Phuket Vegetarian Festival, Thailand.

The Nine Emperor Gods Festival is a Taoist celebration stretching over nine days from the eve of the ninth month of the lunar calendar. Although it’s celebrated around southeast Asia, the festival is particularly interesting in Phuket, in the south of Thailand – where the festival is called the Vegetarian Festival – due to the strange religious rituals performed there.

For the duration of the festival, celebrants wear white (the colour of purity), adhere to a vegetarian diet (to purify the body), and take part in various purification rituals such as bloodletting, impaling or standing next to lit firecrackers. Each morning noisy, colourful processions wind through Phuket from pagodas in the surrounding area. Devotees known as Ma Song lead the processions. These are people who allow the gods’ spirits to possess them, and with the help of priests they enter deep trances at the temple altars just after dawn. Then many of them have their cheeks pierced with a wide range of objects; blades, pistols, umbrellas, even bicycles. Some lick axes, or cut their backs with swords. It is believed that, while entranced, the Ma Song feel no pain.

The processions move through the streets, the Ma Song stopping to bless household altars along the way. Behind them, other celebrants bear litters carryng effigies of the festival gods and, as they pass, people throw strings of lit firecrackers over them. Once the processions are over, the Ma Song undergo a ritual in which temple priests bring them out of their trances.

In the evenings, Ma Song climb ladders made of knives in the temple grounds, walk on fire, bathe in boiling hot oil, and bless those gathered with lucky votive papers.