A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao

Traversing visible and invisible realms, A Time of Lost Gods attends to profound rereadings of politics, religion, and madness in the cosmic accounts of spirit mediumship. Drawing on research across a temple, a psychiatric unit, and the home altars of spirit mediums in a rural county of China’s Central Plain, it asks: What ghostly forms emerge after the death of Mao and the so—called end of history?

The story of religion in China since the market reforms of the late 1970s is often told thro...