Welcome everybody.

Good to see you all here.

Good to see everybody on Zoom, even though I don't know who you are.

I have the pleasure to give the first talk of the series on the IKJF.

My research topic at the center is this lecture that I will give.

It's both a lecture and a walkthrough to my plans for what I'm doing here, a walkthrough

of the sources I will be using.

The topic will also be on destiny and how it relates to this ritual.

So let's get started.

The ritual I will be talking about is called the tolongjian.

It's only one section of a much larger ritual and it's the final section.

And it's used to cast these dragons and slips or tablets on a mountain, often in a grotto,

on water, in a lake and buried in the ground.

And this is to the deities of heaven, earth and water.

This ritual itself is quite famous and the only translation of a Taoist ritual has been

made by Edward Chauvin already one century ago, in 1919, Le Gier des Dragons.

And that's why it's quite famous.

He had found all these epigraphic materials, mostly from his previous study on the Traysan,

this mountain in the east, as one of the sacred peaks.

And he related this to this ritual, which often appeared in these stele inscriptions.

Often these were the emperors commanding a Taoist to perform it in his name to the deities

of these mountains.

So we have a lot of epigraphic material, we have a lot of text, we have at least one translated

ritual.

But in the last few decades, many of these golden dragons and these Jade slips have been

found in archaeology.

They have been discovered from water from the lakes or found in grottoes, some have

been transmitted from previous times.

And now we know what they are.

And this research is like elaboration, continuation of Chauvin's research.

I want to first put this in a like an historical context.

Chauvin only discussed one ritual text.

I would highlight mostly this golden dragon and the Jade slips and their role in development

in history in Taoist ritual.

And the second part is on this archaeological finds.

Because this research is part of a larger project on faith and prognostication, I want

to link this ritual to the theme of destiny or fate.

Because basically Taoist ritual is a means to control your fate, to change your destiny,

something is wrong, you do a Taoist ritual and you can change it.

That's the basic assumption behind this.

And these are these tokens and little artifacts that are reminders of this previous ritual.

I don't think the ritual itself is performed in these days, or even in the Qing dynasty,

it stopped somewhere at the Ming dynasty.

So there are these mythological questions, how do you relate artifacts to ritual and

then in the end to destiny?

That's not usual.

How do you know somebody's destiny or questions or views of destiny from an artifact?

I will also try to give an explanation for that.

And I also have like a main thesis, what I think, what I want to prove in this research

project, which is that there's a type of Taoist assumption, a Taoist idea of destiny and how