what are spirit houses?
While travelling across South East Asia earlier this year, I kept seeing small, ornate shrines in various unexpected places.
On streets corners, outside various buildings and inside homes and businesses, people across Indochina keep shrines known as spirit houses.
Indochina?
The nations of Thailand, Myanmar (previously called Burma), Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos and the Philippines are known collectively as Indochina.
Offerings, like fruits, drinks, and incense - even alcohol and cigarettes - often constituted the shrines, along with figures of different deities.
Upon seeing these almost everywhere I went - from the Philippines to Vietnam, from Laos into Thailand - my curiosity was sparked. What were these shrines for?
Spirit Houses
The shrines that I kept seeing are known as spirit houses, and are intended to keep peace with the spirits of the house, or the building or area, they are found in.
The idea is that these structures appease spirits that have the capability to harm their surroundings. By keeping fresh offerings, and by maintaining a clean spirit house, the inhabitants of the place will be safe from invisible enemies and supernaturally inflicted harm.
They are found in most countries across South East Asia; including Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar/Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and the Philippines. They can also be found in some parts of China and India.
Similar shrines, with offerings to gods, idols and deities, are also found in temples in abundance wherever you go in South-East Asia.
Coming from somewhere like the UK, a secular, largely atheist country, where the idea of ‘spirits‘ or supernatural entities are widely regarded as ‘woo woo’, superstition or illogical, it was somehow refreshing to see these spirit houses.
They served as reminders of the cultures around the world which embrace and accommodate the unknown, and whose traditions and cultural heritage in this sense have been preserved throughout (and despite) their industrial development, and -in the cases of all listed countries except Thailand - their colonisation.
Thailand is the only country in South-East Asia to successfully resist colonisation by any western power.
