In this article I will try to survey both secondary and primary sources, providing a simple historical overview of female shamans, diviners and spirit mediums in China. The terminology, both in Chinese and in English, can be confusing. The term ‘divination’, as used in secondary literature, mostly describes the activities of prognostication of elite males. Women are present, but are a minority, and understood to be fairly irrelevant. In spirit-inspired forms of divination, like shamanism and spirit mediumship, on the other hand, women are not only present but widely disseminated across several practices and audiences, and actively engaged. My approach is broad and tries to encompass all of the above practices, foregrounding women’s activities, highlighting similarities over time but also differences.
As is often the case when looking at the activities of women, however, we are constrained by access to texts.[1] Received texts from imperial China were written and published by elites, who did not represent the majority of the Chinese population, male or female. Further, Chinese elites did not generally mention women in their writings, except possibly for curious incidents, for criticism or for praise in the context of Confucian virtues. Women themselves often were not literate enough to write about their own activities, which, if they were recorded, were in fact narrated by their husbands, fathers, sons, with a specific lens. So how is it possible to explore female centric religious activities, or put women and their repertoires of practices at the center? To mine historical sources for information on women is, in Ellen Widmer’s words, ‘to ask them to do something they were not set up to do’.[2]
[1] Stephan Kory, ‘Presence in Variety’, for medieval China and Lisa Raphals, ‘How the History of Women in Early China’, pp. 36–59, for early China.
[2] Ellen Widmer, ‘Gazetteers and the Talented Women’, p.262. On this, see also Harriet Zurndorfer, ‘Women in Chinese Encyclopedias’.
In this article I will try to survey both secondary and primary sources, providing a simple historical overview of female shamans, diviners and spirit mediums in China. The terminology, both in Chinese and in English, can be confusing. The term ‘divination’, as used in secondary literature, mostly describes the activities of prognostication of elite males. Women are present, but are a minority, and understood to be fairly irrelevant. In spirit-inspired forms of divination, like shamanism and spirit mediumship, on the other hand, women are not only present but widely disseminated across several practices and audiences, and actively engaged. My approach is broad and tries to encompass all of the above practices, foregrounding women’s activities, highlighting similarities over time but also differences.