This is a book of rare ambition – indeed, more than a book, since crucial to it are photographs and an excellent series of videos (available on a separate website) of the performance of the ritual, the Banner Rite, that is the core of its concern. Its ambitions reach into distinct realms, bringing together scholarly modes that are all-too-often strangers to each other. It combines ethnography, history and what we might best think of as scholarly exegesis – two chapters are structured in part around a running commentary on the video – all of which it attempts to subsume within an overarching claim to phenomenological method. By phenomenology it means, largely, an attempt to elucidate, as fulsomely as possible, the perspective implied within the Banner Rite and its traditions. As Mozina is at pains to make clear throughout the book, this means that its two main putative participants, human ritualist and divine being, are fully “subjects.” It is not the case, Mozina claims (and here the book offers a critique of much previous scholarship on Daoism) that the gods figured in ritual are, in a formulation it attributes to Kristopher Schipper, mere “puppets” in the “hands” of ritualists, invented, staged and manipulated for their own purposes. Instead, man and god are equal in agency and subjectivity. This is how the god is treated within the rite, and outside it by those for whom it is a live practice, and this, Mozina asserts, is how we must understand the god if we are to understand both the practice and those who engage in it.

The book is structured around the initial ritual encounter between its two main protagonists: the Daoist priest Chen Diwen and the god Yin Jiao. As the book opens, a chain-smoking Chen nervously awaits the start of the Banner Rite in which he will attempt to convince the god to enter into his service, a sign of the success of which will be the knotting, in the rainy wind of the day, of the cords streaming off the banner inscribed with talismanic graphs whose creation is at the core of the rite. From there, Mozina lays out for the reader, in two chapters that work on the model of cinematic flashbacks, the grounds for his claims to the two subjectivities involved in the rite: first the biography of Chen Diwen and then the “biography” of Yin Jiao. Biography is crucial to Mozina's picture of subjecthood. “By the term ‘subject’,” he says, “I mean those who have a history, articulable in narrative, in which they are formed in relationship with others” (p. 13). The first of these, the account of Chen's life and the origins of his Daoist career, is well-told and straightforward; we get a clear sense of his formation as a person in relationship with others within his personal family and lineage and within the larger history of the China of his times. The second of these chapters, an account of the many – and at times very different – versions of the god Yin Jiao in histories of Daoist practice stretching back to the Song Dynasty, is also skilfully done, and filled with translations of high quality. But it can be hard to jibe with the rest of the book. It is not clear how it fits in with the picture of the single coherent subjectivity of the god as it is encountered in the ritual relationships discussed later in the book. As a result, when in later chapters we are told, repeatedly, that Yin Jiao simply “is a subject,” and when we recall earlier claims that subjecthood is developed in histories of relationship, this chapter can – because of its very philological quality – seem to stand against such claim, and this can seem a moment in the book where its ambitions might confuse its argument, especially, on the one hand, the historical/philological and, on the other, the ethnographic/phenomenological.

When the book returns to Chen Diwen and his participation in the ritual, it is back on firmer ground. The rite is described in two main chapters: one on the “recovering” of a “divine self” and another on the inscription of the talismanic graphs. In these later chapters it seems clearer that the subjectivity of the god is, on the model of phenomenology, as constructed in the rite and as experienced by the ritualist. Whatever the happenstance role of the day's wind and rain in the knotting of the banner, within the rite, and for Chen and his community, it was the god who did it. These two chapters are of especially great value. Mozina's account centres on the video provided on his website, which he expertly explains in fascinating detail, describing the many modes of relationship figured in the rite – whether between, for example, man and god as made possible by an understanding of their shared ontological ground of qi, which enables the man's ritual transformation into a god himself (p. 170), or, more simply, between nervous ritualist and expectant community. The highlight of the book for me is chapter four, on the inscription of the talismanic graphs, which takes us carefully through the process shown in the video and constitutes what is now surely the best account of the writing and nature of talismans in contemporary Daoist practice.

This is, again, a deeply ambitious book that offers new accounts of Daoist ritual through vividly presented evidence, both textual and video. It is elegantly and clearly written and would make for useful materials in both graduate and undergraduate courses – the video component perhaps making it especially effective in the latter context. Indeed, anyone with an interest in Daoist practice or in the study of ritual in general will enjoy, and benefit from, reading this book.