About

The Loose Spirits Archive is a collection of ethnographic video recordings, photographs, and writings documenting traditional ritual and festival culture, folk religion, and the phenomena of trance, spirit posession, and shaminism world wide.

The work was initially undertaken by artist David Normal during his travels in South East Asia between 2000-2005. The work was resumed in 2017, and others have been invited to contribute and collaborate with the goal of establishing a worldwide archinve documenting traditional ritual, festival, and magic practices worldwide.

Normal's interest in the related phenomea of trance, spirit posession, altered states of consciousness, shamanism and folk religion go back to his teenage years with reading related to magic, witchcraft, and voodoo. In his early thirties, he found himself wander SE Asia and decided to sieze the opportunity to observe the rich magic traditions firsthand and document them.

The original footage was shot in Myanmar, Thailand and Bali captured the ceremonies of three different religions within different cultures that shared the commonality of trance and spirit possession. In Myanmar, Normal documented ceremonies known as "Nat Pwe," which are devoted to the worship of the anamistic "Nat" spirits of Burmese folklore. In Thailand the subject was the infamous "Vegetarian Festival," a Taoist folk ceremony practiced in Phuket and elsewhere by the Chinese-Thai diaspora. In Bali, the classic trance dances of Bali Hinduism were documented during a period of enormous social distress following the "Bali Bombings" of 2002. These excursions culminate in about 70-80 hours of footage.

At the time that Normal was conducting and documenting these travels his goal was to make a documentary film, however moeny ran dry he returned to America temporarily. Attempts to fundraise for further productions proved unsuccessful. Normal returned to Bali, where he resided for 5 years. During this time, attempts to press on with documentation were made with inadequate equipment. Frustrations with this documentary project gave way to shifting interests. Initially, Normal turned to computer graphics with the purpose of illustrating some of the myths that informed the rituals, but as the possibility of producing a film became remote he grew increasingly entranced by the study of 3D modeling and animation, resulting in the abandonment of the documentary film project.

10 years later, Normal has returned to his native home of San Francisco and began to paint again. However, the pile of video tapes continues to haunt him. Film collector, Stephen Parr of Oddball Films, expressed his concern that the MiniDV tapes might be deteriorating and urged Normal to take steps to save the footage before it is lost. Eventually, the footage was digitized and transfered to a hard drive.

This website is intended to be a repository of the footage as it is edited into coherent clips. Ceremonial documentation will be paired with impressions, memories, and insights from Normal and other contributors to the project. The standard will be informal; video editing will be relaxed and accompanying texts will largely be 'off the cuff'.