**16. Two Couples**

The highest level of welcoming the gods and protecting spirit women from heaven occurs on the next day. This ritual built on the ritual events and was necessary to bring them to a positive conclusion with a successful water buffalo sacrifice (Tian 2018b).

Two young couples, the sons or daughters of the sponsoring family and their spouses, sat reverentially at the kitchen table dressed in their finest traditional clothing. Their presence, signifying the future, demonstrated the family's willingness to welcome the gods and spirits into the family. The two couples show "the heavens that the host family is using their highest level of humans to show the highest respect" (C. Shi 2018b). Ideally, to be the highest representatives of the family, the couples are married and parents with healthy children. The ritual presentation of the couples reiterates the mythology of the man separated and longing for his wife.

The two couples, signifying the family's most valued offering and future, are held up to the gods as proof of the family's intent, commitment, and devotion. "We are sending four guests. So please, the people say come" (Tian 2018c). The gao is thrown several times until the offerings are accepted.

Tian rang the *xiong* bell as he sang and chanted an announcement and reported to the gods outlining the family's intention (Figure 16). He then recited a list of gifts the family was sending. This was followed by the arrival of the uncle-in-law, who had been waiting outside. The four young people chanted and received the uncle-in-law to the family, joining the couples at the table. The uncle's arrival prompted the telling of ancient stories and

songs by Tian in Miao. Traditionally, telling stories was an opportunity for oral transference and could go on for hours with the family and community listening nearby. For the La Yi demonstration, the storytelling lasted nearly three hours.

**Figure 16.** Badai Tian in badaixiong regalia and ringing a bell to offer the spirits the two couples. (Photo: Thomas Riccio).

The stories are the history of the Miao people from the very beginning: how they came into being, how they traveled to different places, where they had a battle, and how the twelve different branches of the people are history. The twelve branches are from the bee and eggs and turned into butterfly (Tian 2018c).

Tian told me it had been about fifty years since he last recited some stories and songs and that he had to sit quietly for many hours and practice until his memory came back to him. The process, he explained, "Made me glad and young to do this" (Tian 2018b). The other badai were similarly grateful for the unusual opportunity. "This is a rare situation, and I am happy I could practice something that I had no other chance to do" (Hong 2018b), remarked Hong Shu Jin, who was one of the six badai assisting. "The process was a good chance to communicate with other masters. It's rare but good" (Yang 2018b).

The badai rehearsed their performances each night before they slept to allow the "spirits to help them in their dreams." Rituals are held psychophysically as mind–body–spiritual memory, "I go to a quiet place to recall from my memory the movements, something that has long been lost. If I cannot remember the spirits are saying I should not do it" (C. Shi 2018b).

The reciting of stories and songs, which includes repetition and affirmations, served to encode an oral transfer of traditional knowledge, critical to a culture that is not text-based. The chorus-like responses of the uncle-in-law and the couples exemplified how storytelling was traditionally encoded and passed through the generations. One of the stories told by Tian was about the maple tree, which is sacred to the Miao. "Maple is the totem tree of Miao people, also known as grandmother tree. It is said that the mother butterfly, the

ancestor of the Miao people, grew from the heart of maple. Miao people's feelings for trees not only come from the worship of ancestors but also can be understood as a kind of respect for nature" (Chen and Bao 2021, p. 102). In one popular version of the Miao origin myth, a butterfly finds a home with the maple tree and births twelve eggs and the origin of culture. Each egg represents the origin of one of the Miao family names, with Wu, Ma, Luo, Long, Shi, Yang, and Yang being the most prominent.

In another telling of the butterfly myth, the creator figure Butterfly Mother (HudieMama 蝴蝶媽媽) "lays her eggs in a sweet gum tree. After being hatched by a mythical bird, the culture hero Jang Vang emerges from his shell. Industrious, but something of a trickster, Jang eventually gets into a tiff with the Thunder God over an ox, resulting in rains that flood the earth. Jang Vang and his sister survive the flood inside a giant calabash. [ ... ] the brother and sister reluctantly marry, and the world again is repopulated" (Bender and Mair 2011, p. 276).

An interview with Long Ting Meng, a house builder, living in the Miao village of Xing Gueng, revealed how the former telling of the myth of the butterfly and maple tree influenced house building and daily life in the Fenghuang region. Each Miao village in the region historically identified a maple tree on the road just outside its borders—a descendant of the original maple tree—to protect the village. Consequently, each Miao house must have a main post made of maple wood. A central maple post is structurally and spiritually essential, and other posts may be made of maple or not. How a house is arranged and when it is built must be determined by the village badai, who use Feng Shui and fortune-telling (Long 2018).

Today, maple is easy to find but difficult to find big enough to be a house post. It is best to have two maple posts: the 'dragon' post and the 'grand' post. The maple post in a house represents a family's cause and the Miao people's cause for good fortune and to protect the family and food stored in the house. The pole used for the water buffalo killing is maple and sacred, like the house and the village tree (Long 2018).
