self-whipping

Updated: August 29, 2026

Lacerations and what we would call penances, be it remembered, are done to the honour of a Deity; they are not a discipline like the self-whipping of the Flagellants and the jumping of the Jumpers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. "Bhakti," says Sir Monier Williams, "is really a kind of 'meritorious work, and not equivalent to 'faith' in the Christian sense."

John Morrison - New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century: A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments