Author: Edward W
The Chinese have several rituals when Moving into a new house. Apart from electing an auspicious date, the act of moving has rituals associated with it.
One of them is a ritual to rid the house of malefic spirits. Just before you enter the house officially, scatter a mixture of tea-leaves & salt in all the corners of the house. This ritual is so potent you should inform any gods that are found in the House’s altars before doing so.
Puns
In fact, quite a lot of the things that you do in a house-warming ceremony involve everyday objects— rolling a pineapple through the front door as you enter to ensure prosperity, opening all the windows, doors, and fans, and boiling a kettle of water - these are puns, respectively
- 旺來 Wanglai = “Prosperity comes” => 黃梨 Huangli= Pineapple (the pun is closer in Hokkien than mandarin) and
- 風生水起, fengshen shuiqi, a proverb that means ’to flourish’ but lit. transl. is ‘wind-born-water-rise’
Transmission loss
The other day, I was entering into a fengshui shop in Singapore. It sold a kit that (amongst other things) contained the salt and tea mentioned above. It sold for well over a hundred dollars. This was somewhat amusing to me at first. But I thought again. The fact that such a kit can be sold in the first place tells you a lot about the state of Chinese customs in Singapore. As mentioned above, the rituals involve very mundane materials—salt, tea, a pineapple. But—and here is the key question—if the ritual is so materially easy, why can kits, costing well over 10 times the price of the raw materials be sold in the first place? I think the answer lies in how rituals are transmitted – or the lack of it.
One way of transmission these customs is by observation You see your parents doing it, and you do it likewise when you move in to your own house. The second mode of transmission is by text. This is what happened for me; I had read a Chinese almanac that described the rituals.
Transmission by observation is waning. In my own experience, very few members of my extended family perform such rituals. Indeed, those born after the 1960s are seldom actively interested in learning about the rituals. Besides, how often do people move house? Today, the average person does not read the almanacs/ ritual manuals. They considered occult, and somewhat shady at best; the province of grannies and the superstitious.
Furthermore, most of the literature is in Chinese. This is a language even ethnically Chinese Singaporeans have little interest in learning/reading. The few books of customs/ ritual manuals that are in English tend to be written in an abominable style, and lacking in detail.
But still, there remains a residual memory of such rituals. You will encounter many people who will acknolwedge in the power of fengshui, despite not having the least idea about the substantive rules of fengshui. There is a vague sense that you must do some ritual of some sort before you move into the house to ensure happiness, but what things you do exactly are not known.
Ritual experts
Into this vacuum step the ritual experts. They provide an elegant solution—if u want to move house in the Chinese Manner that would please your Ancestors, buy this box. wch has everything. It is not the tea-leaves that are being sold, it is the knowledge that is being sold. It is true; the books are much cheaper than the kit, abt $10. But as mentioned above, the books are not everyday articles of reading, and are in a language few bother to speak/ read outside school. Furthermore, you must know aware that such books even exist to begin with.
By contrast the fengshui shop is very public. It wears its heart on its sleeve as a ‘one stop shop’ for all your fengshui needs. So the average person would easily be attracted to the shop, rather than rooting around a pile of books.
Cheaper ritual specialists do exist, but they are much less accessible than the fengshui shop above. They tend to be monolingual in Chinese, and have a distinctly intimidating/ shady air about them. Their shops resemble temples, with piles of statues of gods, or are plastered over with posters displaying their powers and services —which also has the effect of obscuring their insides from public view.
By contrast, the abovementioned shop provides materials in both English & Chinese. It is also brightly lit, and from a distance seems more like an interior design showroom than a fengshui shop. It is much more accessible in almost every way than the older ritual specialists. Furthermore, since moving house is a rather rare event anyway, the one-off expenditure of $200 for astrologically induced happiness is a worthy investment.
Before I finish this part, there may be one more reason why the set can be sold. The Chinese believe that before an object can be spiritually active, it must be consecrated—Kaiguang 開光. This is an activity that must involve a ritual specialist.
Consecration
Before I finish this part, there may be one more reason why the set can be sold. The Chinese believe that before an object can be spiritually active, it must be consecrated—Kaiguang 開光. This is an activity that must involve a ritual specialist. Although it is not necessary – you can purchase and use amulets and fengshui objects without any consecration, some fengshui shops offer the service to anyway to their customers as a matter of course. I have not seen any evidence of this, but perhaps the house-opening set may have been consecrated (or will be consecrated upon purchase), thereby increasing its power beyond ordinary tea? If so, that would justify the increased price.
Eclipse magic
This break of ritual tradition may explain something about eclipse magic. In the runup of any eclipse, my feed is flooded with advice saying that eclipse magic should not be attempted. From this I gather that there is a significant amount of people who are indeed willing to work magic during eclipses, and the fact that these warnings are needed also tells you something about transmission of western astrology.
Wider society’s recieved knowledge tells you that being frightened of an eclipse is one of the hallmarks of primitive superstition. Remember the case of Columbus frightening the good people of the Caribbean with a lunar eclipse, predicted courtesy of one Regiomontanus? Wherefore there would be a society- wide denial of the malefic nature of eclipses, for to believe them to be malefic would be to mark you as a primitive and superstitious person. This doubtless influenced astrological practice as well though the 20thc; cf the denial of ‘malefic’ and ‘benefic’ planets at the same time.
In turn, astrology seems to have become more mathemathical– calculating the planets on paper rather than observing them and their behaviours. Example: I distinctly recall reading a modern delineation of a solar eclipse in a nativity that said to the effect ‘a solar eclipse is like a new moon, but much stronger in its effects’ and delineated accordingly. Here we can see the astronomical facts of the eclipse—moon conjugated with the sun— take precedence over the mundane effects of the eclipse— a deprivation of the Sun’s light, and all the primal unsettledness associated therewith.
So when astrological magic becomes revived, it is revivied into a society that has largely concept of the malefic nature of an eclipse, and so the talisman-making and other forms of magic progress unimpeded.