Like the Badhaks and other Indian robbers and the Italian banditti the
Thugs were of a very religious or superstitious turn of mind. There
was not one among them, Colonel Sleeman wrote, [698] who doubted the
divine origin of Thuggee: "Not one who doubts that he and all who have
followed the trade of murder, with the prescribed rites and observance,
were acting under the immediate orders and auspices of the goddess,
Devi, Durga, Kali or Bhawani, as she is indifferently called, and
consequently there is not one who feels the slightest remorse for
the murders which he may have perpetrated or abetted in the course of
his vocation. A Thug considers the persons murdered precisely in the
light of victims offered up to the goddess; and he remembers them
as a priest of Jupiter remembered the oxen and a priest of Saturn
the children sacrificed upon their altars. He meditates his murders
without any misgivings, he perpetrates them without any emotions
of pity, and he recalls them without any feeling of remorse. They
trouble not his dreams, nor does their recollection ever cause him
inquietude in darkness, in solitude or in the hour of death."
And again: "The most extraordinary trait in the characters of these
people is not this that they can look back upon all the murders
they have perpetrated without any feelings of remorse, but that they
can look forward indifferently to their children, whom they love as
tenderly as any man in the world, following the same trade of murder
or being united in marriage to men who follow the trade. When I have
asked them how they could cherish these children through infancy and
childhood under the determination to make them murderers or marry
them to murderers, the only observation they have ever made was that
formerly there was no danger of their ever being hung or transported,
but that now they would rather that their children should learn some
less dangerous trade."