The Woman Beneath the Gate
Siam (Ayutthaya, the city wall) · Early modern, the Dutch East India Company record of 1638
The Dutch director of the East India Company station at Ayutthaya in the years between 1633 and 1642 was Jeremias van Vliet. He kept a long description of the kingdom, which he carried back to Batavia and which was lodged in the company archives at the Hague. The manuscript was translated into English in the early twentieth century by van Ravenswaay and was published in the Journal of the Siam Society. In the description, in the section on the building of the city, van Vliet records what was done when a new gate was set into the wall of the capital.
He records that a young woman was chosen.
The choice was not of a beggar. The choice was of a woman of the river quarter, named in the parish register, of good family and full grown, and pregnant. Van Vliet’s account specifies the late stage of the pregnancy. The choice was confirmed by the temple. The woman was summoned, in the early evening, to the site of the new gate.
She was called by name three times. The name was for the spirit to follow into the pit. The beam was dropped at the third calling.
On the rite
The records of the phi tai hong tong klom, the spirit of the pregnant woman who has died a violent and untimely death, are kept in the Thai ethnographic literature. Anuman Rajadhon, the standard authority, describes the doubled spirit. The mother and the unborn child are not, in the local tradition, two spirits. They are one spirit, fused at the moment of the violent death, and the fusion is what gives the phi tai hong tong klom its particular force. The spirit cannot be released by the ordinary chant. The spirit cannot be passed through the customary cycle of rebirth. The spirit, the texts say, is bound at the place of its death and does not move from it.
The rite at the gate of Ayutthaya was designed to bind the spirit to the gate.
The pit had been dug beneath the threshold of the new opening. The pit was the depth of a tall man and the width of the wall. The beam that would form the lintel of the gate had been hewn, dressed, and set on rollers above the pit. At the third calling of the name the supports were knocked out. The beam fell. The records of van Vliet say the beam was heavy enough to require, when it was later raised at any point in the gate’s maintenance, the work of forty men.
The wall was raised on the spirit.
On the gate
The gate, once consecrated, was held to be guarded.
The records of the Bangkok porters of the nineteenth century, kept by the Presbyterian missionary Daniel McGilvary, who lived in Siam from 1858 until his death in 1911, describe the inheritance of the rite at the gates of the second capital. The porters of the river warehouses, in McGilvary’s account, refused to pass under certain gates after dark. The refusal was not general. The porters had names for the gates that could not be passed. The gates that could not be passed were the gates beneath which, in the foundation, the rite had been performed. The porters said that the spirit beneath the gate would call the name of the man who passed. The man whose name was called would be the next sacrifice when the gate next required one. The porters carried the small wax-and-string charm of the Thai amulet-maker at the throat and walked the long way around.
The accounts of the rural gates of the central plain agree. The gates were not approached after the seventh hour. The names of the women, where the names are remembered at all, are kept in the temple registers and are not spoken aloud at the threshold.
On what was buried
The counter-rite for the phi tai hong tong klom, in the cases in which a household woman died of such a death and could not, for the safety of the village, be left bound at the place, is recorded by Anuman Rajadhon. The monks refused the standard bangsukun chant. The corpse was bound wrist to wrist and ankle to ankle in white cotton. The mouth was packed with uncooked rice. The belly was opened. The foetus was removed and was buried separately, in a small grave at a distance from the larger grave, so that the two spirits could not, in the burial, fuse again. The cremation, in the Ayutthaya period, was at Wat Saket, the only ground in the city set aside for the violent dead.
The archive holds no position on whether the woman of the Ayutthaya river quarter, called at the third hour of the evening to the new gate, continued to attend it. The archive observes only that the Dutch director recorded the rite, and that the porters of Bangkok in the next century would not pass the gates beneath which the rite had been performed, and that the women’s names, where they were entered in the temple register, were entered in the columns reserved for the bound, and that the wall at Ayutthaya is ruined, and that the gates are no longer gates, and that the ground beneath them has not been opened.
- van Vliet, Jeremias. Description of the Kingdom of Siam. Composed at Ayutthaya, 1638. Translated by L. F. van Ravenswaay and published in the Journal of the Siam Society, Volume VII, Part 1, Bangkok, 1910. The Dutch East India Company director's first-hand account of the foundation rite at the city gates.
- Anuman Rajadhon, Phya. Life and Ritual in Old Siam: Three Studies of Thai Life and Customs. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files, 1961. The Thai-language ethnographer's treatment of the phi tai hong tong klom and the doubled spirit of mother and unborn child.
- McGilvary, Daniel. A Half Century Among the Siamese and the Lao. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1912. The Presbyterian missionary's account of nineteenth-century Bangkok porters refusing certain city gates after dark.