Les Oracles du Cao Ðài: Étude d’un mouvement religieux vietnamien et de ses réseaux by Jérémy Jammes (review)

Les Oracles du Cao Đài is a very impressive work, over six hundred pages long, based on over fifteen years of research in Vietnam and France, as well as archives in both countries. Its encyclopaedic scale began with a doctoral dissertation, finished in 2006, which has been expanded, updated and filled with new data and subtle interpretations. Both a detailed ethnography of contemporary practices and a historical analysis of documents, it presents a critical but sympathetic analysis of the production of Caodai scripture through a process of mediumistic reception, selection, editing and publication. Messages, which Jammes calls “oracles”, have been received from a wide variety of divine entities, starting with the Jade Emperor (who is called Cao Đài, “the highest power”), the Tang dynasty Taoist poet Li Bai (called Lý Thái Bạch in Vietnamese, the “invisible Pope” who oversees these seances), and the Mother of the Western Heavens (Diêu Trì Kim Mẫu), and including European figures like Victor Hugo and Jeanne d’Arc. Caodaism is a synthesis of the Chinese tradition of literary spirit-writing and more international influences from Theosophy, Freemasonry and the French Spiritism of Allan Kardec. Jammes traces these various influences in great detail, and takes seriously the exegetical explanations of Caodai historians and theologians, something that many earlier scholars failed to do.

This book is also a careful reading of the varied political stances that Caodaists have taken over the past eighty years, and the reasons for the diversity of these positions. Caodaists have been described as “collaborators” (allied at one time with the Japanese and later with the French), “reactionaries” and “opportunists”. Their eclectic beliefs and shifting alliances mean they are often described as the “most misunderstood” movement in Vietnam. The detailed historical and ethnographic research that Jammes has done allows us to see Caodaists as they see themselves, and to appreciate the symbolic and ritual complexity of this new religion.

There are three completely original arguments in Jammes’s book that shed new light on Caodaism. The first is an historical argument that the core elements of Caodai theology come from a Sino-Vietnamese heritage of once “secret societies” which deploy spirit mediumship to produce a cannon of texts transmitted over time. While Jammes traces out influences from a very wide variety of sources, the most important lines of transmission come from the merging in the early temples of these societies of the “three doctrines” of East Asia — Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism — with a new technology for contacting the spirits. Although some earlier scholars have indicated that this might prove to be a fruitful area of investigation, no one has taken the time to prove it as effectively as Jammes has done.

The second is an ethnographic argument about the shifting emphases of Caodai religious practice, and especially the relationship of spirit mediumship to meditation. In a nuanced account of the esoteric origins of Caodaism in ascetic and mystical practices which involve renouncing worldly ties, Jammes lays out the basis for a strategic shift in emphasis forced by the communist government’s ban on spirit mediumship since 1975. He documents the performance of clandestine spirit-medium seances at a teaching agency (Cơ Quan Phồ Thông Giáo Lý) in Saigon, and the diffusion of these messages internationally, but notes that agency leaders carefully monitor and control their content in order to purge it of political references and criticisms of the government (which had been characteristic of spirit messages during the colonial period). During that earlier period, Caodaism was tied to a passionate non-aligned nationalism. Since 1975, this agency has invested much of the mystique of spirit mediumship in secret, esoteric forms of meditation, which offer the possibility of...