Thank you Mercedes for a wonderful introduction and I should mention that the

Jian-Jing Guo grant I received together with Stefania Travagnin who is at

Groningen University so we're co-directing the project so that I want her to be

acknowledged too. I want to thank the EKGF here and Professor Lackner for

inviting me here and all of the colleagues that I've had the pleasure to

have lunch and dinners with and conversations. It's been a really

wonderful, wonderful experience for me and I'm going to be sad to leave in June

but I'll make the most of it until then. So today I want to talk about spirit

writing in Sichuan or the anxiety for the future and but the reason why I

changed the topic a little bit is that I realized that as most of us realize the

audience is heterogeneous. Some of you know a lot about spirit writing,

some of you know nothing about spirit writing and so it's I hope that I'll

give you an introduction and then possibly going in depth into my topic of

research which is spirit writing communities in Sichuan. So I want to

start by saying what is spirit writing. Spirit writing is a religious technique

that connects a person or more often a community gathered around an

altar to a specific divinity in an effort to respond to personal requests,

to seek positive outcomes and for general moral guidance. The divinity then

responds by dictating scriptures through the body of a medium and through an

implement that I will show you in a second. The practice is part of a larger

context of divine revelations which have gone, which have a long history in

Chinese religions especially Taoism. This specific practice has an attestive

beginning in the 11th or 12th century but it flourished later and developed

in very specific ways in the late imperial and Republican period. Seeking a

personal connection with the divine word in the form of written communication is

a long-standing Chinese religious practice and the work of Taoist

scholars on the formation of early Taoist scriptures through divine

revelations are an excellent example of that. But this mode of communication

is also one that China shares with many other religions and cultures and a

comparison, a culture, cross-cultural comparison is something that is

definitely needed in the future. However while Western insensations of the

practice have received much attention and research, religious text revelation

in China has received not as much attention and it should have. More

specifically while the early formation of Taoist canons through revelatory

practices has been studied in detail, this practice ubiquitous in the late

Qing and the Republican period and present in Taiwan and Hong Kong until

today needs more work especially from a historical point of view. So more

specifically I want to say really quickly how this works. A medium visited

by the divinity holds a bifurcated tree branch on a top of a sand tray. The

branch is moved by the divinity and forms words on the tray. The words are

then read out loud by an attendant and written down by at least one other

attendant. Sometimes specific questions are posed, sometimes the divinity

responds to contemporary events inside or outside the community and the short

responses or longer scriptures are then distributed, printed and distributed to

the individuals or the whole community. This is still what happens today in

Taiwan and in Hong Kong and we have very long scriptures from the Qing dynasty

which are which were transmitted in this way and which are the topic of my work.

Now what is period writing? Originally I wanted to just give you a really

brief sense of the origin. Some scholars say that the origins are in the

cult of Zigu, the goddess of the latrines. Zigu was apparently a concubine who was