BODE, Nepal, July 5 (UPI Next) --Every year in mid-April, Juju Bhai Basan Shrestha stands before festival crowds in a cobbled square in the Nepali village of Bode in Bhaktapur district, 7 miles east ...

Chanting and swaying to the hypnotic rhythm of prayer until they reach a trance-like state, the group of dervishes then pierce their cheeks with long needles, without drawing blood or showing pain.

A few weeks after my maiden hook-pull, I speak by phone with Fakir, who is known among the piercing community by his first name. Born Roland Loomis in Aberdeen, S.D., in 1930, he grew up a Lutheran on ...

GJAKOVE, Kosovo - Spring has arrived and dervishes in Kosovo are celebrating with dances and blood. At a small dome-shaped Tekke (holy place) in western Kosovo, a sheikh stepped down from a thick ...

In Hindu dharma, life is seen as a sacred journey marked by sixteen important samskaras or purification rites. These rituals guide a person from birth to death with spiritual awareness. Among them is ...

Five-year-old T. Kavinesh kicked out in panic, his foot slamming onto the goldsmith's mid-section as the man leaned in with a needle. His three-year-old brother T. Sai Sarvesh was already wailing.

Worshippers on Thailand's Phuket island have celebrated a nine-day Taoist festival, with many piercing their faces with metal spikes and walking on hot coals to show devotion to deities. PHUKET, ...

Most folks’ exposure to the art and ritual of body suspension is limited to the 1970 film A Man Called Horse, in which the late Richard Harris endured the Sioux ceremony of o-kee-pa, being lifted off ...

DEVOTEES have pierced their faces with swords, skewers and even bicycles in a shocking ritual during Thailand’s famous Vegetarian Festival. In Phuket’s Old Town, hundreds of followers marched through ...