Just to follow up on my review of Margaret Chan’s Ritual is Theatre; Theatre is Ritual: if you’re interested in Asian martial arts, you should take a little while to watch the excerpts of Kickass Kung Fu on YouTube. It’s a BBC production presented by Chris Crudelli, which has been chopped up into short excerpts and posted on YouTube in a totally uncopyrightlicious manner – but it’s still good for the rest of us, who would otherwise never get to see it.
Chris speaks Mandarin and is an expert in a variety of martial arts. Some sections of Kickass Kung Fu veer away from the martial arts, however. In a couple of clips, he visits the ‘Vegetarian Festival’ in Thailand. This is actually a festival of the Chinese community, and is the same folk Daoist religion as Chan documents in Singapore, though with some different influences. Chan mentions it briefly; it got its name because many of the participants purify themselves for a couple of weeks beforehand, and avoid meat and alcohol.
It’s the same basic rite, though: gods possess the medium, and perform acts of mortification – which these clips show in some detail. What’s interesting is that the possessed mediums experience no pain, and don’t bleed. During the possession they are gods, not men, and gods can’t be hurt. It’s interesting that Haitian voudun is just the same; according to the literature, once a Haitian has been possessed by a loa, they can rub chopped chillies in their eyes, or drink potent alcohol, without effect.
The first clip shows men being possessed and going into a trance before being skewered, to Chris’ obvious horror. This is pretty graphic: you really, REALLY shouldn’t watch this if you’re squeamish.
The second is firewalking, over a foot-high pile of burning charcoal. At the beginning of this clip we see a couple of mediums in full regalia, looking like Chinese opera characters. The possessed mediums run across the charcoal without harm. The marshal of ceremonies is unhappy; he can see that Chris is not possessed, and tries to warn him away. Chris perseveres – and gets second-degree burns on the soles of his feet. (But heals mysteriously rapidly – perhaps because Chris is also an expert in qigong? Who knows…). Anyway, watch and enjoy, as the gods descend to earth.
[...] previously written a review of a book that studies this phenomenon in Singapore, as well as some video links of the same thing in Thailand. I think it’s gradually dying out in Singapore, unfortunately. [...]