for mainline Protestantism when watching this kind of completely insane paganism, both the Aghori sect and the "official" Hindus bathing in the dirty river or throwing their dead into it.
"The Aghori believes that everything comes from the same divine source". Well, yeah, but surely there is *some* relevant difference between, say, a normal dog and a rabid specimen? Or between a deva and a preta? Or between India and Pakistan? In the end, Dakota has to return to his hotel and his psychedelia, instead of tasting the delights of dark side pantheism, while the Aghori continue their search for the perfect corpse...
No comments:
Post a Comment