Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (17 page)

Voluntary and Involuntary Soul-Loss

Chinese believed that the soul could be separated from the body by
both voluntary and involuntary means. Communication with the dead
could involve either "soul-travel" (shamanism) or "spirit possession"
(mediumism). Soul-travel, in which the shaman sent her soul to the
nether regions to visit the dead, was considered a hazardous practice, to judge by stories of the occasional trouble shamans had in getting
their souls back.13 Such stories reveal a nagging anxiety that the soul
might not find its way back to its body, or that the body might
meanwhile be thought dead and consequently destroyed (related,
perhaps, to the fear of being thought dead while only asleep).14

Even more alarming, however, was the idea of involuntary soul-loss.
In addition to the "fright" or other trauma'' that might jar soul from
body, a soul might actually be stolen by either human or supernatural
agents. "Vengeance-seeking ghosts" or demons might be held respon-
sible.11i I)e Groot's Amoy informants told him of "a certain class of
mischievous spectres, who are fond of drawing the vital spirits out of
men." These demons are called tsou-ma t'ien-cheng (heavenly spirits
riding horses), or pan-t'ien hsiu-ts'ai (literary graduates living halfway
in the sky). A person who falls unconscious is taken to a priest (shihkung, Taoist exorcist) who will practice a rite called ch'iang ching-shen
(snatch the spirit) to recover the soul from "the invisible being" who
has stolen it." Soulstealing ghosts were known to lurk along roadsides
at night, and many were the tales of "wretches who, having been
accosted by such natural foes of man, were found dead on the roadside without the slightest wound or injury being visible: their souls
had simply been snatched out of them." Roadside privies were particularly favored by such demons, because it was there that "man is
so lonely and helpless.""' As if such invisible specters were not fearsome enough, evil men were also thought capable of soulstealing.
These sorcerers might write paper charms that worked on their
victims by contagious magic.1°

"Soul-calling" was employed, both as a death ritual and as a cure
for childhood illness. In the case of the recently dead (whether adult
or child), it expressed the survivors' unwillingness to accept the
finality of death and their affection for the departed: they would
cling to him and bring him back if they could. In the case of children,
I have already mentioned that temporary soul-loss (perhaps caused
by "fright") was blamed for various pathological symptoms. In such
instances, the parents resorted to the ritual of soul-calling. The ritual
was commonly called either chao-hun or chiao-hun, both meaning "to
call (or summon) the hun-soul." Recall that chiao-hun is the same term
as that used to describe soulstealing. Both devoted parent and malign
sorcerer "called" the soul-the one to rejoin it to the body, the other
to call it from the body.

Henri Dore observed late Ch'ing soul-calling rituals in Yangtze
Valley communities. Here is one from Anhwei:

["I-]he method employed in recalling the soul of 'a child is as follows: the
child's name is first mentioned, then the person adds "where are you
amusing yourself, come back home." Or thus "where were you frightened, return home" . . . If' for instance the child's name is Ngai-hsi,
little darling, the person will say: "little darling, where have you been
scared, where have you been amusing yourself? Come back home."
Another following behind, replies "he has returned." While they shout
to burst their sides, a person within the house places the clothes of the
deceased child on a broomstick, near the house or the door-way, and
watches attentively whether a leaf or a blade of grass has moved in the
vicinity, or whether an insect has been seen flitting by . . . any such
occurrence is a sign that the soul has returned.2'

That the ritual action of the murderous soulstealer can be
described in the same phraseology as that of the loving parent reveals
in it a special loathsomeness. As shown in Chapter 4, the language
of the Ch'ing Code indicates the peculiarly perverse character of sorcery: like the Black Mass of European demonology, it upended and
mocked the most common human rituals associated with orthodox
social life.

The fear of soul-loss grew from general assumptions about the
biodynamic power of sorcerers: their ability to cause harm by proxy,
giving life to inanimate matter by stealing the vitality of the living
from a distance. Because such biodynamic sorcery played a major
part in the panic of 1768, it is worth discussing briefly here. The
objects by which sorcerers exerted biodynamic power could be of
numerous sorts, but the commonest seem to have been paper mannikins (chih-jen) that were brought to life by incantations. The popular
stories of the "strange tales" sort are full of such paper men.

A Ming dynasty story tells of a sorcerer in Kwangtung named Li
who practiced "Prior-to-Heaven Magic Calculation," a kind of prognostication. He said he could enliven "paper cutouts of men and
horses, and of double-edged swords that could decapitate men." He
also had a technique that could restore the dead to life. Such an
accomplished magician was eventually recruited into a rebel band led
by White Lotus sectarians.2'

A Hupei literatus named Wu publicly ridiculed the powers of
Chang Ch'i-shen, a highly respected local sorcerer, who was thought
to be able to steal men's souls. Expecting Chang's revenge, Wu armed
himself with a copy of the ancient divination manual, The Classic of
Changes (L-thing), and sat up that night waiting.22 An armored demon
burst into the room and attacked him, but when Wu smote it with
the book it promptly collapsed upon the ground. Wu saw there only a paper mannikin, which he inserted between the pages of the book.
Next, two dark-faced goblins rushed in and were similarly disposed
of. Shortly a tearful woman appeared at the door, claimed to be the
wife of the sorcerer, and begged Wu to release her husband and
sons, whose souls had entered the paper mannikins. There now
remained at her home only three corpses, she wailed, which would
not be revived once the cock had crowed. Wu scolded her, saying
that she and her family had done enough damage and deserved their
fate. However, out of pity he gave her back one mannikin. The next
morning he learned that sorcerer Chang and his elder son had died,
leaving only the younger son alive.23

A soul-calling ritual for a dead child.

The universal fear of'paper mannikins as sorcerer's agents is surely
associated with the common use of paper figures (of servants, horses,
houses, tools, and other useful items) in funeral rites. De Groot relates
that in Amoy, representations of human figures were used to inflict
harm on one's enemies by sorcery,

mostly very roughly made of' two bamboo splinters fastened together
crosswise, on one side of which is pasted some paper supposed to
represent a human body. They are not larger than a hand, and those
of men are distinguished from those of women by two shreds of paper,
said to be boots. They are called "t'oe sin" [Mandarin: t'i-shen], "substitutes or surrogates of it person," and may he had, for a cash or so a
piece in every shop where paper articles are made and sold for sacrifice
to the dead and the gods, for they are also burnt as slaves for the (lead
in the other world.21

From mannikins used for transmittal to the shadow world for the
good of the dead, to mannikins used as a conduit for magical evil
toward the enemies they represent, to mannikins that may be used
by others to harm oneself: evidently these connections were readily
made. The use of "parts of the body and clothing" of the intended
victim was another way of transmitting harm by biodynamic sorcery.25
Biodynamic powers could also be acquired by the symbolic use of
parts of human bodies: "The instrument of the sorcerer is a human
soul, or some portion of it, obtained by appropriating certain parts
of the body of a living person, but especially such organs as are
deemed to be more especially impregnated with his mental or vital
power. An image is then provided for his soul to settle in, and the
latter totally subdued by the sorcerer to his will by charms and
spells."26

Hair and the Evil Arts

As we observed in the sorcery prohibitions of the criminal code,
biodynamic sorcery may have evoked both the Confucian horror of
bodily mutilation and the culturally deeper horror of cannibalism.
In any event, soulstealers' use of human hairs to extract soul-force
and then transmit this force to paper cutouts of men and horses were
magical practices well rooted in the popular mind. The same acts
(extracting soul-force and using it to enhance one's power) were
attributed to the masons of Te-ch'ing.

A properly trained sorcerer could use a victim's hair as a medium
for extracting his soul even when the victiim was a stranger-as was
indeed the case with most of the soulstealing we encounter in 1768.
There was no need to know such personal facts as the victim's name
or his birth-signs. A Ming Dynasty novel relates the story of a certain
monk who was born from an egg, and whose birth-signs down to the
day and hour were therefore uncertain. An aspiring sorcerer hoped
to use this "egg-monk" as the unwitting victim of a soulstealing experiment. His master assured him that, with his technique, it was not
necessary to know the monk's birth-signs. "If you lack his birth-signs,
you just need to get a piece of his underwear, along with some of his
hair or fingernails," and recite over them the necessary spells.27 If
such items would do the trick, then perhaps even the victim's name
might be dispensed with. A sorcerer of one's own community-a
kinsman or neighbor-who knew one's name or birth-signs could
inflict harm without the intermediacy of a personal object. This is
what was attempted by peasant Shen Shih-liang (of Chapter i), who
wrote the names of his detested nephews upon paper slips for mason
Wu to pound atop bridge pilings, and by the murderous Taoist of
Ch'ang-chih, who enchanted his victim by discovering her birth-signs.
But the outsider, the stranger-sorcerer, had to do his dirty work
without such intimate knowledge. Here was the point of hair- and
lapel-clipping: it placed one at the mercy of complete strangers. The
notion that a sorcerer could enchant the inanimate ejecta or clothing
of an unknown victim was the natural complement of a fear of
strangers.

That hair has magical power is believed in many cultures. I suggested, in Chapter 3, some reasons why the Manchu tonsure may
have been so stubbornly resisted by Chinese in the wake of the
conquest. Here the same question arises in the context of sorcery:
what was the connection among hair, power, and death? Edmund Leach's suggestion that people subconsciously associate the hair with
genitalia seems to me over-specific, given the range of ethnographic
evidence on the subject.18 I prefer the more general formula that he
attributes to "older anthropologists" such as Frazer, to the effect that
"ritual hair symbolizes some kind of metaphysical abstraction-fertility, soul-stuff, personal power."`"' Evidence from Punjabi culture
shows that hair is used as an implement in sorcery precisely because
it absorbs and stores fertility: a barren woman may clip hair from
the head of a first-born child to cause him to be reborn in her own
womb. The long, matted hair of a holy man (sadhu) is particularly
prized because it has stored up so much fertility power (from the
prolonged sexual abstinence of its wearer).i0 The power of hair to
absorb and store spiritual power is certainly visible in Chinese evidence. In Cantonese funerals, hair seems to be an absorber of fertility-laden spiritual essences: married daughters and daughters-inlaw of the deceased "are expected to rub their unbound hair against
the coffin just prior to its removal from the village." James L. Watson
believes that this intentional absorption of death pollution is thought
to enhance fertility and lineage continuity, almost as if the soul of the
deceased were reentering the lineage through the women's hair."
The soulstealing affair continually calls attention to the importance
of hair in the lives of monks, and not only in the tonsure ceremony
where they lose it. One reason monks were so often found carrying
hair was that tonsure-masters commonly kept some hair of their
disciples (those they had shaven and whose monastic education they
were responsible for). But apparently not only intergenerational ties
were served by this retention of hair. Monks were known to exchange
such hair with one another along the road in order to "link destinies"
(chieh-yuan), perhaps to broaden the variety (and hence the potency?)
of soul-force one was carrying and thereby reinforce one's links to
the whole sangha or body of monks.32

Sorcery Prophylaxis

The soulstealing crisis of 1 768 was marked by the frantic efforts of
ordinary people to counter the baleful effects of sorcery, whether by
lynching suspected sorcerers or by employing magical remedies.
Magic could quash magic, as shown by the doughty Hupei literatus
who smote demons with The Classic of Changes. Indeed, premodern
China (and today's China to an extent we do not know) was an arena
in which supernatural harm and supernatural remedies were arrayed in grim and deadly battle. Mankind was, in de Groot's words,
"engaged every day in a restless defensive and offensive war" against
malevolent spirits.~° In this war there were, of course, professionals:
the ritual specialists who conducted exorcisms and funerals and prescribed the geomantic alignment of buildings. The foot soldiers, however, were laymen. They relied upon a vast written and unwritten
armory of spells, charms, and behavioral formulae for warding off
evil.:''