Vietnamese

Vietnamese popular religion is organised as a court, and the court has a distinctly Vietnamese arrangement at its centre.

The Jade Emperor presides at the top, inherited with the wider East Asian bureaucratic model, along with the whole apparatus of ranked celestial offices, registers and petitions. Below that, the tradition of Dao Mau organises much of the working religion around Mother Goddesses and four palaces, heaven, forest and mountain, water, and earth, each with its own colour, its own retinue of mandarins, dames, princes and damsels, and its own liturgical repertoire.

Rank in this system is administrative. Spirits hold office, are addressed with titles, and can be promoted, and for long stretches of Vietnamese history the imperial state issued formal recognitions to village tutelary deities, which regulated who could be worshipped where.

The route in is national as much as ancestral. Tran Hung Dao, the general who defeated the Mongol invasions, is venerated as a deity with his own network of temples. The Hung kings, held to be the founders of the nation, receive a state commemoration. Heroes of the country become gods of the country, and the process has not stopped.

Alongside this run the ancestors of every household, who are the most constant object of observance in Vietnamese life and who are not a separate department from the rest.

Vietnamese religious material comes in two layers that were written for different audiences in different scripts, and both matter.

The classical layer is in literary Chinese. The Viet Dien U Linh Tap and the Linh Nam Chich Quai, from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, collect accounts of the country's spirits and legendary history, and they were compiled by scholar-officials working within a Confucian literary tradition and in part to establish which deities the state should recognise. Alongside them sit the imperial recognitions themselves, issued to villages for their tutelary gods, which survive in large numbers and constitute an administrative record of the pantheon.

The popular layer is largely oral and performed. The chau van songs of the hau dong, the ritual in which mediums host the spirits of the four palaces in sequence, carry the characterisation of each figure, and the ritual is the primary place where the pantheon is actually enacted rather than described.

Twentieth-century politics interrupted the record. Mediumship was discouraged and at times suppressed as superstition, and open practice contracted. Since the late 1980s it has revived vigorously and visibly, and in 2016 the practices connected with the Mother Goddesses were inscribed on an international heritage list, which has brought recognition, funding, tourism and new arguments about authenticity all at once.