As Europeans traveled the world, they had to make sense of the very different customs they encountered, whether in the New World or in Africa and Asia. In the 1720s and 1730s two French Protestant exiles in Amsterdam published the first encyclopedia of all the known religions of the world. This excerpt from the section on India describes the fakirs, Sufi ascetics who could be Muslim or Hindu. Like other Europeans Bernard Picart and Jean Frédéric Bernard found these rituals bizarre but they also pointed to similarities to European religious customs. By focusing on such comparisons, they recast religion as a cultural practice and helped establish the study of comparative religions and anthropology.

It has been said in all ages that the devil has his martyrs, but there are as many of these in India as in any part of the world. We there see Fakirs, who are properly the monks of this country, that outdo whatever we read of the antient Anchorets [Christian religious hermits], who spent their whole lives in the most severe penance and mortification.

Several of these Fakirs make a vow, of continuing all their life-time in one posture, and keep it effectually. Others never lie down, or continue all their lives in a standing posture, supported only by a stick or rope under their arm-pits; and others again stand with their arms always rais’d on high. There are some who endeavor to mortify and torture themselves by austerities still infinitely more rigid; these mangle their bodies with scourges or knives. They look upon themselves as no longer of this world, and as they fancy they have triumph’d over every passion, and are in a state of innocence, many of them either walk up and down, or discover their naked bodies in public; not even concealing those parts, which modesty would have hid. . . .

We read in the first book of Kings, the odd manner in which the priests of Baal used to honour their god; how they invok’d him, and endeavour’d to obtain some favour from him, by slashing themselves with knives and lancets. We are also told in Scripture, that the above-mentioned, in order to draw down fire from heaven upon their sacrifices, used to make their bodies run down with blood. The austerities and mortifications of the Fakirs, may be put in parallel with them.

Source: Bernard Picart and Jean Frédéric Bernard, The Religious Ceremonies and Customs of the Several Nations of the Known World: The Ceremonies of the Idolatrous Nations, vol. 3 (London: Printed for Nicholas Prevost, and comp., 1731 [original French edition, 1723]), pp. 240-241.

Question to Consider

What are the consequences of comparing the fakirs to Catholic monks?