Where to start with this one?
The story of my attendance at this festival actually goes back almost a year. During my last trip through Southeast Asia, I had read about the vegetarian festival, but after it had already happened. Once I learned more about what happened there and saw some photos from it, I immediately put it on my list of things to see if I was back in Thailand at the right time. Conveniently, my last wedding obligation of the summer was only a couple weeks before the start of the festival, so I took it as a sign that I was meant to go.
You might be wondering what the big deal is regarding a vegetarian festival. It sounds pretty benign, if not downright dainty, right? Read on, my friends. Read on.
Other resources on the Internet can offer more details, but I’ll give the abridged version here. The origins of the festival are nebulous, but the most popular story concerns a traveling Chinese opera group that fell ill with malaria while on Phuket. They adopted a strict vegetarian diet to appease the gods and, miraculously, everyone made a full recovery. Today’s hybrid Chinese-Thai festival pays homage to that history and is also a chance for people to purify themselves to gain good favor from the gods for the upcoming year. In deference to the nine emperor gods, the festival is held during the first nine days of the ninth month of the Chinese lunar calendar. All the shrines on Phuket participate, but most of the action is in Phuket Town.
It’s also worth mentioning that this festival is mostly limited to Phuket and incorporates Chinese culture as well. Other parts of Thailand don’t celebrate this and I’ve yet to meet a non-Phuket Thai person that’s actually been to this festival.
As the festival name suggests, many people adopt a vegetarian diet for the festival; veggie food is found in many restaurants and offered by hundreds of street vendors. Truth be told, the diet is stricter than simply vegetarianism; it’s actually a jae diet, which forbids all animal products and foods that are too pungent (e.g. onions and garlic). There are various other purification rules too, such as no sex and no alcohol. Everyone wears white, except the mediums.
During the festival, many people (mostly men, but a few women) act as mediums for the gods. For the nine days, they are possessed by spirits, sometimes go into trances, chant, bark, shake, crack whips, dance, participate in the ceremonies, and are treated with the utmost respect by everyone in attendance. Each medium is always accompanied by an entourage. For the processions, families will arrange small, red-tablecloth-covered tables on the sidewalk along the procession route; these tables will have small offerings (food and drink), incense, Buddhas, and the like. The mediums walking in the procession will occasionally stop by these tables, partake of the offerings, possibly leave some small gifts for the family, and offer blessings.
Every morning, there was at least one temple ceremony somewhere on the island, always followed by a procession, usually through Phuket Town. In the evenings, there were usually multiple temple ceremonies, often accompanied by processions. In short, there was always something going on somewhere.
To set the mood a bit, here are some photos I took at the ceremonies or around town. Old Phuket (a specific part of Phuket Town) is described as having Sino-Portuguese architecture and almost has a French Quarter feel to it (especially at night), which is very different than anywhere else I’ve been in Thailand.
One of the more prominent aspects of the festival was the use of firecrackers. Constantly. By everyone. It wasn’t unusual to see children playing with some legitimate explosives. Talk about hands-off parenting! If Songkran is a 4-day water fight, then the vegetarian festival is a 9-day firecracker fight. There were certain places in town (the traffic circle with the clocktower comes to mind) where teenagers would gather in the evenings and set off firecrackers for hours, but the processions were the main sites of pyrotechnics. It’s customary to throw firecrackers at the mediums, the small thrones being carried by the participants, and the participants themselves. And what the hell, while you’re at it, throw firecrackers at your friends too. And farang. Basically, anyone and anything.
Surprisingly, the firecrackers don’t hurt that much, even if they explode next to you; you feel only fleeting pricks of heat on your skin, like embers from a fire. That said, covering up with clothes is probably smart, as is bringing ear plugs, a mask, and sunglasses.
All of the video I shot comes from two of the processions and most of the footage is from the last night of the festival. Parts of Old Phuket felt like warzones; the smoke was so dense, you could barely see across the street.
Now onto the good stuff!
First and foremost, everything that follows is pretty graphic. Nothing is censored and some of the material is a bit gruesome.
Continue at your own discretion.
This is NSFW and probably also NSFL.
Maybe you want to look at some puppies and rainbows instead?
Seriously, you’ve been warned.
Alright, thanks for joining!
The most infamous aspect of the vegetarian festival is the mutilation. Again, it’s not clear how this tradition started, but it falls within the same realm of purifying the body and appeasing the gods. The rituals take several forms: self-inflicted wounds, firewalking, climbing the “knife ladder”, and body piercing. The piercing is by far the most popular activity and is also what tends to appear in Google Images search results. Most of the piercing is done through the cheeks with metal spikes, after which another object is inserted into the hole. It seems that the mediums try to outdo themselves and each other every year with crazier or more intense piercings. A few mediums were pierced through the tongue, neck, or arms instead of (or in addition to) the cheeks. The piercings happen at the temples early in the morning and then the mediums walk in the processions for everyone to see.
On Monday, I woke up at 5:00 so I could make it to Bang Niao, one of the temples in Phuket Town, by about 6:00 for the piercings. There were a lot of people, including a lot of photographers and videographers (Thai and farang), but it was still fairly easy to see a lot of the piercings up close since there were so many mediums. A lot of the men who were administering the piercings had noticeable scar tissue in their cheeks from participating in years past.
And finally, my favorite: a handgun (hopefully not loaded).
Whenever I look at those three photos, this always pops into my mind:
- Cut hole in cheek and insert gun.
- ???
- Profit!
And now that you’re acclimated to seeing the rituals in still photos, check out how things looked in real life.
Shockingly, the mediums didn’t appear to feel any pain. Not a single one of them winced or flinched or anything, even when having a massive spike rammed through his face. Also, there wasn’t as much blood as I was expecting. Sure, there was the occasional puddle of blood on the ground or pile of blood-soaked tissues, but not as much as there should have been, considering what was happening. Not surprisingly, the same guys who participate in this also subscribe to tattoo culture. As you can see in the photos and videos, a lot of them have detailed and artistic full-back or full-sleeve tattoos.
I’m still surprised at myself at how quickly I became desensitized to everything; after a little while, it was totally normal to see weird objects being thrust through gaping wounds or getting caught in the middle of a loud and explosive storm of firecrackers. The whole week was bizarre, moody, grotesque, fascinating, and surreal. And totally worth it.
Oh yeah, and it was awesome to have super easy access to delicious vegetarian food for an entire week. Funny how I keep forgetting about the food at the vegetarian festival. I wonder why?