ABSTRACT
Early in the morning of a winter day, the villagers of Shenxi gathered to witness the ceremony of fasang being performed for the mother of villager Li Xiujie, who had passed away two days earlier due to illness. Fasang is the ceremony in which people, led by Daoist masters, send the dead to the graveyard for burial. I followed the villagers to observe the proceedings. When I stood on one side of the grave to take pictures, I was pulled back by several women with fearful looks on their faces who told me that I should not stand there, lest the sunshine project my shadow into the grave and thus lead me to an untimely demise. They said that the shadow represents one of the souls; one cannot live if any of one’s souls enters a grave. I politely disregarded their warnings, and I told them that I had to stand in that position because it was only from there that I could take the pictures I wanted. It was not until a subsequent break that I began to feel uneasy as I turned to discover that all the villagers, including the woman who always followed me and who had helped me carry my bag during the ceremony, kept to the other side of the grave, leaving me alone in the area where they believed one risked losing one’s soul.
