Photographer Bo Thomassen

In front of the central tempel lies 12 huge dragons motionsless on the ground. All are they blind folded. A high priest dressed in a yellow rope walks around the resting dragons and then stops in front of one of them. He focus, falls into trance and recieve at “message” then he leans forward and write a Chinese  sign in the mouth of the dragon.

The place is the town Singkawang in Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo and the year is 2570 according to the Chinese calendar, the year of the Pick. Cap Go Meh is a 4 days long festival which marks the end of Chinese New Year and on the last day it culminates with a several kilometers long procession. The next 4 days the town will be full of incense, dancing dragons, lion dancers and holy men visiting the 1000 small and big tempels in Singkawang.

What makes Cap Go Meh so special in Singkawang is not only that it is celebrated in a very old way but especially because of the several hundred Tatungs. A Tatung is a holy person who are capable of being possessed by spirits - some say it is God. When possessed they achieves different abilities. Some speak in tongues, some cut themselfs with machetes without getting wounded others again inflicts pain on themself by being pierced with different objects. Those inflicting pain on themselves do it as a purification process not only for themselves but for the whole community. It is not only people of a Chinese origin that become Tatungs but also among the native people of Borneo, the Dayaks, you find Tatungs. The former head hunters adorns themselves with skulls, not from humans, but from monkeys and with their hefty tattoos they make an already bizarre and incomprehensible sight even more colorfull. When the spirit leaves the Tatung, as fast as it possessed him, he falls to the ground. Sometimes it takes a while to bring him back to consciousness.