The Wu ~ China’s Female Shamans and the Tradition That Was Almost Erased

Before Confucius. Before the dynasties that gave China its recognisable historical shape. Before the texts that would define Chinese philosophy and religion for millennia – there were the Wu.They danced in long-sleeved robes until the spirits entered them. They spoke in the language of gods and communicated the will of the dead to the living. They performed rain ceremonies, healed the sick, drove off malevolent forces, interpreted dreams, and predicted the future through divination. They were called to the oracle bones, the ancient Chinese practice of writing questions and submitting them to flame. And their voices were recorded in the inscriptions that survive as some of the oldest writing in the world.And they were, predominantly, women.The wu (巫) ~ the word translates as shaman, sorceress, spirit-medium, or ritual specialist depending on context and century, represents one of the oldest and most thoroughly documented traditions of female spiritual power on Earth. It is also a tradition that has been systematically suppressed, marginalised, and written out of the dominant narrative of Chinese history. The patriarchal Confucian orthodoxy that came to define Chinese culture had little use for women who spoke with the authority of heaven itself, and so it attempted to reduce them. First to subordinate roles in official religion, then to figures of suspicion and ridicule, then to invisibility.They did not entirely disappear. They never do. What the Oracle Bones RememberThe earliest evidence for the Wu comes from the Shang Dynasty, which ruled central China from roughly 1600 to 1046 BCE. The oracle bones, tortoise shells and ox scapulae used for divination, inscribed with questions and answers, contain some of the oldest Chinese writing in existence, and they mention the Wu with striking frequency.Divination: the Wu proclaims… reads one inscription. Others mention groups of Wu performing ceremonial dances before sacrifices, or being summoned – bring the Wu – for specific ritual purposes. Several inscriptions name individual female Wu: Yang, Fang, Fan, recorded as performing rain-making ceremonies at moments of drought and crisis.Old sources show the Wu performing invocation, divination, dream interpretation, healing, exorcism, driving off evil spirits, and performing ecstatic rain dances. Dramatic descriptions recount the powers of the Wu in their ecstasies. They could become invisible, slashed themselves with knives and swords, cut their tongues, swallowed swords, and spat fire, were carried off on a cloud that shone as if with lightning. The female Wu danced whirling dances, spoke the language of spirits, and around them objects rose in the air and knocked together.This is not the cautious language of historical distance. This is eyewitness description — or as close to eyewitness as texts from three thousand years ago allow. The Wu were present. They were visible. They were doing something that people around them experienced as genuinely extraordinary.The oldest Chinese dictionary, the Shuowen Jiezi, defines Wu unambiguously: “a zhu (invoker or priest), a woman who is able to render herself invisible, and with dance invoke gods to come down.” The character itself, some scholars suggest, depicts a person with outstretched arms in long sleeves, in the posture of the trance dance. The gesture preserved in the written language long after the practice it recorded had been pushed to the margins. The Body as InstrumentThe central technology of Wu practice was the body itself.Not the body as metaphor. The body as literal instrument of spirit communication. As the vessel that, in the right conditions, through the right preparation, through the long trained discipline of the trance dance, could be entered by the divine and used to speak.Many scholars see Chinese shamanism as underlying what developed into Taoism. The Taoist word...