Jim Algie Read online

  As a high-voltage fixture on the travel circuit, it is surprising that the festival has not become more shockproof. But Alan noted, “The reason all the tourists keep coming is that it hasn’t been compromised. The believers still think that the gods come to visit, so for them it’s real. There’s no pretense about it. The Taoist communities in Singapore and Malaysia have their own versions, but without any of the incredible feats. So those nationals will come to Phuket. There probably was such a festival in China once, but it has now disappeared. So many of the visitors come from different parts of China.” The ladies in the TAT office said that the local version of Taoist Lent has never been celebrated like this in China; the piercing rites are spiked with Hindu influences from the Thaipusam Festival.

  As popular as the Vegetarian Festival has become, there are still bastions of Chinese traditionalism and ‘demilitarised zones’ in the war-zone cacophony of exploding fireworks. Alan recommended the “old parts of Phuket city where there are some delightful parades and many of the older Chinese people come or sit outside their houses to watch”. Over the first few days of the festivities, the rituals of raising lanterns and praising the Emperor Gods are considerably more subdued, with not a drop of blood shed.

  On a culinary level, Taoist Lent is celebrated all over Thailand. Just look for the restaurants and food carts flying yellow pennants. Many of the usual Thai dishes, liberally spiced with chilli, basil leaves and lemongrass, are on offer, as well as Chinese fare. The only difference is that the meat has been replaced by chunks of tofu that have been marinated so they look and taste like chicken, beef and seafood.

  Some of the Taoist temples in the southern provinces of Phang-nga, Krabi and Trang celebrate the return of the Immortals, but only the capital of the latter province features any processions or feats of self-mortification.

  On Phuket, the ‘spirit warriors’ who stick to a meat-free diet, wear white clothes and abstain from alcohol and sex, claim to be possessed on and off throughout the festival by the same entity.

  “It’s quite surprising,” said Alan, “to see someone who works as a bank teller and suddenly they’re possessed and become this supernatural being for a short time. You do see people around with scarred cheeks, but it’s amazing how quickly they heal. It depends on the individual of course, but some of the warriors are back leading normal lives the next day with only a couple of bandages on their cheeks.”

  For Western visitors, this is the most baffling part of Thailand’s extreme take on Taoist Lent. How can a person have both cheeks pierced with a sword and walk around for hours in the tropical heat and not wind up with hideous permanent scars? True believers claim that the gods who possess them, and the strict regimen of diet and asceticism, protect them. Most Westerners do not believe this.

  Peter Davidson, the director of International Services at Phuket International Hospital, is one of the disbelievers. In an article for the Phuket Post in 2008, he wrote, “The cheeks predominantly consist of soft tissue; mostly skin, fat and some muscle which are used for facial expressions and eating. There are no large blood vessels in the cheek area, however, like all areas of the face and head, there is a complex blood vessel network with abundant small vessels. Because of this anatomy of the cheek, it is unlikely that significant bleeding is present when the cheek is pierced. With piercing, a puncture wound is made, which typically bleeds less than a laceration or other type of wound. This, coupled with the anatomy of the cheek, could explain why bleeding is minimal. Over recent years it has been a requirement that a doctor be available at the temples where mah song are pierced, and it is not unusual for these doctors to have to perform some suturing and wound repair where the puncture or piercing practice elicits too much bleeding.”

  In his opinion, the fact that most of the participants are young men means that their wounds heal faster. Medical precautions have also diminished the high-risk stakes. All the men and women taking part are now required to have HIV checks before they get pierced, and the paramedics on hand at all the temples where the piercing is done wear gloves and sterilise the objects to be inserted. The main risk is that the wounds will get infected.

  Some of the feats the mah song perform are not as easy to explain. At night, the ‘entertainment’ includes demonstrations of walking through beds of glowing red coals—that are a good ten-metres

  long and 20-metres wide—in front of Chinese temples ablaze with shades of gold and scarlet, while some warriors scale ten-metre-high ladders runged with razorblades sharp enough to shave with. In 2009, one of the fire-walkers at the temple of Tharua fell face first onto the coals. In a flash, flames engulfed his white trousers and the traditional apron. Several spectators ran to his rescue. They dragged him to safety but not nearly quick enough to prevent serious burns that kept him in the hospital for weeks of treatments, followed by months of physiotherapy so he could learn how to walk again.

  “That man clearly did not have the spirits inside him,” said Alan Morison. “It should satisfy the skeptics that these ‘warriors’ are doing some incredible things.”

  Of all the spirit mediums Alan has met or interviewed, one man stands out. “He’s a Buddhist but becomes possessed by the spirit of a Muslim religious leader who was highly respected in that area. He has Taoist and Muslim shrines in his house. A Thai woman I know regularly consults him as a kind of oracle, often for big decisions she wants to make, such as the best time to buy a new car. She’s not an ignorant or superstitious woman. Nor are the other people who go to see him. They respect his wisdom. It’s really quite strange to see this man who only speaks Thai go into trances where he speaks Arabic and recites lines from the Koran.”

  Allan was right about that. Watching the devotees go into trances before they are pierced is strange. At first, they start twitching and shaking their heads, then they approach the metal altar in the temple, banging on it with their fists and making high-pitched noises. As they begin to shake more violently, one or more of their minders sneaks up from behind to tie on a special smock emblazoned with Chinese dragons and yin-yang symbols. But the devotees’ Thai name mah song (‘entranced horses’) is telling—the gods are said to ride them like horses. That is not unique to Thailand. The dancers in the white magic rites of Haitian vodou—as opposed to the black magic of Hollywood voodoo—were captured undergoing similar transformations by filmmaker and ethnographer Maya Derin in her riveting book and documentary, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti.

  Many Thai ceremonies revolve around men and women being possessed, like the underground gatherings of spirit mediums and the now infamous Tattoo Festival at Wat Bang Phra, near the town of Nakhon Chaisri. There, a motley crew of gangsters and blue-collar workers are taken over by the animal deities inked on their skin—roaring like tigers, hopping around like monkeys and snaking across the dirt on their bellies.

  In Phuket, some of the wildest spectacles take place on the last night of the festival during the ‘Farewell to the Gods’ ceremony, when the backstreets of the island’s capital are cloaked in darkness and illuminated only by a few streetlamps, the golden glow of candles on makeshift shrines and firecrackers exploding everywhere. (Bring earplugs and flame-retardant headgear is the best travel advice.) Overhead, the sky was an aurora borealis of pyrotechnics, the smithereens fading as they fizzle out and fall. At the same time, the warriors—unpierced and carrying black flags emblazoned with sacred incantations that are supposed to protect them, and cracking whips to drive away malevolent spirits—strode through the streets with their entourages. Behind them came men carrying sedan chairs that housed icons of the Taoist divinities so they could be released back into the sea, as standard-bearers hoisted golden dragons on poles.

  Watching Veerawat, the middle-aged ‘ghost doctor’, dancing under a streetlamp while teenagers threw lit firecrackers at his bare feet, was mesmerising. Balancing on one foot like a Thai classical dancer while holding the black flag aloft, he slowly and gracefully arced in a circle. An older Chinese man lowe
red a string of firecrackers on a pole just above the warrior’s head. A single spark set off a chain reaction of big bangs. One after another, the firecrackers exploded in his face. He did not flinch or even blink; and kept spinning around in a circle like a whirling dervish. This was one of the most incredible acts of endurance and grace under pressure that I’ve ever witnessed. Whether he was actually possessed by a higher power, or whether it was his faith that gave him the power to withstand such a deafening bombardment, it did not really matter. Either way, it was an athletic and artistic feat of Olympian proportions. With that kind of willpower and indifference to pain, what other achievements arepossible?

  On this night, Veerawat’s entourage consisted of Ray the computer programmer and two Chicago punk rock girls who were tattooed and pierced from ankles to eyebrows. Ray, who has tattoos of Isis, Osiris and John Lennon to mark turning points in his life and a Prince Albert piercing in his nether regions, said, “Kelly and I went to this ‘Spirit and Flesh’ workshop run by Fakir Musafar, where you go through ecstatic states of shamanism through rituals of body modification and piercing. We had all sorts of trippy visions and revelations. But it was more like, rising above the pain and purifying yourself, finding something bigger and better—kind of like this festival.”

  Fakir Musafar, the man who coined the term ‘modern primitives’ and who, at the age of 79, still runs his own body-piercing studio, explained during one of his lectures, “Intense physical sensations create focus which gives one the ability to do things in life that you couldn’t do with unfocused attention.”

  Ask any virtuosic musician or martial arts expert and they’ll tell you much the same thing.

  Unhurt and unfazed by all the pyrotechnics, the modern-day shaman strode down the street like a warrior going into battle. His entourage of three young punks—who were on a spiritual and psychological mission to transcend suffering and rise above middle-class mediocrity through this ancient and arcane wisdom—scurried to catch up with a Thai man old enough to be their grandfather.

  In a way, that’s exactly who he was.

  Oral Hexes and Shock Airwaves

  The radio show’s first caller began his story:

  “The owner of a company that screens movies at temple fairs and outdoor festivals received a phone call from a man named Vinai to show ghost films at a Buddhist temple fair near Korat. When he arrived, the owner met Vinai, who asked him to screen the movies behind the temple. While the films were playing that night for an audience of 50 or 60 people, the projectionist noticed some women in really old-fashioned clothes and wondered why they were dressed that way. That night, the projectionist slept at the temple. The monks woke him up the next morning, asking why he’d shown films behind the temple—no one had asked him to do so. The monks were perturbed because some people had died under mysterious circumstances nearby. So the projectionist told them about Vinai. The old mortician at the temple, who prepared the bodies for cremation, then showed the projectionist a memorial plaque for a dead man named Vinai...”

  And so began another eerie evening of ghost stories on one of Thailand’s most popular radio shows—‘Shock Radio’ on 102 FM. Hosted by Kapol ‘Pong’ Thongplub from the witching hour until 3am every Saturday and Sunday, the programme mostly involves callers sharing tales of the supernatural which they’ve personally experienced, or heard from friends and family members.

  Most of the stories deal with traditional Thai spectres such as phi pop—a supernatural parasite that possesses people—and phi kraseu (‘filth ghost’), the villainess in many Thai horror movies. This ghoul, which flies around rice fields at night, has a hideous female face and a flashing green or red light in its head, while its body consists of dangling intestines. Its staple diet is blood, human excrement and the entrails, placentas and foetuses of pregnant women.

  Since its first broadcast in 1992, the programme has built up an audience of more than 100,000 listeners per night. Before allowing callers on the air, Pong and his staff first screen the calls. Although there is a long tradition in Thailand of comedic ghost movies starring such satirical phantoms as ‘Miss Sexy Ghost’ and ‘Miss Universe Ghost’, the Shock Radio programmers are only interested in the hell-and-hair-raising tales. Listeners sometimes call in with anecdotes about aliens and paranormal phenomena, but mostly they tell spectral stories from all over Thailand.

  One of the most repeated tales has become an urban legend around the country’s universities. “Two students are roommates, and one of them goes out at night to buy some food,” shock-jock Pong told me. “He ends up getting cut in half by some psychopath, but his ghost feels guilty about not bringing back the food, so he goes back home. The ghost’s roommate answers the door and sees his dead friend’s upper torso floating there holding a bag of noodles for him.”

  Such tales, far-fetched as they seem, say a lot about the Thai sense of friendship, love of food and especially their faith in the spirit realm. As a matter of conjecture, Pong reckons that about 80 per cent of Thai people, particularly in rural areas, believe in the supernatural. One Thai friend, when asked about this, said many locals are unsure about the supernatural but, hedging their bets, are unwilling to say they are disbelievers.

  The radio programme is also helping to keep the spirit of oral storytelling alive in Thailand. This is an age-old tradition that mostly relies on tales of the supernatural. In turn, this tradition has spawned countless comic books known as phi saam baht (‘three-baht ghost stories’, the Thai equivalent of the ‘penny dreadful’), and a lot of music, from northeastern folk tunes to indie rock. Vasit Mukdavijitr, one of Thailand’s most influential underground rockers, is a regular listener of Shock Radio. Some of his strange experiences on the island of Koh Chang inspired the creepy ballad ‘Death Star’ he wrote for Daytripper’s second album, Pop Music.

  “I was walking along this dark beach with my girlfriend when these ghostly hands appeared out of nowhere and, I don’t remember this, but my girlfriend said I freaked out and tried to attack her. But I don’t know for sure. I was kind of drunk that night.”

  Later in their bungalow, his girlfriend saw ‘strange colourful shapes appear’ just as the singer himself was spooked by a huge, seven-legged spider crawling up the wall. “My auntie told me that seven-legged spiders are signs of the Buddhist devil,” said Vasit.

  In addition to contributing a few classics to the growing genre of Asian horror—such as Nang Nak and the original version of The Eye (partly set and shot in Thailand by Hong Kong brothers Danny and Oxide Pang)—the Thai pantheon of the supernatural was also director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s main muse. In 2010, he became the first Thai to ever win the world’s most coveted film award: the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. A profound meditation on science and reincarnation, cinema and mortality, and love and time travel, Loong Boonmee Raluek Chat (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) is a witch’s cauldron that boils over with surreal and supernatural elements such as scarlet-eyed monkey phantoms and a scene between a lonesome princess and a libidinous catfish whose whiskers tickle her fantasies. In his acceptance speech at Cannes, the director thanked the “all the ghosts and spirits of Thailand. They make it possible for me to be here.” The Jury Director, Tim Burton, called the film “a beautiful strange dream that you don’t see much of anymore”.

  Some of the stories aired on Shock FM are just as bizarre. The callers are anywhere from seven to 75 years old. But the majority are teenagers. For many college students, the show is a thrilling diversion from late-night studying. Anchana recalled how, in her student nursing days, the students in her faculty played pranks on each other based on stories they’d heard on Shock Radio.

  “A friend and I switched off the lights in a lab where some of the students were studying, and where they had dead babies floating in jars. We put surgeons’ masks over our faces, pulled our hair down over our eyes, and shuffled around the room like zombies, moaning, ‘Give us our children back.’ The other students started screa
ming. But after we switched the lights on, we saw that the babies were all floating upside down—completely the opposite of how they usually were. Playing jokes like that is bad luck.”

  Chulalongkorn University is Thailand’s oldest and most venerable institution of higher learning. Consistently ranked in the top 20 of all Asian universities for its research facilities and international programmes, the institution has, over the course of a century, produced influential statesmen, award-winning scientists and great artists, authors and tycoons. In the Faculty of Science, however, freshman students are advised not to use the front stairway in the White Building (the faculty’s oldest structure), because corpses once used for studying medicine used to be buried there. In the Faculty of Political Science, the main icon which students and staff pray to is the Black Tiger God. Freshmen students should not have their photos taken with the statue of the ‘Serpent King’ (Phaya Nak) from Buddhist lore in the Faculty of Art, for fear they may not graduate. Conversely, graduating students are urged to get their photos taken at this auspicious place.

  These strange beliefs and superstitions are not secrets whispered among the students and faculty. No, they are all included in an official history book on the university that I edited for them in 2010.

  Among the younger generation, old traditions may be dying a slow death, but their devotion to animism is very much alive. One of my former colleagues, Lek, a 25-year-old woman with a dyed-red bob, told me, “I’m not going to celebrate the Loy Krathong festival this year by putting a banana-leaf float in the water, but by floating my brain in alcohol.” Then the smile faded and she said more seriously, “But I always pray to the ‘Goddess of Water’ before I go swimming or I might have an accident.”