Jigar Khoy

(JIG-ger COY)

Variations: Jigar Kohr, Jigogonja

In the North Indian nomadic tribes of the Bhils, Kols, and Santals there exists a type of VAMPIRIC WITCH called a jigar khoy, or a JIGARKHWAR if a woman. The jigar khoy uses his hypnosis skills to place a person into a trancelike state. Then, using magic, he steals a small seed from inside the person's body that contains his life-energy (see ENERGY VAMPIRE). The witch implants the seed into his own calf muscle and uses his telepathic ability to call other jigar khoy to a meal. The witch will roast his leg over a fire; this causes the seed to grow in size. When it is large enough, he cuts out the seed and serves it as a meal to his guests, along with some of his own flesh. After the meal has been completely eaten, the person from whom the seed was taken dies. It is suspected that by use of magic the leg muscle is somehow healed or replaced.

The jigar khoy witch can seek out an appropriate apprentice to learn the evilness that is the witch's purpose for being. After learning the spells, the student must then eat a cake that has bits of human liver in it. Once the cake is eaten, the student is no longer fully human but rather a fellow jigar khoy, which translates to mean "liver eater."

Among the basic acts of evil the jigar khoy will commit when the opportunity presents itself, it will also be able to steal the intestines of a person, chew on them, and then place them back inside the person. Jigar khoy do this to feed off the pain it causes.

Having a jigar khoy in one's tribe in very dangerous. If someone is suspected of being a jigar khoy witch, he is bound hand and foot to a large boulder, which is then rolled into a body of water. The belief is that no matter how large the stone is, the jigar khoy will not allow the rock to sink.

Once the VAMPIRIC WITCH has been discovered, the matter of his human restoration is at hand. First, two and half days must have passed from the last time the witch has eaten a human liver. To be certain, the jigar khoy is typically made to fast during its first three days of incarceration. After the fast, the jigar khoy is then branded with a specific glyph on either side of his temple and again on each and every joint. Next, his eyes are rubbed vigorously with SALT to cleanse out all of the evil things he has seen. Once the body has been prepared, the jigar khoy is taken to a cave and suspended from the ceiling for forty days. During that entire time special prayers and incantations are constantly said over it. At the end of the forty days, if there is still life in the body, the person is declared cured and human once again.

Source: Crooke, Introduction to the Popular Religion,

349­50; Franklyn, Dictionary of the Occult, 153; Masters, Natural History of the Vampire, 65; Spence, Encyclopedia of Occultism, 225