Egyptian Serpent Power
Source: http://www.joanannlansberry.com/other/s-power2.pdf
Egyptian Serpent Power
Source: http://www.joanannlansberry.com/other/s-power2.pdf
Last edited by Vivek; 10th June 2012 at 01:50.
"Can you see why I have so little patience for that sort of immaturity?"
Yes. I don't either...lol.
MORE ON CYTHRAWL (from yet other sources)
Cythrawl, stems from the very ancient paths of Europe and Britain, but more Celtic and certainly eventually totally Druidic. The Christians in their true to fashion ‘wisdom’ made the “Horned God’, and all His likenesses such as Cernunnos, Pan, Fosite and many other names that He went by into their personalized and stylized Devil, as all these Gods and Forces were far too powerful to remove from the peasants celebratory practices, so they made them evil and against the law, for all intents and purposes. Their problems solved…
The ancient God Wr-alda, with its manifestation of being a many headed serpent(s) suddenly become very evil also and a dark one, who the Christians called the Leviathan, amongst other names, when in its purest form was originally the “sustainer” the giver of “life itself” to Irtha, (the Earth Goddess).
Along with these sweeping statements and re-designations other Powerful Gods and Goddesses became; good or bad, dependent upon the push and whim of the Church and how afraid they were of not being able to fully infiltrate the new lands with Christianity without their removal or reconstituted form being “press released”.
Similar to Shiva, (the destroyer, but also the giver of life in a similar sense), the great force Cythrawl is different in that He is the Beginning and the End, the Alpha the Omega, the A and the Z. An unmanifest point which begets and swallows everything.
Cythrawl, like Wr-alda were, and still are, powerful forces; certainly not Satanic - as that was only “made-up” by the Church in its early growing, to disperse all opposition to their own God and political objectives of taking over Britain and of course the rest of the world eventually.
Don’t forget the old Celtic Goddess Bridgit, was so well loved by the peasants, the Christians could not get rid of Her, or downgrade Her to a Demon, so they made Her a Saint and said that she had been the midwife and Godmother of Jesus. (I’m not quite sure when Mary and Jesus was ever supposed to have visited Ireland, after having just given birth to him in a place thousands of miles away. I wonder what language they talked to each other in? This never entered anyone’s little heads in those days though and therefore, Saint Bridgit is still held in the highest esteem from Pagans and Christians alike, although She is actually a Pagan Goddess.
The Welsh Cythrel, spelt differently and taking a Christianized viewpoint, from the original Cythrawl, became the Christianized bad guy once again and I assure you, we don’t Devil worship, or anything remotely similar. It simply portrays the powerful forces of the Alpha – Omega and the beginning and the end - being one and both at the same time. Perhaps more like a mobius strip, mmnn?
Conceivably not quite ‘order out of chaos’, but more like ‘organized chaos’ it seems.
MORE ON CYTHRAWL (from other sources)
(Welsh) [KEETH-rawl] - In the Welsh cosmology, Cythrawl archetypally symbolizes the opposing male creative force, which represents destruction rather than creation. While this sounds very negative to non-Pagans; Pagans accept the powerful energy as - leading towards nothingness and being as necessary to existence, as that which leads to creation.
Cythrawl's powerful energy has been personified as deity, and His home is in the Otherworld where his energy is first manifested before appearing in the mortal realm.
GOD AND CYTHRAWL (taken from the web - from the Christian context)
As the Christians, since arriving on the shores of Britain, have tried their hardest to destroy Paganism and the ways of the God and Goddess. They also clearly tended to overlay their teachings on all Pagan religions and beliefs, when they couldn't destroy it and eventually, we see a strange mixture of ancient beliefs and Druidism trying to be defined in a Christian way. They personify God and Cythrawl, being two primary existences in the Cymric cosmogony. They stand respectively for the principle of energy tending towards life, and the principle of destruction tending towards nothingness. Cythrawl is realised in the region of Annwn (annoon) - This was the word used in early literature for Hades or Fairyland, which perhaps may be rendered, the Abyss, or Chaos. In the beginning there was nothing and there rested Cythrawl in His ineffable state. The beginning - the end, the alpha - the omega.......
The totality of being as it now exists (The original Druid belief) is represented by three concentric circles. The innermost of them, where life sprang from Annwn, is called 'Abred', and is the stage of struggle and evolution - the contest of life with Cythrawl. The next is the circle of 'Gwynfyd,' or Purity, in which life is manifested as a pure, rejoicing force, having attained its triumph over evil. The last and outermost circle is called 'Ceugant,' or Infinity. Here all predicates fail us, and this circle, represented graphically not by a bounding line, (for it defies time and space), but by divergent rays, and is inhabited by what the Christians believe is God alone. The following extract from the Druid BARDDAS in which the alleged bardic teaching is conveyed in catechism form, will serve to show the order of ideas in which the writer's mind moved:
Q: Whence didst thou proceed?
A: I came from the Great World, having my beginning in Annwn.
Q: Where art thou now? and how camest thou to what thou art?
A: I am in the Little World, whither I came having traversed the circle of Abred, and now I am a Man, at its termination and extreme limits.
Q: What wert thou before thou didst become a man, in the circle of Abred?
A: I was in Annwn the least possible that was capable of life and the nearest possible to absolute death; and I came in every form and through every form capable of a body and life to the state of man along the circle of Abred, where my condition was severe and grievous during the age of ages, ever since I was parted in Annwn from the dead, by the gift of God, and His great generosity, and His unlimited and endless love.
Q: Through how many different forms didst thou come, and what happened unto thee?
A: Through every form capable of life, in water, in earth, in air. And there happened unto me every severity, every hardship, every evil, and every suffering, and but little was the goodness or Gwynfyd before I became a man.... Gwynfyd cannot be obtained without seeing and knowing everything, but it is not possible to see or to know everything without suffering everything.... And there can be no full and perfect love that does not produce those things which are necessary to lead to the knowledge that causes Gwynfyd.
Every being, we are told, shall attain to the circle of Gwynfyd at last.
There is much here that reminds us of Gnostic or Oriental thought. It is certainly very unlike Christian orthodoxy of the sixteenth century and retains most of the Druid belief and content. As a product of the Cymric mind of that period the reader may take it for what it is worth, without troubling himself either with antiquarian theories or with their refutations. But where 'Barddas' is mentioning Annwn as the state where life begins, the original Gnosticism doesn't operate with a beginning (because, if there is a beginning there also has to be an end), but with an eternal spiral which is life & the force (Christian belief is of course God) and within this spiral are all the lesser (pulmonary) circulations or spirals, which contains evolutionary, individually but still indivisible life’s, who develop through the stages of mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms and again as pure spirit, ending each lesser spiral being 'One with God'. This stage may last for eons of 'time' but will automatically lead to another lesser spiral where it starts all over again, but always in a higher degree, and so on in eternity. (Micro- Middle- and Macrocosm has and will always exist inside each other). These thoughts can be read in the Danish writer Martinus'(1890-1981) work THE THIRD TESTAMENT (# 431) and may complete the Cymric (i.e. Celtic) cosmogony, and thus include Cythrawl as a part of God's being, which some interpretations of Druidism also contains.
Source: http://www.coven-of-cythrawl.com/Cythrawl.htm
I nearly just fell out of my damn chair.
Last edited by Vivek; 10th June 2012 at 02:20.
Sebastion (10th June 2012)
From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroni
KRONI
Kroni (Tamil: குறோணி) is a figure in Ayyavazhi mythology. He is the primordial manifestation of evil, and manifests in various forms of evil, such as Ravana and Duryodhana, in different ages or yugas. In order to counteract and destroy the evil of Kroni's manifestations, Mayon (a Tamil name for Vishnu) incarnates as Avatars such as Rama and Krishna. Kroni is analogous to Satan in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. He shares many similarities with the demon Kali of the Mahabharata and Kalki Purana.
Kroni in the Akilattirattu Ammanai
According to the Akilattirattu Ammanai, the Ayyavazhi holy book, Kroni was born in the first of the Eight Yukams (aeons) with multitudinous limbs each the size of a mountain, and was the first evil to be born in the Universe. He had a fire of ravenous hunger in his stomach, and he drank all the waters of the sea to quell it. The water being insufficient, he swallowed Kailayam, the abode of Shiva, and then proceeded to devour the entire Universe. Mayon, residing with Shiva in Kailayam, escaped promptly and undertook a Tavam to receive a boon from Shiva in order to destroy Kroni. Shiva granted the boon, but made Mayon aware of the necessity of appearing in different forms for the successive six yukams in order to destroy the six fragments of Kroni. Being aware of the mission, Mayon sliced Kroni into six fragments and saved the Universe. With that event the first Yukam came to an end.
Fragments of Kroni
The six fragments of Kroni were then born as evil spirits (or Asuras) in six successive Yukams (aeons). In all the yukams Mayon had to incarnate in the world to destroy the evils. The six fragments were known as
Kroni, the spirit of Kali Yuga, is said to be omnipresent in the present age, and this is one of the reasons why followers of Ayya Vazhi, like other Hindus, believe that the current yuga, Kali Yuga, is so degraded.1.Kuntomasali
2.Thillaimallalan and Mallosivakanan
3.Suraparppan Sinkamukasuran and Iraniyan
4.Ravanan
5.Thuriyothanan and the Ninety-nine Brothers
6.Kaliyan
Philosophical View
Philosophically, Kroni is viewed as the evil which prevents the soul from attaining absolute bliss or knowledge. The six fragments are considered to be six evils found in the six chakras except Sahasrara of the physical human body. It is stated that every human being should overcome the qualities of the six fragments (ill effects) in order to attain divinity (Sahasrara), the state of union with God.
But this view is often criticised by some followers because the Akilam did not mention Kroni in direct relation to Chakras. As some believe that many philosophical concepts are symbolised indirectly as mythical figures in a story form in Akilam, this view on Kroni is accepted during religious studies.
Liber Archon
Source: http://www.laevusmanus.org/resources/Liber%20Archon.pdf
you may fall out of your chair more since I was expressing something of the nature of how the Vatican had a bug up its arse about the druids (among others) as you were posting this.
Patricus (Patrick) running all the serpents from Ireland was basically just saying "Hey we got rid of all the Druids and converted the indigenous people (tribes) the Druids care took there).
My great grandfather was a member of the IRA and he noted that in order to free Ireland from the English, Ireland first had to be freed from the Church. A herectic statement for the time which is better understood today.
Cythrawl was considered an energy to the Druids, as well. What was known as the void. Neither good nor evil but necessary, a space of returning to Zero Point I'd guess you say. Some referred to it as the veil.
Avalon was known as the Isle of Women. Strangely enough Avlaon is associated with apples (eve, woman, apples) and the Isle of Man was it's counterpart that Cythrawl held sway over. If Avalon was the seat of power for the divine female the seat of power for the Male, was of course the Isle of Man. Some have referred to it as the Dragon Isle. That is where the men who were to proven apt for care taking the land had to run with the Horned Stag, (the Horned One coming into a male stag). Where a man took his rites to prove he was able to care take with sovereign female who had her own Initiations on Avalon.
Posted by Vivek (here)
MORE ON CYTHRAWL (from yet other sources)
Cythrawl, stems from the very ancient paths of Europe and Britain, but more Celtic and certainly eventually totally Druidic. The Christians in their true to fashion ‘wisdom’ made the “Horned God’, and all His likenesses such as Cernunnos, Pan, Fosite and many other names that He went by into their personalized and stylized Devil, as all these Gods and Forces were far too powerful to remove from the peasants celebratory practices, so they made them evil and against the law, for all intents and purposes. Their problems solved…
The ancient God Wr-alda, with its manifestation of being a many headed serpent(s) suddenly become very evil also and a dark one, who the Christians called the Leviathan, amongst other names, when in its purest form was originally the “sustainer” the giver of “life itself” to Irtha, (the Earth Goddess).
Along with these sweeping statements and re-designations other Powerful Gods and Goddesses became; good or bad, dependent upon the push and whim of the Church and how afraid they were of not being able to fully infiltrate the new lands with Christianity without their removal or reconstituted form being “press released”.
Similar to Shiva, (the destroyer, but also the giver of life in a similar sense), the great force Cythrawl is different in that He is the Beginning and the End, the Alpha the Omega, the A and the Z. An unmanifest point which begets and swallows everything.
Cythrawl, like Wr-alda were, and still are, powerful forces; certainly not Satanic - as that was only “made-up” by the Church in its early growing, to disperse all opposition to their own God and political objectives of taking over Britain and of course the rest of the world eventually.
Don’t forget the old Celtic Goddess Bridgit, was so well loved by the peasants, the Christians could not get rid of Her, or downgrade Her to a Demon, so they made Her a Saint and said that she had been the midwife and Godmother of Jesus. (I’m not quite sure when Mary and Jesus was ever supposed to have visited Ireland, after having just given birth to him in a place thousands of miles away. I wonder what language they talked to each other in? This never entered anyone’s little heads in those days though and therefore, Saint Bridgit is still held in the highest esteem from Pagans and Christians alike, although She is actually a Pagan Goddess.
The Welsh Cythrel, spelt differently and taking a Christianized viewpoint, from the original Cythrawl, became the Christianized bad guy once again and I assure you, we don’t Devil worship, or anything remotely similar. It simply portrays the powerful forces of the Alpha – Omega and the beginning and the end - being one and both at the same time. Perhaps more like a mobius strip, mmnn?
Conceivably not quite ‘order out of chaos’, but more like ‘organized chaos’ it seems.
MORE ON CYTHRAWL (from other sources)
(Welsh) [KEETH-rawl] - In the Welsh cosmology, Cythrawl archetypally symbolizes the opposing male creative force, which represents destruction rather than creation. While this sounds very negative to non-Pagans; Pagans accept the powerful energy as - leading towards nothingness and being as necessary to existence, as that which leads to creation.
Cythrawl's powerful energy has been personified as deity, and His home is in the Otherworld where his energy is first manifested before appearing in the mortal realm.
GOD AND CYTHRAWL (taken from the web - from the Christian context)
As the Christians, since arriving on the shores of Britain, have tried their hardest to destroy Paganism and the ways of the God and Goddess. They also clearly tended to overlay their teachings on all Pagan religions and beliefs, when they couldn't destroy it and eventually, we see a strange mixture of ancient beliefs and Druidism trying to be defined in a Christian way. They personify God and Cythrawl, being two primary existences in the Cymric cosmogony. They stand respectively for the principle of energy tending towards life, and the principle of destruction tending towards nothingness. Cythrawl is realised in the region of Annwn (annoon) - This was the word used in early literature for Hades or Fairyland, which perhaps may be rendered, the Abyss, or Chaos. In the beginning there was nothing and there rested Cythrawl in His ineffable state. The beginning - the end, the alpha - the omega.......
The totality of being as it now exists (The original Druid belief) is represented by three concentric circles. The innermost of them, where life sprang from Annwn, is called 'Abred', and is the stage of struggle and evolution - the contest of life with Cythrawl. The next is the circle of 'Gwynfyd,' or Purity, in which life is manifested as a pure, rejoicing force, having attained its triumph over evil. The last and outermost circle is called 'Ceugant,' or Infinity. Here all predicates fail us, and this circle, represented graphically not by a bounding line, (for it defies time and space), but by divergent rays, and is inhabited by what the Christians believe is God alone. The following extract from the Druid BARDDAS in which the alleged bardic teaching is conveyed in catechism form, will serve to show the order of ideas in which the writer's mind moved:
Q: Whence didst thou proceed?
A: I came from the Great World, having my beginning in Annwn.
Q: Where art thou now? and how camest thou to what thou art?
A: I am in the Little World, whither I came having traversed the circle of Abred, and now I am a Man, at its termination and extreme limits.
Q: What wert thou before thou didst become a man, in the circle of Abred?
A: I was in Annwn the least possible that was capable of life and the nearest possible to absolute death; and I came in every form and through every form capable of a body and life to the state of man along the circle of Abred, where my condition was severe and grievous during the age of ages, ever since I was parted in Annwn from the dead, by the gift of God, and His great generosity, and His unlimited and endless love.
Q: Through how many different forms didst thou come, and what happened unto thee?
A: Through every form capable of life, in water, in earth, in air. And there happened unto me every severity, every hardship, every evil, and every suffering, and but little was the goodness or Gwynfyd before I became a man.... Gwynfyd cannot be obtained without seeing and knowing everything, but it is not possible to see or to know everything without suffering everything.... And there can be no full and perfect love that does not produce those things which are necessary to lead to the knowledge that causes Gwynfyd.
Every being, we are told, shall attain to the circle of Gwynfyd at last.
There is much here that reminds us of Gnostic or Oriental thought. It is certainly very unlike Christian orthodoxy of the sixteenth century and retains most of the Druid belief and content. As a product of the Cymric mind of that period the reader may take it for what it is worth, without troubling himself either with antiquarian theories or with their refutations. But where 'Barddas' is mentioning Annwn as the state where life begins, the original Gnosticism doesn't operate with a beginning (because, if there is a beginning there also has to be an end), but with an eternal spiral which is life & the force (Christian belief is of course God) and within this spiral are all the lesser (pulmonary) circulations or spirals, which contains evolutionary, individually but still indivisible life’s, who develop through the stages of mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms and again as pure spirit, ending each lesser spiral being 'One with God'. This stage may last for eons of 'time' but will automatically lead to another lesser spiral where it starts all over again, but always in a higher degree, and so on in eternity. (Micro- Middle- and Macrocosm has and will always exist inside each other). These thoughts can be read in the Danish writer Martinus'(1890-1981) work THE THIRD TESTAMENT (# 431) and may complete the Cymric (i.e. Celtic) cosmogony, and thus include Cythrawl as a part of God's being, which some interpretations of Druidism also contains.
Source: http://www.coven-of-cythrawl.com/Cythrawl.htm
I nearly just fell out of my damn chair.
The Thugs of India [THUGGEES]
By Christopher S. Putnam
Accounts of a secret cult of murderers roaming India go back at least as far as the 13th century, but to modern history their story usually begins with the entrance of the British Empire in the early 1800s. For some years, India’s British administrators had been hearing reports of large numbers of travelers disappearing on the country’s roads; but, while disturbing, such incidents were not entirely unusual for the time. It was not until the discovery of a series of eerily similar mass graves across India that the truth began to dawn. Each site was piled with the bodies of individuals ritually murdered and buried in the same meticulous fashion, leading to an inescapable conclusion: these killings were the work of a single, nation-spanning organization. It was known as Thuggee.
At its root, the word “Thuggee” means “deceivers,” and this name hints at the methods employed by the cult. Bands of Thugs traveled across the country posing as pilgrims, merchants, soldiers, or even royalty, in groups numbering anywhere from a few men to several hundred. Offering protection or company, they would befriend fellow travelers and slowly build their confidence along the road. Often the impostors would journey for days and hundreds of miles with their intended victims, patiently waiting for an opportunity to strike. When the time was right, typically while their targets were encamped and at their most relaxed, a signal would be given—reportedly “Bring the tobacco”—and the Thugs would spring. Each member had a well-honed specialty; some distracted their quarry, some made noise or music to mask any cries, while others guarded the campsite from intruders and escapees. Thugs of the highest rank performed the actual killings. As a prohibition against shedding blood was at the core of Thuggee belief, the murders were performed in a bloodless fashion. The usual method was strangulation with a rumal, the yellow silk handkerchief each thug wore tied around his waist; but an occasional neck-breaking or poisoning helped to add some variety. It was a matter of honor for the Thugs to let no one escape alive once they had been selected for death.
For the members of Thuggee, murder was both a way of life and a religious duty. They believed their killings were a means of worshiping the Hindu goddess Kali, who was honored at each stage of the murder by a vast and complex system of rituals and superstitions. Thugs were guided to their victims by omens observed in nature, and once the deed was done, the graves and bodies were prepared according to strict ceremonies. A sacrificial rite would be conducted after the burial involving the consecration of sugar and of the sacred pickax, the tool the brotherhood believed was given to them by Kali to dig the graves of their prey. Thugs were certainly not above robbing their victims, but traditionally a portion of the spoils would be set aside for the goddess.
Kali, despite her fearsome appearance, is not an evil deity. For more mainstream Hindus, she is a goddess of time and transformation who can impart understanding of life, death, and creation. To the members of the Thuggee cult, she was something else entirely. Their Kali craved human blood, and demanded endless sacrifice to satisfy her hunger. According to Thuggee legend, Kali once battled a terrible demon which roamed the land, devouring humans as fast as they were created. But every drop of the monster’s blood that touched the ground spawned a new demon, until the exhausted Kali finally created two human men, armed with rumals, and instructed them to strangle the demons. When their work was finished, Kali instructed them to keep the rumals in their family and use them to destroy every man not of their kindred. This was the tale told to Thuggee initiates.
All Thugs were male, and membership in the cult was hereditary apart from a few outsiders allowed to join voluntarily and some young boys captured in raids. Around their tenth birthday, the sons of Thugs would be invited to witness their first murder, but only from a distance. Gradually over the years they could strive to achieve the rank of bhuttote, or strangler. Thuggee membership was for life, all the way up to the elderly Thugs who still did what they could for the group as cooks or spies—yet the wives and daughters of these men might never know the truth about the male members of their family.
Their extreme secrecy combined with their mastery of murder made the Thugs the deadliest secret society in all of history. In the early 19th century they were credited with 40,000 deaths annually, stretching back as far as anyone cared to count. Some estimates put the overall death toll as high as 2,000,000, but with the cult potentially operating for more than 500 years before formal records were kept, the true number is impossible to determine.
Even as the evidence began to mount, most members of India’s British-run government remained dismissive of claims that a secret cult of murderers was terrorizing the countryside. It would be the efforts of a single soldier that would eventually turn this apathy around.
Sir William Henry Sleeman was a sober, no-nonsense Bengal Army officer who from early on dedicated his career to the eradication of Thuggee. Faced with a wall of disbelief and indifference from his superiors, he transferred to the Civil Service where he could gain enough authority to wage his war personally. As a district magistrate by the 1820s, he gathered a force of Indian policemen under him and set to rooting out the cult with a variety of innovative policing methods. By examining common attack sites and listening for reports of suspicious figures, Sleeman and his men formulated predictions of where the next large attack was likely to occur. They would then turn the Thugs’ own methods against them—disguised as merchants, the officers would wait at the chosen site for a group of Thugs to approach, and ambush them. Information obtained from the prisoners was used to plan the next strike.
But Sleeman’s job would not be easy, as one of the Thuggee cult’s defining characteristics was its pervasiveness within Indian society. In an era where strict caste divisions dominated every aspect of life, Thuggee was unique for transcending all such social barriers. Anyone from a farmer to an aristocrat could be a Thug. Many were even Muslims who, in a truly inspiring feat of rationalization, managed to reconcile their practice of human sacrifice to a goddess with their religion’s strict ban on idolatry and murder. When members of the brotherhood were not terrorizing travelers, they lived as normal—often upstanding—citizens, with ordinary social lives and occupations. It was impossible to know who might be with the Thugs, even among one’s closest friends.
What was more bizarre, and endlessly frustrating for Sleeman, was the level of protection the Thugs seemed to enjoy within India. Though they clearly had the country living in fear, a strange ambivalence toward the cult existed. Local police and officials turned a blind eye to reports of Thug activities, while peasants would simply work around the bodies that occasionally appeared in their fields and wells. Landowners and Indian princes often explicitly shielded known Thugs, to the point that they would sometimes violently clash with British soldiers on the hunt.
The reasons for this strange reaction to the cult are varied and complex. In the case of the lower-ranked members of society, it most often may have simply been out of fear or superstition; it was believed by some that the goddess Kali would take revenge on those who interfered with her followers. The rich and powerful, for their part, may have had some vested interest in Thug activity: bribery, perhaps, or they may simply have been charmed by master con artists. Some poor villages accepted the murder and robbery of rich travelers as simply a way of bringing wealth into the region—for many, Thugging was apparently viewed as a regular tax-paying profession, as noble as any other. Whatever the cause, it meant that Sleeman’s men were more often than not met with silence as they probed residents for information.
But a few factors were in Sleeman’s favor. First, the Thugs’ beliefs forbade them from killing certain groups, including women, fakirs, musicians, lepers—and Europeans. Thuggee was thus unable to retaliate against its English persecutors even when it had the opportunity. Second, once captured, most Thugs cooperated with authorities willingly—one might even say gleefully. Staunch fatalists, the imprisoned Thugs believed their situation was the result of their displeasing the goddess. They therefore showed little remorse in turning in their brothers, believing that anything that happened to them would be the will of Kali. Some suspect that Thuggee prisoners even deliberately accused innocent men; unable to strangle in person during their incarceration, sending men to the gallows was a convenient way of keeping up their obligation to Kali. As for those condemned to die, it is said that each went to his death with no trace of emotion, often requesting only that he be allowed to place the noose around his own neck.
With informants pouring in at an ever-increasing rate, Sleeman’s campaign against the Thugs gained ground beyond anyone’s expectations. Within a few years the cult was crippled, and by the end of the 19th century the British declared Thuggee extinct. Sleeman was hailed as a hero by most of India, and in many parts of the country he is still revered.
But there are those who have wondered if the British were too quick to congratulate themselves. It is difficult for some to imagine how a secret fraternity that had survived for centuries and engrained itself into every facet of Indian society could have been eliminated in so short a time. Certainly, the mass killings are a distant memory, and India no longer lives in fear of its shadow. But in some remote areas, rumors still linger about the yellow-sashed strangers who welcome travelers with open arms and a friendly smile.
Source (with pictures and more links): http://www.damninteresting.com/the-thugs-of-india/