Andre > Recent Status Updates

wow, that aging emperor must have been quite paranoid if he thought his officials practiced gu to harm him.

There was a witchcraft scandal when emperor AI reigned? Never heard of that.

Spitting as part of an exorcist ritual ... hm, I wonder how long that lasted.

Interesting thought: Less written about witchcraft at court because court and officialdom were so seperated that they had n o interest and so did not write anything down. And too bad that the author had no sufficient competence in the Manchu language. So we won't get anything form the qing court.

So throught history chinese officials have become increasingly intolerant towards local religious culture and their attempts to sanitize local practive regularly led to the repression of specialists in communication with the dead or with the divine world.

So in 1368, the founder of the Ming dynasty was so paranoid that a leaking hall made him want to arrest and execute all the wood and mason craftsmen. Luckily one official had the courage to point out killing so many was ot a good idea, so possibly thousands were spared. Still some must have lost their lives anyhow

hm, I can see as to why the role of carpenters in placing protective amulets etc into a building could convince people that thereby they would be able to harm someone with their craft.

not sure what is more odd for me, this spell to undress women or the women hanging themselves because they were undressed. I mean is it really so bad to be undressed in front of your husband?

I wonder why by the 17th century persecution became less likely but in the 18th and 19th century there were several mass panics regarding witchcraft.

If the fear of witchcraft was so prevalent back then, I do wonder why so many magistrates felt so uneasy with the topic and did not want to persecute. Skepticism of the accuser probably did exist but was it so common or was there some other element?

So land disputes were a common element in witchcraft accusations. Apparently in the west as well, which is funny, in folktales that element is absent.

That story of a painter pinning needles in the heart of a painting of the girl he wants is something positive in chinese historiography? When she has heart pain, he approaches her confesses her feelings and when she follows him he removes the needles. That is totaly selfish and cruel.

So the author makes a case for cursing being a way to deal with societal stress, especially for women, because there were so little other outlets available for them.

burying dogs at a foundation of a building to ward off evil... again, another similarity to germany. Does it have to do with the job of guard dogs?

Claiming that only women/girls who were not of proper behavior could have been raped by the deities in the first place... yeah, that is typical victim blaming.

Financial wealth is not as much a cause of witchcraft accusations in german folktales as much as here, but it is there as well. And it seems to be a common trend to attribute the wealth of someone else to nefarious magical forces. This here even mentions sexual favors with the deity in question. And the deities being cold reminds me of the devil beings described as cold during intercourse. I wonder why.

that note left for a thief in Taipeh in a neighboorhood is hardly the same as cursing. The author seems to acknowledge that but still seems to make a connection.

So there was the stereotype that female witches are supposed to be especially beautiful and cleanly, although this does not seem to play a role in the actual selectiom of the actual target of accusations. And good that the author points out that Han people also had the stereotypes of ethnic minorities being sexually freer.

How prevalent were love rituals that they could easily be associated with witchcraft?

Camphor and Willow Deities... where have I heard that before? And apparently the famous terracotta army was a guard of the first emperor of the Qin against his northern enemies and/or vengeful ghosts of the enemy armies he and his generals had destroyed during war time.

So back in the warring states period figurines into graves were introduced so as to no longer requiring actual humans to accompany their masters into the grave. And only later when buddhism was introuced was the focus of religious worship towards anthropomorphized representations of deities came into being. Beginning in the third century CE.

Oh, so the written characters might be similar but not the language spoken.

so unlike in the west almost all archives from the imperial period have been lost and modern archives (e.g. from the 1950s which was rich in persecutions) are largely inaccessible to academic researchers. So there is only a tiny fraction left of what once existed. Hm, I really have to keep that in mind.

So not just wu, but gu is also a term that replaxed a variety of local terms from oral discourse that were lost ikn the process of translating spoken language vairants into written text and literary chinese. So we have no clue how it was called by local people in their language. I guess not surprising when we are talking about an empire.

So heteropractical (yao) activities were potentially punished with death by strangulation. heretic (xie) activities were punished by beheading.

So judical systems that reguire confession before someone can be sentences have a greater chance of triggering ongoing persecutions because the need for a pre-sentence confession inevitably leads to the practice of torture and the reinforcement of prejudice.

why am I not surprised that the term wu was a pejorative term by the literate elite to dimsiss different classes of ritual specialists who were often highly respected locally and the term was not widely used in common spoken discourse during most of imperial history? Were these literati really any good in regard to tell is what the general public thinks?

the author makes a good point when he argues that the incessant harping throughout the centuries about the importance of social harmony by moralistic authors of all ideological and religious backgrouns was and undoubtetly still is a direct result of ongoing social tensions, with social trust regularly breaking down and being generally more fragile than one would care to think.

His predictions for what the japanese could achieve in Formosa seem quite optimistic. I wonder why, because he mentioned several problems, but maybe he simply did not write it down.

a place where cold mountain water mixes with hot spring water... hm, sounds interesting.