Shakti and Shâkta : essays and addresses on the Shâkta Tantrashâstra

MATAM RUTRA

nine days after its birth. The people of the country decreed that this monstrous infant should be bound to the mother's corpse and left in the cemetery. The infant was then tied on his mother’s breast. The mother was borne away ina stretcher to the cemetery and the stretcher was left at the foot of a poisonous tree called Nalbyi which had a boar’s den at its root ; a poisonous snake coiled round the middle of its trunk and a bird of prey sitting in its uppermost branches. (These animals are the emblems of lust, anger and greed respectively which “kindle the fire of individuality.”) At this place there was a huge sepulchre built by the Rakshasas where they used to leave their dead at the foot of the tree. Elephants and tigers came there to die; serpents infested it and witch-like spirits called Dakinis and Ghouls brought human bodies there. After the bearers of the corpse had left, the infant sustained his life by suckling the breasts of his mother’s corpse. These yielded only a thin yellowish watery fluid for seven days. Next he sucked the blood and lived a week; then he gnawed at the breast and lived the third week; then he ate the entrails and lived for a week. Then he ate the outer flesh and lived for the fifth week. Lastly he crunched the bones, sucked the marrow, licked the humours and brains and lived a week. He thus in six weeks developed full physical maturity. Having exhausted his stock of food he moved about; and his motion shook the cemetery building to pieces. He observed the Ghouls and Dakinis feasting on human corpses which he took as his food and human blood as his drink, filling the skulls with it. His clothing was dried human skins as also the hides of dead elephants, the flesh of which he also ate. He ate also the flesh of tigers and wrapped his loins in their furs. He used serpents as bracelets, anklets, armlets and as necklaces and garlands. His lips were thick with frozen fat and his body was covered with ashes from the burning ground. He wore a garland of dead skulls on one string; freshly severed heads on another: and decomposing heads on a 383