Thugs, a fraternity of professed worshippers of the goddess Kali, the wife of Siva, who, professedly to propitiate her, practised murder, and lived on the spoils of the victims. Thuggee, a name for the practice, originally by strangling and at times by poisoning.
Definition taken from The Nuttall Encyclopædia, edited by the Reverend James Wood (1907)
Thucydides * Thule, Ultima