Sea sacrifice ceremony to pray for calm seas and safe waters
Editor's note: This article is part of the author's series on sea rituals. To read other good pieces, please click the links at the end of the article.
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In this day and age, rituals may already seem like something distant and out of date. Young people may prefer to believe in the iPod and BlackBerry they can hold in their hands, worship Taipei 101 and Bill Gates, rather than think of paying homage in gratitude to the mountains and sea that have coexisted with all things for so long.
Of course, these days even lamas play football, but there are still people who have not long been apart from nature worship and want to follow their memories to recover the rituals of old. Two years ago, Mr. Wu Chen-hsin-jung, the chief of Duli, reopened the Duli sea ritual that had been interrupted for more than fifty years while he was ill, and afterward his daughter Siku nervously took over the sea ritual; by this year, 2012, it was already the third year.
Sister Siku asked me to design the clothes for the sea ritual, and I agreed without hesitation. Because time was limited, I continued the earlier cute style and drew a pig surfing on the sea, because the Amis name of the Duli sea ritual is "Pafafoy," fafoy being pig, and the sea ritual means "offering a pig to the ocean." I thought that since the Amis are cheerful and optimistic by nature, even for a ritual I still wanted to present it in a relatively lighthearted way. Especially since there are many surfers near Duli, if the pig being offered were to go out to sea on its own, that seemed fine too, though I still worried a little that it might be too frivolous.
On the day of the sea ritual, the tribal work crew put on the Pafafoy clothes, and they looked quite energetic, so only then did my small worry relax.
(The indispensable – abundant lunch)
(This article is published in sync with the author's blog)
Preparing the sea ritual together (Part 1): The elders are all like this
Preparing the sea ritual together (Part 2): Ducks, and the Inas who used Energizer batteries