By Dr Carl Vadivella Belle, Hindu Chaplain, Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia

Thaipusam, an annual Hindu festival, is widely known for devotees spearing their cheeks with long, shiny steel rods and piercing their chests and backs with small, hook-like needles in penance. It is claimed that devotees feel no pain, do not bleed from their wounds and have no scars left behind. In examining the Hindu festival of Thaipusam, the speaker will suggest that a particular form of trance (arul) plunges the devotees into a catalytic form of consciousness in which they are exposed to the deity’s transformative power.

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