From jayabarathi Sat Apr 3 20:07:34 1999
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Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 12:03:23 +0800
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Cc: tamil@..., "Chandrasekaran, Periannan"
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Subject: [agathiyar] Re: Ritualistic suicide
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Dear Netters,

There have also some exchanges and input in the forumhub.
Since the forumhub is a public forum withfree access and the posting is
addressed to me, I thought it better to share the info and the questions
with other netters.
Chandrasekaran gives a further reference from the Thakkai
Ramayanam.

Regards

Jayabarathi

--------------------Forwarded------------------------------------
From: Chandra (@ viking.delta-air.com) on: Fri Apr 2 14:14:19

JayBee,
That page on self-sacrifice was very interesting
and very informative. It was new to me to see that navakaNtam
was also practised. Anyway, I wonder how it is possible to cut one's
own head off!
In addition to learning (or having been "conditioned") by detective
novels that are replete with statements such as a normal person usually
unable to easily stab themselves to death (we could discount this anyway
since we are not talking about normal family person but a skillful
warrior who would know various techniques for causing mortal injuries),
I have read some macabre non-fiction about the history of capital
punishment which described in detail various techniques for punishment
and torture in the west.
There it said it had historically been very difficult to slice a
human's head off.Apparently it was easy to miss the mark and hit at
the victim at
the wrong places a few inches of the ideal spot on th eneck etc. And said
very skilled executioners were needed to perform that gruesome task.
It also described the evolution of the guillotine and how much difficulty
the "scientist pair" that invented it had to undergo in arriving at the
final
verison of guillotine. It said something like they had experimented with
banana trunks etc. to simulate the consistency of the human neck.
Now given all this how could a person however skilled they were could
lop their own head off!
The Japanese version in which the best friend performed the slicing
seems more feasible.
Would you like to throw more light on this "dark" subject?
------------------

From: Chandra (@ user-38lc94p.dialup.mindspring.com) on: Sat Apr 3
22:05:21

Balaji,
The thakkai irAmayanam book's preface says that at the
aforementioned fort at cangkagiri between kOvai and Salem, there were
spots called thOlourichchAn mEdu and uruttivittAn pARai [about 1800 AD].

That book also states that one n-allayyan serving as the body guard
of a king of that area whose dynasty was generically designated
"mOrUr kAngkEyan" offered his own head to the goddess n-allpuLLi
amman in return for relieving the childlessness of the king
[apparently sometime before 16 th century].

Chandra

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