“Graham Bull’s extra-ordinary journey into Singapore tang-ki rituals of spirit possession entices the reader into dwelling in a liminal dimension between folly and transcendence, between everyday human suffering and different therapeutic modalities. While sliding with impressive ease through psychoanalytical, religious and anthropological reflections he dares to deconstruct the strict confines between religious faith and psychoanalytical insight. I am also much taken by his subtle descriptions of the shrines’ rituals as a mixture of the sacred with humorous mockery of social conventions.” - Bice Benvenuto, Psychoanalyst

“Leave your winning lottery tickets as thanks on top of the altar? Use the date of a person’s death as the basis for a lucky number? The tang-ki mediums of Singapore-possessed by the Mad Monk, the Monkey God or by the Spirits of Hell- challenge Euro-American ideas of what exactly constitutes ‘a religion’. They are pragmatic, hardly soteriological as the deity of the Western Christian tradition. The gods are here to heal illness, to assist in finding employment and passing exams, perhaps to lessen your transition in hell, but not to save your soul. Following his own training in psychoanalysis and in social anthropology, Graham Bull traces intriguing parallels between Lacanian psychodynamic thinking and traditional Chinese philosophy, but unlike most earlier advocates of a rapprochement between psychodynamics and anthropology, he does not seek to reduce social science to a psychology, spirit possession to the dynamics of an individual mind, but rather to lucidly explore the phenomenological experiences of our intersubjectivity. His highly original use of both disciplines emphasises the fascination and utility of practising both together. The city-state of Singapore is a highly conformist though pluralistic society and Bull employs Lacan’s notion of the hysteric (the dissociated one) as a potentially oppositional ideologue who challenges Singapore’s ‘discourse of the master’, as Lacan puts it, whilst at the same time making sense of multiple individual subjectivities. Yet tang-ki worship goes along with the state’s command capitalism, and may even be said to be some celebration of it. Though he does not claim too much, issues of identity and the subjective self are played out in relation to Singapore’s modernisation and contemporary capitalism, both play and critique, and offer us a wider model to look at these concerns more globally. How does the control of chance in our daily life go along with a highly technical and benevolent governmental power? A model or a parody? Or both? Clearly written, his accounts of these engaging spirit mediums and their vicissitudes will continue to resonate in our imagination. Plangent if not indeed poignant.”- Roland Littlewood, Professor of Anthropology and Psychiatry, University College London .

“My first thought about the tang-kis is their partial resemblance to the Victorian spiritualists who bring messages from those beyond to those who are bereft and refuse to mourn. Some of the clients of the tang-kis also cannot lack and need a tang-ki to guarantee their bets. John Gray demonstrates that the theory of natural selection creates a strange situation in which the co-discoverer of natural selection, A.R. Wallace, converts to spiritualism. The society in which the tang-kis live, namely Singapore, appears to be not as ordered as one might think and produces blowback in those endowed with authority. These are the masters in Graham Bull’s anthropological story of the tang-kis who possessed as they are by gods are sometimes considered mad. These mad people have healing power. Lacan ambiguously asserted towards the end of his life that we are all mad. I think he must have meant that we all have the potential for madness. Not enough people are sufficiently gifted like the tang-kis for all of us to be mad. The tang-kis could be heretics who have taken the good path to madness which gives them the power of healing and throwing the dice. I would recommend this text for all students of psychoanalysis.”- Richard Klein, Psychoanalyst