Pishacha — Piśāca — is the lowest and most repulsive class of Hindu flesh-eating spirit: the ghoul of the cremation ground, the corpse-eater, the carrion-demon that haunts charnel houses, crossroads, and battlefields where the dead lie unburned. If the rakshasa is the lordly man-eater and the vetala the corpse-animating ghost, the pishacha is the gibbering, gluttonous bottom of the demonic hierarchy — degraded, half-mad, and feared for the diseases and madness it spreads.
Origin and Lineage
The Puranas trace the pishachas, like the yakshas and rakshasas, to the daughters of Daksha wed to the sage Kashyapa — the pishachas born of Pishacha or of Krodhavasha, “the brood of anger.” Another tradition makes them creatures Brahma fashioned when, in a fit of distraction, beings of darkness slipped out of him. They are often listed in the great triad of malign night-spirits — rakshasa, pishacha, bhuta — that the living must be guarded against, especially the newly dead, the sick, and women in childbirth.
Nature and Menace
Pishachas are described as dark, emaciated, veined with protruding blood-vessels, with bulging red eyes and a hunger that is never sated. They feed on human flesh and on the vital energy of the living. Their special menace is intrusion: a pishacha can enter a body through food, through wounds, or through a moment of ritual impurity, causing wasting sickness, fits, fever, and insanity — many traditional explanations of madness and possession name the pishacha as cause. They are creatures of impure places and impure times; cleanliness, fire, mantras, and the worship of Shiva (lord of the cremation ground who masters such beings) are the classical defences.
The Pishacha Tongue
Curiously, the pishachas left a mark on the history of language: an entire family of ancient Prakrit dialects of the northwest was called Paishachi, “the speech of the pishachas,” reputedly the language in which the lost Brihatkatha — the vast story-collection that seeded the Kathasaritsagara and a thousand Indian tales — was first composed. That a literature of demons’ tongue should be the fountainhead of so much storytelling is one of the stranger ironies of Indian letters.
The Lowest Rung
In the moral and cosmic ladder of Hindu beings, the pishacha marks the floor: a soul so consumed by gluttony, cruelty, or unclean death that it has fallen below even the rakshasa into mindless hunger. To be reborn as a pishacha was a fate threatened for the gravest sins, especially the theft of food, the breaking of vows, and violence against the helpless. Yet like all such beings it could, in the long turning of karma, eventually be released — for in Hindu thought even the corpse-eater is a soul on its long road home.