In Thai, Phuket devotees pierce their faces with swords and rods to cleanse their community: Video
The Thai island of Phuket has once again transformed into the epicentre of one of Southeast Asia’s most visually intense and spiritually extreme festivals, the Phuket Vegetarian Festival, where divine devotion meets acts of extreme endurance.
Running from October 21 to 29, the annual nine-day celebration honours the Nine Emperor Gods, celestial figures in Taoist belief. But beyond its name and its abstention from meat, the festival is most widely known for its intense rituals of self-mortification, performed in the name of spiritual purification and communal protection.
Footage from this year’s event captured by Viory shows dramatic scenes at the Bang Liao Shrine, where devotees known as 'Mah Song' or “Horses of the gods” entered trances believed to be guided by divine possession. In these altered states, participants had their cheeks pierced with swords, rods, tree branches, and even tools like axes and machetes. Others were seen walking barefoot over burning embers, part of the traditional fire-walking ceremony.
According to tradition, the Mah Song’s pain-defying acts serve a purpose of absorbing bad luck and misfortune, protecting the community from evil spirits, and ensuring good fortune in the year to come.
Each day of the festival sees loud processions through the streets of Phuket Town, with devotees parading past shrines, firecrackers in the background, and the air thick with incense smoke.
This story is written and edited by the Global South World team, you can contact us here.
