Ritual Masters Research Articles

This Ship Prays: The Southern Chinese Religious Seascape through the Handbook of a Maritime Ritual Master

Long kept in the British Library, a liturgical manuscript from the port of Haicheng, Fujian, holds details of the rich system of beliefs that Chinese sailors held. Originally untitled, the text by the shelfmark OR12693/18 is usually referred to as “Libation Ritual (for Ship Safety)” ([An Chuan] Zhuoxian Ke [(安船)酌献科]). Formerly, it was given scholarly attention mostly due to its addended lists of maritime placenames, which follows Qing-era sea routes across China’s coasts and to the South China Sea. Further inquiry into the manuscript’s terminology, deity names, and maritime knowledge confirms its deep relation to sailors’ lore. By tracing this text into a wide range of sources, this paper demonstrates how manuscript OR12693/18 reflects a cohesive maritime system of beliefs and knowledge. Manifested within the prayer are a hierarchical pantheon, ritual practices, and a perceived sacred seascape. Moreover, it is evident that the manuscript belonged to a tradition of sailing ritual masters who were regular members of the crew onboard junks. As such, this paper offers an analysis of a religious-professional tradition with trans-local aspects, shedding new light on seafaring in pre-modern China.

Borrowing and Borrowing Back: The Mother Goddess Religion in the Northern Mountains of Vietnam

Abstract: The Lên đồng spirit possession ritual and traditional festivals related to the Mother Goddesses religion are widely practised across Viet Nam. The process of integrating elements of ethnic minority culture into the Mother Goddess religious rituals themselves - worshiping indigenous ethnic spirits, and appropriating music, melodies, songs, and costumes, has similarly formed part of the long process of ritual creativity in development of the Lên đồng ritual. This paper describes practitioners of the Lên đồng ritual who have borrowed religious elements from minority communities, in particular the Tày and Nùng minority groups in the mountainous region of northern Vietnam. The recent fieldwork also revealed how knowledgeable ritual masters (thầy cúng) from these communities are often called upon to perform the invocation rites that initiate a Lên đồng ritual for Việt majority spirit mediums. The paper argues that people’s increased awareness of indigenous religious practices has contributed to their improved perception of ethnic minority people’s cultural practices. The authority and meaning of the religious expression of minority groups is shown in this story of a ritual master of ethnic minority origin with a reputation for high ritual efficacy.

An Overview of the Weiyi (威儀 Dignified Liturgies) of Taoism

Dignified liturgies (weiyi 威儀), one of the fundamental concepts in the Taoist scriptures, shows the overall image of Taoism displayed at the altar of the retreat (zhai 齋) and offering (jiao 醮) rituals. By examining the weiyi and Weiyi Masters in Taoist history, the dignified image of Taoist priests, the dignified duties of ritual masters, and the weiyi at the altar of the zhai and jiao rituals, we argue that the weiyi, which embodies the sacred dignity of the zhai and jiao altar, is key to understanding the meaning and function of Taoist zhai and jiao rituals. An overview of the weiyi is a new perspective in Taoist ritual studies, as in Taoist history its image as a state religion was displayed through dignified liturgies.

Тайваньский даосизм: вариативность форм и неизменность социальной миссии

This article is devoted to the analysis of the social structure of Taiwanese Dao­ism and its role in the everyday life of Taiwanese society. The emergence of Tao­ism in Taiwan dates back to the middle of the 17th century, when the first settlers arrived here from the areas of Quanzhou, Zhangzhou and Chaozhou, located in the southern coastal regions of mainland China. Until the 20th century, only Taoists of the Orthodox One school (Zhengyipai) were represented in Taiwanese society. The peculiarity of the ritualists of the Zhengyi school is their close con­nection with the local community, whose spiritual needs they serve. The author, based on the work of Taiwanese researchers and his own humble experience of field research in Taiwan, examines the social history of Taiwanese Daoism and characterizes its main currents. The article discusses the features of the Daoist tradition of Dao-fa er-men, the Lingbao lineage and the Chanhe lineage, as well as the social role of ritual masters fashi belonging to the “vernacular level” of the Taoist tradition, and grassroots spirit mediums tong-ki. As the results of modern research indicate, Taiwanese Daoism has many forms and historical variations, but it retains its social mission unchanged. The modern Taoist ritual­ists of Taiwan, first of all, ensure the normal functioning of the local social or­ganism, its unity and ethnocultural self-identification.

The Production of the Book of Mormon in Light of a Tibetan Buddhist Parallel

The Production of the Book of Mormon in Light of a Tibetan Buddhist Parallel

Music for healing: Black Gnawas and the ‘professional’ practice of dealing with spirits in southeastern Morocco

In Morocco, people usually call Gnawa those communities of black Moroccans made up of descendants of slaves from sub-Saharan Africa (Mauritania, Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, and Guinea) who follow rituals merging Islamic traditions with pre-Islamic African traditions. Gnawa brotherhoods are organised into ‘houses’ called Dar Gnawa. Each house is led by a Mʿallem (a ritual master) who inherits his ancestor’s knowledge and is responsible for a group of apprentice musicians and dancers from the same town or from other places. Music and dancing are key elements in their religious ceremonies. Based on fieldwork carried out in 2012–2016 in a black community living in southeastern Morocco, a village in the desert, 50 km away from the border with Algeria, this article analyses the healing rituals performed by the brotherhood in the two Dar Gnawas in the town, in nearby villages, and in the annual festival. The aim of this article is to explain how Gnawas created their legitimacy and prestige as ‘professional’ healers.

The Ecological Insight of the Bunga’ Lalang Rice Farming Tradition in Luwu Society, South Sulawesi, Indonesia

Abstract The ecological insights of local farming traditions have the potential to be adapted to modern agricultural practices. The article presents an exploration of the ecological insights of the bunga’ lalang rice farming tradition in the Luwu society, South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Four rituals of the tradition were observed directly during their performance, followed by interviews with eleven figures including the ritual masters. Each ritual of the bunga’ lalang tradition was treated as a discourse and the meanings of the biological elements are extracted to generate ecological knowledge that is biologically logical and compatible with modern scientific knowledge in rice farming.

Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai's Yijian Zhi transed. by Cong Ellen Zhang

Reviewed by: Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai's Yijian Zhi transed. by Cong Ellen Zhang Hsiao-wen Cheng Cong Ellen Zhang, ed. & trans., Record of the Listener: Selected Stories from Hong Mai's Yijian Zhi. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2018. xliii, 116 pp. US $15 (pb). ISBN 978-1-62466-684-1 Hong Mai's 洪邁 (1123–1202) Yijian zhi 夷堅志, or Record of the Listener, a massive collection of tales of the extraordinary, was a product of the unprecedented social, economic, and technological developments of the Southern Song (1127–1279). It comprised at least thirty-two installments compiled and published over the last forty years of Hong's life, more than half of them now lost. Enough survives to yield four volumes in Zhonghua shuju's 中華書局 modern typeset edition, on which Cong Ellen Zhang's translations are based. These selected translations "aim to provide students and the general English-language reader with a representative sample of Hong's work" (p. xiii). Yijian zhi has been one of the richest sources for social, cultural, and religious historians of Song dynasty. As Zhang says in her introduction, "a large percentage of the Record stories, as can be seen when times and places are clearly marked in the text, occurred during Hong Mai's lifetime in the Southern Song, and feature the everyday lives of ordinary men and women in local societies" (p. xxxi). Zhang's selection contains a hundred stories, most of them appearing in English for the first time. Along with her introduction, Zhang's translations provide extremely useful source material for either surveys or upper-level Chinese history and religion courses. The introduction offers just enough background on the time period, the author, and the text, while the selections are the perfect length to serve as a weekly reading for an undergraduate course. The translations are fluent and accessible with footnotes that inform without overwhelming. The selection includes many stories that will be of particular interest to scholars of Chinese religion and the thematic guide in the appendix makes them easily discoverable for both students and scholars. Zhang begins her introduction by illustrating the usefulness of Yijian zhi for Song historians through the example of "Buddha Redresses an Old Injustice." In this short story of only 241 words, we see how a vicious karmic cycle involving two ordinary people—an urban resident and a soldier—was resolved in South China soon after the Jin sack of the Song capital Kaifeng and North China (pp. xi–xii). In addition to well-researched subjects—local temples and cults, exorcism and ritual masters, medical and healing practices, and the like—Zhang's translations shed light on many folk beliefs and practices such as karmic retribution, miraculous dreams and spiritual journeys, testimonies about the netherworld and the divine justice system, geomancy of ancestral tombs, ubiquitous ghosts and spirits, and interactions between the living and the dead. We also see in quite a few stories that Buddhist temples often provided space for unburied coffins or temporary graves during this time. Zhang's selections also reflect her own research interests: many stories deal with travel and issues of filial piety. Since this volume is a part of Hackett Publishing's translation series, the introduction is kept brief. In the remainder of this review I shall offer some thoughts and extra information that readers of this volume may find useful, raise a few questions about Yijian zhi in general that I believe bear further consideration and research, and highlight a few stories translated in this volume that I find particularly interesting. Given the extreme diversity—in both content and style—of the stories in Yijian zhi, I would be somewhat cautious of describing any selection as "representative." We should keep in mind that more than half of the Yijian zhi accounts have been lost, that the compilation and publication of Yijian zhi took place in installments over four decades, and that the issue of authorship is not a straightforward one. There is little doubt that Hong Mai was the compiler of all the installments, but he relied heavily on contemporary informants. In quite a few cases [End Page 247] an entire...

Literate Shamanism: The Priests Called Then among the Tày in Guangxi and Northern Vietnam

Then is the designation in Vietnamese and Tày given to shamanic practitioners of the Tày ethnicity, who reside mainly in the northern provinces of Vietnam. Scholars are long aware that the predominantly female spirit mediums among the Zhuang in Guangxi, variously called mehmoed or mehgimq, had a ritual repertoire which included shamanic journeys up to the sky as their essential element. The ritual songs of the mehmoed are orally transmitted, unlike the rituals of male religious practitioners in Guangxi such as Taoist priests, Ritual Masters, and mogong, all of which are text-based. One was led rather easily to posit a dichotomy in which male performers had texts, and female performers had repertoires which were orally transmitted. This division also seemed to hold true for certain seasonal song genres, at least in Guangxi. For that matter, shamanic traditions cross-culturally are seen as predominantly or exclusively oral traditions. Recent research among the Tày-speaking communities in northern Vietnam has confounded this tidy picture. Religious practitioners among the Tày include the Pụt, who in many cases have texts which incorporate segments of shamanic sky journeys and may be either male or female; and the Then, also both male and female, who have extensive repertoires of shamanic rituals which are performed and transmitted textually. The Then have a performance style that is recognisably based on shamanic journeying, but elaborated as a form of art song, complete with instrumental accompaniment (two- or three-stringed lutes), ritual dances, and flamboyant costumes. Apart from individual performances, there are large-scale rituals conducted by as many as a dozen priests. The present paper gives an overview of the practices and rituals of the Then, based on recent fieldwork in Vietnam and Guangxi, and discusses the implications these have for our conventional understandings of shamanism, literacy, gender, and the cultural geography of the border regions.

Javanese Conceptions and Socialisation of Death. Death Funerals as an Active Orientation of Time and Values

This article reflects on the Javanese view of death, based notably on first-hand accounts of ritual masters, their conceptions and ritual practices. Existing ethnographic literature on Javanese funerary rituals is largely descriptive and delves little into conceptual issues. A comparative analysis of the literature and first-hand data reveals that death must ultimately be understood in relation to the social action of ancestors called to be reborn or not. Considered from this angle, it is possible to define various types of action that do not lead to ancestralisation as well as define various categories of death. Ultimately, these categories induce the different types of action and social relations of the living. The perspective is notably based on Robert Hertz’s observations on funerary rites and the central role and unique configuration of second funerals in Java.

Chinese Buddhism in Catholic Philippines: Syncretism as Identity by Aristotle C. Dy, Sj

Reviewed by: Chinese Buddhism in Catholic Philippines: Syncretism as Identity by Aristotle C. Dy, Sj Clark L. Alejandrino ARISTOTLE C. DY, SJ Chinese Buddhism in Catholic Philippines: Syncretism as Identity Mandaluyong City: Anvil, 2015. 266 pages. The Jesuit priest Aristotle Dy, inspired by his exposure to a mixture of Buddhist and Catholic practices while growing up Chinese in the Philippines, decided to specialize on the study of religions at the School [End Page 107] of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he completed the PhD dissertation that produced the book under review. Conducting fieldwork in the thirty-seven temples that dot the small Buddhist landscape of the Philippine archipelago, Dy interviewed ritual masters (monks and nuns) and lay leaders and practitioners, collected and read liturgical texts and spells, and observed elite and popular levels of participation in various temple activities. Armed with rich ethnographic data, he has written an important book detailing Buddhism’s entry into and adaptations to a predominantly Catholic Philippines. These adaptations, open-ended mixtures of two or more religions in a dynamic process called syncretism, are sufficient to tell the story of Buddhism’s small-scale but continued success in penetrating and remaining relevant in the Philippine religious arena. This story is the book’s most important contribution to Philippine studies, where no major studies of local Chinese religious practices exist in English. Dy then could have chosen to reorganize his book to focus solely on this narrative. In what follows I outline the order by which I believe the book should be read to highlight the virtues of Dy’s contribution. Beginning with the short introduction, one should proceed to the first half (103–15) of chapter 3, “Buddhism as a Chinese Religion,” where there awaits a deft summary of a vast literature on Buddhist adaptation in China from the fourth to the thirteenth century that demonstrates how “unique Buddhist teachings evolved in China independently of India, and provided a direction for its later development among overseas Chinese” (106). The success of syncretism as a strategy of seeking acceptance serves as a valuable point of comparison when Buddhism later enters the Philippine Catholic setting. In China the Buddhist incorporation of Confucian filial piety into its teachings, for example, is mirrored in the Buddhist offering of prayer services in the Philippines on 2 November (All Souls’ Day) as a complement to traditional Chinese days for venerating the dead that usually falls on an April by lunar calendar reckoning (142). Dy’s thoughtful discussion (115–23) of monastic reforms during the Republican Period (1912–1949) in China and corresponding developments in Japanese- and later Guomindang-controlled Taiwan lays the context for the first half (21–39) of chapter 2, “Chinese Buddhism in the Philippines.” Dy first shows that Buddhist temple communities could only be established in the archipelago during the late nineteenth century when “there was declining interest in converting the Chinese” to Catholicism (22). He then goes on to map out the fascinating [End Page 108] twentieth-century transnational networks that brought monastics, nuns, and lay sisters called caigu from mother temples in Fujian and Taiwan to the Philippines and shows why they readily went beyond ritual to charitable work. Interestingly, in Dy’s dissertation the book’s chapter 3 is chapter 2 and vice versa, a more logical and chronological progression that leaves one puzzled with the decision to switch the chapters when the manuscript went to press. Chapter 4, “Scriptures and Devotions,” identifies the key texts, sutras, and spells that inform the liturgies and reveal the ritual concerns of both monastics and lay followers. As in China, predominant in the Philippines are funerary texts and prayers for the dead, which mark great concern for the afterlife, while those for the living lie mostly in the realm of averting disasters (xiaozai). Special attention is given to the popularity of the devotion to the bodhisattva Guanyin. Dy again is good at highlighting the transnational links between southern Fujian, the nearby island of Putuo (which Guanyin traditionally inhabited), and the Philippines. Due to their striking resemblance in appearance and character, Chinese and even Filipinos conflate Guanyin and the Virgin Mary, thereby providing a vivid example of...

Le culte des Trois Maîtres Immortels 三仙師 à l’ouest de la province du Fujian 福建 depuis le XIIe siècle

This essay examines the history of the cult of the Three Immortal Masters among whom two masters Huang and a master Xing, the most influential deified Daoist ritual masters since the twelfth century in the west of Fujian province, southeast China. This cult gave the opportunity for different social groups to express their understandings regarding “legitimacy.” The analysis focuses on the ways in which different groups have built the legitimacy of this cult. It is also observed in the analysis that the elements of this cult appeared gradually. It is a stratified development that has created today’s cult of the Three Immortal Masters.

The last of the Li: ritual texts and shifting ethnicities in Hainan

On Hainan, it is commonly believed that people who identify themselves as Han employ ritual masters (commonly known as daogong 道公) who use texts, while those who view themselves as Li employ the service of geba (no applicable Chinese characters) who do not. This paper argues that the use of Chinese ritual texts implies that the specialist possessing them belongs to a larger religious movement, while those specialists without texts emphasize their own powers as well as those of the masters who instructed them. At the same time, however, my historical and field research indicates that the use of texts has been spreading throughout the Five Finger Mountain region throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thereby prompting significant changes towards hybrid rituals and the denial of any Li connection. While the ethnic differentiation (minzu shibie 民族識別) campaigns beginning in the 1950s have promoted a sense of ethnic identity, the growing use of written texts indicates that Li ritual practices have been converging with those of the Han.

Spirit Possession: An Autonomous Field of Practice in the Burmese Buddhist Culture

The cult of the Thirty-Seven Lords is distinctively known for its practices of spirit possession although possession by spiritual agents may be found in other domains of Burmese Buddhist culture. What sets apart the practices observed in the cult of the Thirty Seven Lords is a form of individual and relocatable possession contrasting with traditional rituals linked to the locality and allowing for the professionalisation and the autonomisation of the ritual role of spirit mediums. Ceremonies of possession for the Thirty-Seven Lords mobilize communities of followers in which bonds of dependence with the nats are mediated by ritual masters, married to a nat , such bonds fashion these communities on the model of “clienteles” whose dominant authorizing principle is spirit possession. Spirit possession is what allows the cohesion of the spirit mediums practices that can be observed particularly during the festivals and can be said to constitue an autonomous ritual domain in the Burmese Buddhist culture.

虛靖天師傳說研究─筆記、小說與道經的綜合考察

Zhang Jixian, usually known as Heavenly Master XuJing, is a legendary Daoist in the Song and Yuan Dynasties. He can be seen as the key to the formation of authority of Dragon and Tiger Mountain, the sacred mountain of Daoism in Jiangxi Province, as the centre of the heavenly masters. Based on the studies by Koichi Matsumoto, Nikaido Yoshihiro and Wang Jianchuan, this paper aims to examine how the legendary figure of Heavenly Master Zhang is created and the authority of Dragon and Tiger Mountain is established through certain notebooks, stories and Taoist scriptures. The most renowned story of Master XuJing in Song Dynasty is about how he vanquishes a flood dragon with his powers. The archetypal story shows how a Heavenly Master is able to dispatch the gods and exorcise demons, and thus reinforces his religious influence over the masses. During Song and Yuan Dynasties, Heavenly Master Zhang is also celebrated as the chief ritual master of Thunder Magic and of Marshal Guan's Apotropaic rituals preserved in Daofahuiyuan（道法會元）. At the same time, enjoying the honors offered by the imperial court, this legendary figure gradually becomes an embodiment of religious and political authority. As Marshal Guan's rites grow more and more popular, the influence of Master XuJing on the common people grows deeper and deeper. Thus the hagiography and rites repeatedly reinforced the Master Zhang's images of proficient in magic, and formed the authority of Dragon and Tiger Mountain.

Confucian Rituals and Chinese Villagers: Ritual Change and Social Transformation in a Southeastern Chinese Community, 1368–1949 by Yonghua Liu (review)

source—the contributions to this volume are no exception. The undeniably valuable data from interviews presented in the various chapters is rarely tested against or supported by evidence from written primary sources. But due to the ever evolving nature and dynamic of contemporary Christian groups, information gathered from interviews alone, while captivating, is also quickly out of date. The book will be of enormous interest to all scholars of contemporary religion, who would like to gain a better understanding of how religion—in this case Chinese Christianity—and members of faith groups negotiate the complex relations with the state and secular society. What emerges from this volume is a complex patchwork where Christianity plays an important part in an individual’s or an ethnicity’s identity and their relation to the state and the many factors influencing this relationship. The increased visibility and confidence of Chinese Christians is a sign of the increasing plurality of Chinese society, yet there remain a number of tensions—some social, some cultural, and in rare cases political— between these churches as social groups and the different layers of the party state. These tensions are not necessarily any greater than the tensions between other social groups in contemporary China where citizens increasingly confidently exercise their right of assembly and association. GERDA WIELANDER University of Westminster, London YONGHUA LIU, Confucian Rituals and Chinese Villagers: Ritual Change and Social Transformation in a Southeastern Chinese Community, 1368–1949. Religion in Chinese Societies, vol. 6. Leiden: Brill, 2013. xv, 326 pp. J125, US$162 (hb). ISBN 978-90-04-25724-5 True to its title and subtitle, this book is in two parts: one of approximately 100 pages on village rituals and the ritual masters called lisheng 禮生, and another of roughly 270 pages on the creation of lineages and community institutions in the township of Sibao 四堡, Fujian 福建, in late imperial times. Sibao will be familiar to many readers as the rural printing center studied by Cynthia Brokaw, a place whose economy was based on the production and distribution of cheap books through much of southeastern China. The aim of the book is to show ‘‘the nature and impact of the Chinese villagers’ encounter with Confucian rituals and the major mechanisms that facilitated this cultural encounter,’’ and its argument is that ‘‘the promotion of Confucian rituals in the countryside greatly transformed rural social structures and local popular culture’’ (p. 4). After an introductory chapter, there are two chapters on the lisheng, one providing a quick overview of these important specialists and the other covering the rituals at which they officiated, which Liu persists throughout in calling Confucian or Neo-Confucian. Liu was able to collect or copy fifty lisheng manuals, which contained the texts they wrote out, recited, and burned at those rituals, plus a few other items. Nearly half the texts were used at funerals, while another two-fifths were used at sacrifices to gods or ancestors (Appendix 4). Judging by the three Liu translates, they were short and conventional (pp. 89–90). Some of the manuals contained a few ‘‘ritual formats’’ (yizhu 儀注), which were scripts for the performance of rituals. Though it appears they were quite short, BOOK REVIEWS 235 they are potentially of great interest and one wishes Liu had discussed them in more detail. (One example is translated on pp. 72–73.) Local ritual specialists who were neither Daoist priests nor Buddhist monks could be found in many parts of China in late imperial times, and are of high importance for our understanding of the attitudes and values of ordinary people. They have not been much studied by scholars in the US and Europe, and hence these chapters are most welcome. The next five chapters deal with the creation of a number of important interrelated social institutions in Sibao from mid-Ming on: lineages with corporate estates, the community compact (which actually was the organizational hub of a village alliance), the establishment of altars of the soil and of orphan souls, and temple construction. Taken together these comprise the ‘‘social transformation’’ of his subtitle. The chapter on the rise of large-scale lineages is the longest, and in fact the lineage was the dominant local institution...

Buddhist Traces in Song Daoism: A Case From Thunder-Rite (Leifa) Daoism

After the turn of the first millennium the Chinese religious landscape had developed to a degree that the production of hybrid Buddho-Daoist ritual texts was a widespread phenomenon. With the rise of a Daoist trend referred to as Thunder Rites (leifa 雷法), which matured during the mid- to late-Song 宋 Dynasty (960–1279) and did not solely pertain to any particular branch of Daoism, a new type of (often Buddho-Daoist) ritual practice had emerged, largely exorcistic in nature, that would eventually be incorporated into classical Daoist traditions. Practitioners of Thunder Rites were either members of the established Daoist orthodoxy or itinerant thaumaturges, referred to as ritual masters (fashi 法師). Buddhist Esoteric knowledge in the Song Dynasty was so wide-spread that it did not only find its way from “court to country”, but even back to court again—namely through Thunder Rite ritual masters like Wang Wenqing, who acted as the imperial preceptor of Emperor Huizong and in whose hybrid Buddho-Daoist productions of ritual texts the Buddhist traces had become almost invisible.

Taoist tradition, gentry culture, and local societies: The cult of Zougong at Sibao in western Fujian Province since the Song and Ming dynasties

Zougong, the most important local deity at Sibao, Tingzhou Prefecture, was worshipped by local villagers at least from the Yuan and the Ming dynasties on. The Zou lineages in the area regarded Zougong as their common ancestor. Existing literature usually identifies Zougong as Zou Yinglong, a zhuangyuan in the Southern Song Dynasty. However, such identification appeared only in the late Ming period when local elites of several Zou lineages consciously tried to unite and consolidate their lineages. Before that, Zougong was a mighty ritual master in a series of magic contest stories popular at Tingzhou, rather than a zhuangyuan. The change of his identity from ritual master to zhuangyuan was a result of convergence of Taoist tradition, gentry culture and local culture, which may be called “cultural hybridization,” rather than a simple process by which local culture gave way to gentry culture.

Le rôle de l'esprit môt (phi môt) chez les Taï Noirs du Viêt-nam et quelques techniques de guérison élémentaires

When healing illness, the Black Tai people of Vietnam use a wide range of treatments. In some cases they resort to shamanistic practices based on their beliefs about the môt spirit helpers which the author summarizes briefly before presenting the two kinds of healers who resort to them - the mo môt ritual masters and the male môt lao or female mot nhinh (mae môt) shamans - and describing their performances. Two other healing techniques have nothing to do with shamanism. The first one, phytotherapy, is the prerogative of women, and the secret magic formulae pronounced at the time of treatment are exclusively transmitted from mother to daughter. The second one, called "healing by hand" (au mu 'yd) is practiced only by men. This kind of treatment requires a high degree of concentration and makes use of the eyes, hands and feet of the healer to treat the patient. It is based on the knowledge of the four main networks of energy (si sai) at work in the human body, according to this Tai massage tradition.

Le saimon des Princes de la Terre à Monobe-Mura (Kōchi)

The saimon of the Princes of the Earth analyzed and translated in this article comes from a poor mountain village, Monobe-mura, on Tosa Island, in Kōchi prefecture, Kami district. It was chosen as the subject of an article honoring the memory of Anna Seidel because of its significance in the history of mythico-ritual representation in Japan. Coming probably from the time of the transition to the modern era (in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries), this text shows that the acceptance by the peasant elite of Chinese structural principles of cosmogony and political ideology proceeded hand in hand with an extraordinary wealth of mythico-ritual creativity. The text under consideration was apparently compiled by local ritual masters, tayū, who were inspired by the Japanese version of the legend of Pan K'ou (Banko) in which this figure was identified with the deity Dokkū of the ommyōdō and the god Kōjin, who occupies a central place in various religious currents emerging from medieval civilization. The original nature of this saimon lies in the way it presents a theory of ritual as the basis of the socio-cosmic order; (a) Pan K'ou and his five sons, as the King and Princes of the Earth, give shape to both space and time, especially the morphology of the chief's house and the kagura dances that recapitulate the history of the creation of Japan told in the saimon; (b) the ancient kagura pattern called that of the iwato-biraki, the "opening of the grotto," is given a new sense, with the hot/cold syndrome representing the yin/yang balance that controls solar energy, dividing the political and natural order; (c) the polarity between political chiefs and ritual masters, is presented as homologous to that between exoteric and esoteric practice, with the local priestly caste thus holding the keys to peace among men and among the five cosmic agents; (d) mastery of the teaching allows the achievement, by means of ritual, of the incarnation of the originally undifferentiated cosmic energy through the "royal" individual and the head of the agnatic family on the one hand, and, through its secret double, the guardian deity of esoterism on the other. Banko is the primordial model revealing this possibility, that is to say, the passage from chaos to a diacritical hierarchical order.