Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Focussing on the contrasting cosmologies, ritual and material cultures that have come to dominance in Singapore and Taiwan, this paper compares two varieties of healing rituals. The first was performed by a spirit medium (tang-ki) in Singapore who prepares ‘medicines’ comprised of items collected at night from Singapore’s largest ceremony to cure a devotee of leukaemia thereby ‘enlisting the dead to cure the living’. The second focusses on a twelve-day lingji medicine festival held in Taiwan ‘enlisting the living’ to cure the souls of the dead to reduce conflict in the contemporary world. The research methodology was participatory in all rituals, and the paper includes discussions with the Hell deity possessing his tang-ki in Singapore, and with lingji mediums before and after healing rituals performed during the festival. As until perhaps forty years ago the two religious landscapes were essentially analogous, the purpose of the paper is to illustrate how two diametrically opposed cosmologies and attached ritual traditions have evolved and are enacted in Chinese vernacular tradition in the two locations.