Ngo Van Chieu

In the Vietnamese cities of the 1910s and 1920s, seances were a middle-class pastime, and the class that practised them most was the one Ngo Van Chieu belonged to: French-educated Vietnamese clerks and administrators in the colonial service, literate in Chinese and in French, at home in neither tradition entirely. Two currents met in these gatherings. One was the Chinese practice of fuji, spirit writing performed with a suspended stylus that traces characters in sand or ash, long used by Daoist and syncretic societies. The other was French spiritism, the seance culture of Kardec and his successors, which arrived with the language and the schools.

Out of these sessions came messages signed by a spirit that eventually identified itself under the name Cao Dai, the high tower or supreme palace. Several circles were receiving such messages independently by the mid-1920s, and in 1926 a group of them signed a declaration to the colonial government announcing a new religion and held a founding ceremony at Tay Ninh.

What resulted was consciously universal in design. Cao Dai holds that God has revealed himself in successive eras through the founders of the existing religions and now addresses humanity directly; its pantheon includes figures from Chinese, Buddhist, Christian and Vietnamese tradition, and its organisation borrowed a hierarchy of dignities from Catholic and Vietnamese court models alike.

The vision Ngo Van Chieu reported on Phu Quoc in 1921 was of a single large eye, radiant, appearing before him while he considered how a formless divinity might be represented at all. He asked, by the means available to him, whether some other symbol might serve, and the eye returned. He began to venerate it, and the Divine Eye, set within a triangle and surrounded by rays, became the sign under which Cao Dai worships. It is placed above the altar in every temple, and it is what a visitor to Tay Ninh sees first.

When the movement organised itself publicly in 1926 he was offered its highest office and refused it. The reasons given differ in the telling: reluctance to accept a hierarchy, disagreement with the direction of the public church, ill health. He withdrew to Can Tho in the Mekong delta and gathered a small group around a path of inward cultivation, without the elaborate liturgy, the vestments or the administration of the main body. That branch still exists, and is distinguished within Cao Dai from the large public organisation rather than opposed to it.

He died in 1932 on the river, travelling. Cao Dai reveres him as its first disciple, and the two paths he stands between, an inward discipline and a public church, remain the shape of the religion.