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MARK R.E. MEULENBELD, Demonic Warfare: Daoism, Territorial Networks, and the History of a Ming Novel. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. 288 pp. US $57 (hb). ISBN 978-0-8248-3844-7 Demonic Warfare was a much-awaited book, as one can see by the numerous quotes in recent publications of the 2007 dissertation (Princeton, supervised by Susan Naquin) from which it is issued. It will not disappoint the avid readers: the subject is important, the writing crisp, engaging and occasionally witty, and the argument compelling. It will easily become a standard item on reading lists on Daoism and popular religion; hopefully it will also feature among reference works on the Chinese novel, as the author aims at this public, too, but there it will maybe meet more resistance. Indeed, the book opens with a chapter surveying the historiography of the Chinese novels of the Ming and Qing, and concludes that Western-inspired literary studies have taken over the subject, and as a result some works that used to be on top of the charts for centuries, notably Fengshen yanyi 封神演義, have become forgotten because they are not good enough literature. This is because, Meulenbeld argues, they are not “literature” (there is no imagination, and no “supernatural”): they are paraliturgical texts, that explain in a narrative mode how the pantheons of gods that people worship during festivals came to be what they are. They are commentaries on ritual (especially exorcistic ritual); both use the same language, that of the “vernacular sphere.” Meulenbeld makes in passing the same claim for other novels (Xiyouji 西遊記, Sanguo yanyi 三國演義, Pingyaozhuan 平妖傳), but in the case of the Fengshen yanyi at least, this seems a convincing way of presenting the over-abundant and unwieldy material where hundreds of soldiers and generals fight against each other, die violent deaths, and in the final chapter are given ranks and titles within one comprehensive pantheon. The rest of the book is devoted to the gods that swarm the pages of that “novel” (for Meulenbeld keeps the term after all), and, rather than discussing them one by one, as this has been occasionally done before, treats them as systems of relations. This ‘relational’ approach is arguably the most important contribution of Demonic Warfare: it shows how Daoism provides the tools to relate all the local gods within a functioning system that provides much-needed authority and rules to manipulate violent spirits. In so doing he makes a forceful argument against those who study popular religion independently of Daoism. Chapter 2 discusses the origins of the Fengshen yanyi and the genre of canonization narratives: it argues that after any major foundational event (founding a dynasty, establishing a village) in Chinese culture, all those who participated (both victors and losers, newcomers and displaced indigenous people) must be “thanked” and given a place—canonized. This act was at the heart of early forms of stories of the founding of the Zhou dynasty, of which the Fengsheng yanyi is a late expanded version. The spirits thus canonized are all victims of violent death—dangerous demons who possess spirit-mediums and must be appeased. Chapter 3 and 4 close in on the precise pantheon of the Fengshen yanyi and show that it corresponds precisely to that of the new exorcist rituals, notably the Thunder rituals (leifa 雷法) that develop during the Song and Yuan periods to become dominant in the clerical organization of Daoism during the early Ming. This is no coincidence: the main thrust of the Thunder liturgy is to enroll, by force and persuasion, the unruly spirits 94 BOOK REVIEWS in thearmies of theDao where they aresubjected to rules andcontrol, andthuscease to wreak random havoc, even though they don’t lose their propensity to violence. Meulenbeld also suggests (this would need further substantiation) the links between the divine armies of the Thunder rituals and the actual organization of local militias. Chapter 4 and 5 take the story to the time of the compilation of the Fengshen yanyi in the late Ming and place its pantheon in its religious and political context, where Thunder rituals and their gods feature prominently in both court and local practices. Like any ambitious book that goes beyond the classical...

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