Week 3: Xiuyan & Er'Shen

Dear all

Cybershamanism summer research team has completed the third week of fieldwork! In the past week, the team continued to challenge themselves on academics and preserving strategies of Chumaxian. They have volunteered to present on Chumaxian on most renowned academic conferences in the next following year. It's our honor to have prof. Rambelli to associated with us to connect to these resources. It's been a challenging week but growing week.

In Week 3, after our team finalized their interview with Mr. Wang and Mr. Li, they have already familiarized with the Dashen and its duty. But Er'Shen is somewhat unfamiliar for all of us. Our founder Chenxuan Xu comments "I have been with Chumaxian since I was born but it's my first time to know Er'Shen." Thus, we interviewed Mr. Zhang, an Er'Shen who has been collaboring with many Dashen for 20 years. His impressive understanding and amount of knowledge reshaped our understanding of Chumaxian.

Typically, we have a stereotype on Chumaxian as a barbarian and under-developed religion: it doesn't have temples, official texts or books, master & appentices, and large population worshipping it. But Mr. Zhang breaks this stereotype. As he informed, Er'Shen is not "spiritually selected" but more like teacher-student relationship. Er'Shen priests couldn't be possessed by any spirits, but when the Dashen is possessed and gods come to human's world, Er'Shen could understand the divine words from Dashen to welcome the gods. For example, liquor in Chinese is Baijiu(白酒), but in the gods' language, it's Ha'l Qi(哈拉气). They also know more texts and the gods' language than the Dashen. Although in Chinese, Dashen means the "primary", Er'Shen doesn't have a clear boundary of leveling mechanism.

Mr. Zhang is a friend of Mr. Wang. They always collaborate to repair the missing pages of song texts. There are several issues during inheritance: first, if their masters didn't pronounce correctly, the exact words may not make sense; second, they personally forget some of the texts; third, during the Maoist Era, many texts or even recorded videos were destroyed, lacking the enough references to justify their hypothesis. Therefore, Cybershamanism decides to spend 1,000 dollars on publishing the documentary and print copies of the book, and all of our profit will be donated to Mr. Wang and Mr. Zhang to hire more students to become Er'Shen which has no restrictions on gender, religious connection to Chumaxian spirits, and education background.

Thanks to prof. Rambelli and Bao, and all our research team members and staff. They are creating and preserving the most valuable and meaningful culture worldwidely.

Department of Media