Mantic Medicine: Women, Divination, and Healing in 1950s China

Throughout the twentieth century, intellectuals in China attempted to “modernize” the nation by eradicating practices they considered superstitious. The effort to abolish superstition reached a peak with the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949. Of particular concern to the CCP were practices that linked superstition to healing, and the CCP was specifically attentive to the role that female shamans and fortune tellers played in mediating sickness and health. Although the CCP was attempting to bring basic healthcare to the masses through programs like the “barefoot doctors,” most rural areas remained underserved and lacked access to modern medical care. This combination of medical inaccessibility and longstanding familiarity with traditional divinatory practices meant that so-called “superstitious” healers remained ubiquitous, even in the face of government prohibition. Despite being denigrated by the Party as obstacles to socialist modernization, female shamans and fortune tellers continued to serve as a hub of medical care well past the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, offering a combination of material treatment and psychological comfort in the face of both personal suffering and national instability.

This paper will examine the intersection between gender, medicine, and mantic practices in 1950s China, showing how “superstitious” female practitioners both supplemented basic medical care infrastructures and offered a psychotherapeutic dimension to healing. Given the CCP’s efforts to build a socialist modernity predicated on rationality, materialism, and Marxist dialectics, traditional healers justified their existence on the basis of their intimate ties to the locality and their deep knowledge of the individuals who lived and suffered therein.