Making the Gods Speak: The Ritual Production of Revelation in Chinese Religious History By Vincent Goossaert. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2022. 351 pp. $60 (hardback) - Communicating with the Gods: Spirit-Writing in Chinese History

These two books establish spirit writing and divine revelations as a new field in the study of Chinese religions in Western languages.Vincent Goossaert's monograph offers both historical and theoretical foundations for comprehending spirit-writing as a ritual technique to produce divine revelations.Matthias Schumann and Elena Valussi's edited volume, stemming from an international conference held in 2019, features sixteen articles by leading scholars from East Asia, Europe, and North America.It explores the diverse practices of spirit-writing in terms of techniques, social organizations, religious affiliations, regional networks, and political ramifications.Together, the two books complement each other to offer a comprehensive history of spirit-writing in Chinese religious life.Spirit-writing, as defined in both books, refers to ritual techniques that a person deploys, often centering on an altar set up by a religious community, to create the presence of a divinity.A wide range of gods, spirits, and recently deceased souls could be invoked through such ritual means.The divinity would purportedly descend into the altar and impart instructions onto materials such as paper, sand, or incense ashes, using a writing implement (such as a brush, a wicker basket, or a piece of wood) wielded by a medium under divine influence.As a major form of divine revelations in Chinese religions, spiritwriting first emerged in the tenth century, and has since "evolved from being one ritual niche within the repertoire of techniques for producing divine presence to being the most common means of producing revelations in the modern period" (Goosssaert, 11).The ritual practice "lay at the very center of religious life and religious text production" in late