Failed Precipitations

Abstract

I have argued that an exuberant and messy multivocality characterized the beginnings of both Taiping religion and the Eighteen Lords temple. The early Taiping nearly collapsed from the overload of meaning, as the melting of Hong’s ideology into local practice foreshadowed the cacophony and chaos that followed during the period of mass possessions. Although its roots were very different, the Eighteen Lords also offered a surfeit of possibilities rather than any single message. Both celebrating and condemning utilitarian greed, these spirits evoked a range of images from new mothers to merciless gangsters. Despite their diverse origins, the two cases thus shared an extreme saturation. Each case also included a potential reading as resitance among its complex possibilities. The crux of the comparison between the Taiping and the Eighteen Lords lies in how the one managed to realize that potential, forging a unified interpretation as resistance, while the other defeated all attempts, remaining a thick brew of unrealized and inconsistent possibilities. This chapter will look in detail at the various attempts to forge a unified version of the Eighteen Lords, and at how the temple managed to soak up each one, just stirring it into the mix instead of being transformed by it.