KAPALIKA AND KALAMUKHA

members of either of two groups of extreme Hindu ascetics most prominent in India during the medieval period (10th11th centuries), notorious for their practices of worship, which were said to include human sacrifice. They were offshoots of the Pasupata sect, the earliest sect of Saivites (worshipers of the Lord Siva as supreme deity). The Kapalikas (worshipers of Kapalin, the skull bearer, a name of Siva) and the Kalamukhas (Black-faced, so-called because of the black mark, or tilaka, customarily worn on their foreheads) were often confused. They were both designated as mahavratins (observers of the great vows), which referred to such practices as going naked, eating and drinking liquor from a human skull, eating the flesh of the dead, and smearing themselves with the ashes of corpses. They frequented lonely cremation grounds where they meditated on the yoni, the symbol of the female sexual organ, and were said to engage in many strange orgiastic rites. Some otherwise puzzling sculptures on medieval Indian temples are sometimes explained as depicting Kapalika ascetics. An inscription at Igatpuri in Nasik district (Maharashtra state) confirms that the Kapalika were well established in that region in the 7th century; another important centre was probably Sriparvata (modern Nagarjunikonda), in Andhra Pradesh, and they apparently spread throughout India. In an 8th-century Sanskrit drama, Malati-Madhava, the heroine narrowly escapes being sacrificed to the goddess Camunda by a pair of Kapalika ascetics. Successors to the Kapalikas in modern times are the Aghoris, or Aghorapanthis.