Chinese shamanism

What it is

Chinese shamanism is the home-grown spirit-calling tradition of China, centred on the wu: a man or woman who stands between the human world and the powers behind all things. Practitioners reach those powers through dancing and trance, and the craft sits at the root of Chinese folk religion. Shang kings used two roads to their ancestors: the ecstatic wu way, and a plainer one through oracle bones. The tradition fed early Taoism, which grew around the pursuit of long life and the xian ideal, a holy man of the mountains. Ritual masters active now are sometimes called wu by outsiders, though most of their orders decline the label. In the north-east the practice took its own path, blending Han religion with the rites of Tungusic peoples such as the Manchu.

Where it comes from

The tradition's oldest traces tie it to Neolithic cultures such as the Hongshan. The word wu enters the record under the Shang dynasty, around 1600 to 1046 BCE, when practitioners could be of either sex. Under the Zhou, nature gods and Heaven rose while wu kept a place in royal ceremony. Confucian thinkers later dismissed ecstatic rites as unruly, and the wu drifted to the margins, surviving in local custom. The state of Chu showed a marked love of these practices, visible in its poetry and lacquerwork. Manchu rulers brought Tungusic rites to the throne in 1644 and ran court shamanism until 1912. After a twentieth-century eclipse, spirit mediums surfaced again from the 1980s, chiefly in the countryside.

How it is done

The wu works as a go-between. Dance and trance carry the practitioner into contact with spirits, gods and the dead, a role performed for courts as much as for villages. Shang China also read oracle bones, a more methodical channel to the ancestors that stood beside the ecstatic one. In old Tibet, priests drummed and danced before a campaign, cast divinations for the outcome, and blessed the army's gear. North-eastern shamans hold rites such as the moon drum dance and chūmǎxiān, 'riding for the immortals', for their communities. Qing court ceremonies took place at official shrines and inside palace women's quarters, led for the most part by professional women.

Tools and materials

Its instruments are few: a drum to beat, a dance to move by, and the trance itself. Shang royalty added oracle bones, inscribed and read for replies from the ancestors. Manchu practice built tangse, purpose-built shrines, and worked from a printed code of rites under the Qing. The written sign for wu in Bronze script, some researchers note, looks much like a heraldic cross long used as an emblem of the magus.

What it is for

Its central aim is contact: with deified ancestors, nature powers, Heaven and the dead. Kings sought ancestral backing for rule, and Shang rulers kept both the trance road and oracle bones for it. In Tibet priests divined for omens of victory, prayed for the war gods' favour and steadied soldiers' nerves with blessed equipment, ceremonies the royal family endorsed. North-eastern shamans serve local communities and circles of believers with rites for their needs. Taoism, an offshoot, turned the same soil toward seeking long life and the xian state. Disasters in early Tibet were read as heaven's warnings, which priests answered with ceremony.

Who does it

The Shang wu could be a man or a woman. By the late Zhou the word had narrowed to women, with xi reserved for male practitioners, and everyday speech kept a shelf of terms: nanwu for men, and nüwu, wunü, wupo and wuyu for women. Tongji, literally 'youth diviner', acts as a near-synonym for the spirit-medium. Qing court ceremony was staffed largely by professional women. Tibetan priests held recognised religious posts and even marched with armies. Modern ritual masters are tagged wu mostly by outsiders; their own orders rarely use the name, and today's mediums work largely in villages.

Peoples and places

Han China holds the tradition at its core, but each region shapes it differently. The north-east stands apart: there Han religion mingled with Tungusic practice, Manchu shamanism above all, producing rites unlike those of the centre and south. Chu, a Spring and Autumn state, prized wu practices so highly that its poetry, calligraphy and lacquerware carry mythic figures absent from neighbouring states' relics. Manchu rule transplanted Tungusic court shamanism to Beijing, where its secrecy intrigued city residents; Mongols and Han were barred from attending. Early Tibet ran a related system of nature and ancestor worship through priestly intermediaries, strongest on the harsh plateau, until Buddhism displaced it.

What people believe

Shang religion revolved around the ancestors. Its great gods were not forces of nature on the Sumerian pattern but virtuous humans made divine: royal forebears titled di, above them Shangdi, the Highest Lord, linked with the dragon Kui, emblem of universal qi, the breath-power of things. Sun, moon, stars, winds and clouds were taken as filled with divine energy, while the earth received worship as She or Tu. The Zhou, a farming people, tipped the balance toward nature gods and set Tian, Heaven, beside Di, Earth, as a paired whole. In Tibet, misfortune was read as heaven's rebuke, and spirits of the wild answered priestly summons.

When it is done

Much of the record is tied to state ceremony. Shang and Zhou rulers staged rites within the framework of government, and wu served in them. Tibetan priests held a grand prayer gathering before each military expedition. Qing emperors kept shamanic ceremonies running at the Beijing shrine and in the palace's women's quarters right up to the dynasty's end in 1912. After decades in which such practice vanished from public view, mediums have worked openly again in the countryside since the 1980s.

How scholars and sceptics see it

Researchers dispute the label itself. 'Shamanism' descends from an Evenki word for a Siberian ritual specialist, and while some scholars accept it as a frame for early Chinese ceremonies, others warn that a Western category may hide what was distinct in China, since the wu's role shifted so much across dynasties that it outgrows any tight definition. On the word's roots, Berthold Laufer linked wu with Turkic bögü and a Tibetan term for sorcerer. Coblin proposed a shared Sino-Tibetan root behind wu and the Tibetan 'ba'-po and 'ba'-mo of Bön. Schuessler weighed cognates meaning 'to dance' and 'mother', plus a borrowing from an Iranian word for the magi, which Mair defended with archaeological and linguistic evidence.

Compare and confuse

It is easily blended with its relatives. Taoism grew partly out of it, so the two overlap historically. Modern Chinese separates native wu from the Siberian saman and from shamen, a term for Indian wandering monks. The Korean mu of Muism shares its root. Priests of the Zhuang Shigong tradition, its bu and mo, and the bimo clergy of the Yi faith are drawn into the same etymological web. Bon, though not classical shamanism, keeps features such as spirit-summoning, healing and divination.

Law and persecution

Rulers both sponsored and fettered it. Hong Taiji put shamanic rites to work for the state and barred subjects from raising new shrines. The Qianlong emperor, worried the customs were dying out, had a Shamanic Code compiled in 1747 and handed to Bannermen, while forbidding Mongols and Han to attend its ceremonies, though how thoroughly it took hold remains unclear. A French Jesuit, Joseph-Marie Amiot, brought the code to European notice in 1773. Neo-Confucian opinion had long scored the practice as untutored and disorderly. Under Maoist rule, religious rites left public spaces altogether. In eighth-century Tibet the court withdrew recognition from Bon priests, pushing their rites into remote districts or Buddhist shapes.

Today

The craft still breathes. Since the 1980s, spirit-mediums have returned to view, above all in rural China, after the long Maoist freeze. Contemporary ritual masters rarely claim the wu name for themselves even when outsiders apply it, a sign of how the term has drifted from its old court standing. In the north-east, shamans continue serving local communities and circles of believers, keeping rites such as the moon drum dance alive.

Questions people ask about Chinese shamanism

Good reading and sources

• Chinese shamanism on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• Wikidata recordOpen data