The Nine Emperor Gods Rule

by Peter
(Sitiawan, Malaysia)

These days I live in Malaysia after a few years' journey on a bicycle from Holland. Strange things happened along the way. In India, a woman disappeared right in front of me on a railway platform. Unfortunately, I don't have a photo of that event.

Last year I visited a big Chinese festival: the Nine Emperor Gods Festival. It's a Taoist festival in which the belief is that gods come from overseas (the spirit world) to celebrate the festival. During the festival the statues of the Gods of the temple are brought out to watch a traditional Chinese opera.

The festival takes several days and I witnessed several days in several different temples. It was a great event. But the strangest thing happened to me and to my friends when we start making photos.

My friend Pearly, her husband and I had three different cameras and we all three shot together in the 9 days over 1500 photos. Several hundreds of them contained unexplainable transparent balls in all sizes. One would dismiss this maybe as a deformation of the lens.

... But in more then one camera?

The day of the firewalk we were surrounded by other people who had heard of our photos and wanted to see them. We showed them and while we were showing some of the people, we took photos of the temple with the same transparent balls which btw were not seen with the naked eye. At least 30 different cameras had these strange bulbs on the photo.

The explanation of the people was that the gods were active, and these balls were manifestations of the gods. I can not tell if this is the truth or not. I can, however, tell we shot these photos over a period of several days and we kept seeing them coming back. But only inside the temple complex. As soon as we went out of the temple complex we could shoot whatever photo, and "the gods" were not there.

During the festival we witnessed a firewalk and also a spear ceremony. The spear goes through a cheek and the spear (a 9 feet spear!) will be carried around.

Since then I have been back several times to this temple in Butterworth but I have never seen the transparent balls again. However, I am planning to visit the Nine Emperor Gods Festival again and I wonder... were they gods and will I see the gods again?

The original story of the Nine Emperor Gods Festival can be read at:
www.pulau-pangkor.com