Most Khmer people in the remote areas’ villages are the elderly who always prepare the spirit-calling ceremony while there are the deathly pale sick. As soon as we asked them the reason, they would say they are just responded to have done the following the ancestor’s tradition to call back the major and minor souls while not inhabiting the human body.
It is such belief that this spirit-calling ceremony has been implemented at night around 7-8 pm through making offerings to the ancestral spirits and other relatives passing away to call back the major and minor souls. Khmer people in the Northeast Thailand sees that a person totally consists of thirty-six souls; minor soul, thirty; major soul, six.
The upland Khmer (Khmer Leur) on the other side of Dang Rek mountain range pay much respects to the souls because people able to survive rely on those major and minor souls which are powerful, even though they cannot see; those are also the ancestral souls. In Khmer belief in Surin province and Burirum province, the elderly first see the sick’s fortune and after that they invite the spirit-calling medium to prepare the sacrificial items.
It is noticed that there are candles, incense, and flowers prepared in this ceremony in the sick person’s house. Besides this, we see another woman able to call back the soul by preparing five candles, incense sticks, and flowers each. On top of that, there must be four virgin girls and boys to participate in the spirit-calling ceremony.
The prepared objects for this ceremony includes a banana tree and a sugarcane tree to get the soul back; a staircase consisting of nineteen steps, a small bowl of rice and soup, and a pair of bell throat-latch, shaken to make the sound while calling the soul. They lean the upper staircase against the roof or any higher place and the bowl of rice and soup is put at the end of the staircase. At the beginning of a process, the adoration to the Buddha is firstly done, and then the soul is called back through chanting loudly and harmoniously “comes, the soul comes, please come while all the young and old participating in that ceremony have chorused the same words loudly.”
It is the late night that this ceremony is arranged once again and the last one in the early morning. In that time, the elderly medium takes sticky rice packed in the silk scarf, put into the basket or Chhneang (the bamboo fish trap) with one box and one ancient ladle, gather the soul into the basket on the trees by walking around the house for three times, and regarded something in Chhneang as the sick soul.
After gathering fish into the basket around the house for three times, she uses her arms to cover that ancient box, waves from the Northeast for three times, and beats into the soul basket to parade up the house of the sick person. After that, they have tied a cotton thread around the sick person’s wrist and make offerings to ancestral spirits to be heard and protect the sick’s souls. Naturally, it is noticed if there is a reaction from the sick person it means that he or she is healed and will recover from his or her illness (M. Tranet, 1978).
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