Chapter 4 Tribal People 135the grave, but the soul of the eyes and heart go to the afterworld and are eventu-
ally reincarnated. In sleep, the eyes and heart may wander and cause dreams.
The complexities of the interconnected worlds of spirits and humans
require specialists who can move between these two worlds safely and skill-
fully. Every village must have one shaman, and most will have several. The
most powerful shaman in Chengmengmai was Chaitong, a 38-year-old man
who had two wives and six children. Chaitong’s grandfather had been an espe-
cially gifted shaman who had been selected by a spirit (neng) to become a sha-
man (chingneng). Chaitong became a chingneng in a more usual way. He got
sick, and an older shaman was called in to “kill the sickness,” but this did not
help. Even though taken to the hospital, he still did not recover. More shamans
were called, and finally his grandfather said, “If you do not become a shaman,
you will get sicker and sicker.” But he was only a 10-year-old boy and the
thought frightened him. They used a common divination method to determine
whether Chaitong should become a shaman. He took four pieces of water buf-
falo horn (made by sawing two horn tips longitudinally) and holding them
together, he said, “If they fall all open, I’ll become a shaman,” and then he
threw them. They fell open, and so he began studying with his grandfather.Chaitong demonstrates the most important method of divination used by a Hmong shaman—
casting the buffalo horns. Two tips of the horn of a black water buffalo or a black bull are cut in
half, each with a convex and a concave side. Questions are posed and the answer is discovered,
depending on how the bones land. This is how they landed when it was determined Chaitong
should become a shaman.