Đền Sòng

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For three or four days on end, the story runs, the sky over Thanh Hóa stayed lit. The exorcist-adepts of the Nội Đạo Tràng, the Inner Way, had come north to south against the shrines of the Mother, and one after another they put them to the torch — from Vân Cát in Nam Định, where she was born, down the coast to the low hills above Cổ Đam village. The hills shook with the contest. Pressed at the last and losing, the goddess changed her shape: she went into the ground as a dragon and slipped into a ring of nine wells, where an older power sheltered her. The temple that stands on that ground today is called Đền Sòng, and in the land of Thanh they say no shrine is more numinous.

That is the sacred story, and Đền Sòng holds it the way a battlefield holds a battle — as the place where a thing that matters is said to have happened. The temple honors Liễu Hạnh, the incarnate Mother of the Sky and first among the Four Palaces of Vietnamese religion, but it does not honor her where she was born or where she kept her poets’ tavern. It honors her at her fiercest, on the ground of her manifestation-in-power and of the great contest the tradition calls the Sòng Sơn đại chiến, the battle of Sòng Sơn.

An altar to Thánh Mẫu Liễu Hạnh in her Sòng Sơn manifestation — Thánh Mẫu Sòng Sơn, Vân Hương Thánh Mẫu — at a Mother-Goddess shrine in Ho Chi Minh City. Phương Huy, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The dry staff and the greening

The temple carries more than one name. It is Đền Sòng, or fuller, Đền Sòng Sơn — Sòng of the Mountain — and in the older record Đền Sùng Trân, the name under which it enters the dynastic notice. It stands now in Bắc Sơn ward, in what is locally counted the sixth quarter, of Bỉm Sơn town in the north of Thanh Hóa province, close under the pass the country knows as Ba Dội. The ground beneath it was once the village of Cổ Đam — also written Cổ Đạm — in the district that the Later Lê called Tống Sơn and later ages Hà Trung, at the northern edge of the province where the road from the capital comes down into the land of Thanh. The place is a threshold in the plain sense as well as the sacred one: the last of the north before the south, the pass a marching army had to cross.

Within the tradition the temple’s founding is a sign rather than a survey. The lore kept on the town’s own heritage record and among the keepers of the shrine sets it in the Vĩnh Tộ era of the Later Lê, the years 1619 to 1628. An elder of Cổ Đam, the telling goes, was visited in a dream by Tiên chúa Liễu Hạnh and bidden to raise her a temple. On a morning near the turn of the year he carried a staff of dry bamboo to the ground she had marked, drove it into the earth, made his offering, and vowed that if it greened they would build. The dead cane put out leaves. The villagers read the greening as the goddess declaring herself present, and they raised the shrine on the spot — a founding by omen, dated by a reign, told as the ground itself consenting to be holy.

The temple the documentary record can name came later and by a king’s hand. It was built, by the account carried on the Bỉm Sơn town heritage portal and the local histories, under Lê Hiển Tông in the Cảnh Hưng era — the long reign of 1740 to 1786 — a work of Đại Việt, raised in the same generations when the organized cult of the goddess was hardening into a pantheon with ranks and colors and a liturgy. The building that stands is not that first one untouched; the record notes restorations in 1912, in 1919, in 1928, and again in 1939, so that what a pilgrim meets today is a fabric repaired across the twentieth century over an eighteenth-century core, its manner a blend of late-Lê and Nguyễn work.

Its plan is three linked chambers, set one behind another and deepening toward the dark. First the Tiền Đường, the fore-hall open to the courtyard; then the Trung Đường, the middle hall; and last the Hậu Cung, the rear sanctum where the Mother sits. The chambers are carried on heavy stone pillars — cut, by the local account, by the stone-workers of làng Nhồi in Đông Sơn, the province’s old quarry village, dressed to a six-sided section and worked with flowered relief, standing on tall stone plinths. Gilt couplets and horizontal boards run the praises of the Mother down the halls in sơn son thếp vàng, red lacquer and gold leaf. One detail is worth pausing on: the triple gate, the tam quan, gives onto the temple through three named doors — the Gate of Precept, the Gate of Concentration, and, in the center, the Gate of Wisdom — Giới, Định, and Tuệ, the three trainings of the Buddhist path. A visitor enters the shrine of a Taoist immortal through a Buddhist threshold, and the choice is not idle. It is the whole of the goddess’s Sòng Sơn story written into the stonework of the door.

The tablets of the sanctum say whom the temple keeps. At its heart is Mẫu Liễu Hạnh under the title borne here — Vân Hương Thánh Mẫu, the Holy Mother of Vân Hương, whom the people call simply Bà Chúa Liễu, the Lady Liễu. She is one of the Tứ Bất Tử, the Four Immortals of Vietnamese religion, and within the theology of Đạo Mẫu she is Mẫu Thượng Thiên, the red Mother of the Heaven Palace, the presiding one at the head of the whole. Beside her the shrine honors three martial guardian saints — the generals Tả Quân, Hữu Quân, and Tiền Quân Thánh, the flanking and van commanders — a soldierly company fitting a temple of the Mother in her fighting aspect. The record reaches the modern age as a religious monument first, famed in the provincial proverb Đền Sòng thiêng nhất xứ Thanh — Đền Sòng is the most numinous in the land of Thanh — and then as a legal object: in 1993 the Ministry of Culture and Information classed it a national historical-cultural relic.

The Mother at her fiercest

What sets Đền Sòng apart from the other great houses of the goddess is the episode it enshrines. The holiest ground of the cult, Phủ Dầy in Nam Định, remembers her birth, her married life, and her green-stone tomb; the lakeside Phủ Tây Hồ in Hà Nội keeps the gentlest of her scenes, the poet-goddess trading verses with a passing scholar over wine. Sòng Sơn keeps the war. In the sacred story — told at the temple, elaborated by eighteenth-century literati, and studied by the folklorist Ngô Đức Thịnh as the cult’s crisis-and-conversion myth — the goddess in her third descent had grown formidable and, where she was crossed, dangerous. Against her rose the adepts of the Nội Đạo Tràng, the Inner Way, a Daoist-Buddhist ascetic order of the Trần lineage rooted in Thanh Hóa, whose Tam Thánh, the Three Holy Ones, went out against her with exorcistic magic. They burned her temples in a running campaign from Vân Cát in the north down to Sòng Sơn, and the two powers fought for days until the hills trembled.

The tradition does not pretend she won. Pressed to the crisis and captured, in the telling the local cult keeps, Liễu Hạnh transformed herself into a dragon and went down into the earth, taking refuge in a ring of nine wells where Cửu Thiên Huyền Nữ — the Mysterious Woman of the Nine Heavens, the spirit the people here know as Cô Chín — already dwelt. This is the reason a second shrine stands a few hundred meters from the first: Đền Cô Chín Giếng, the temple of the Nine Wells, marks the water the dragon-goddess entered, and the two temples are bound by the story into a single sacred geography. It is worth keeping the two distinct even so — Đền Sòng is the Mother’s own house, and Đền Cô Chín Giếng the house of the spirit who sheltered her — for the pilgrim’s circuit moves between them and the legend runs through both.

She was not destroyed in the well. At the last extremity, the story goes, the Buddha himself — Phật Tổ Thế Tôn, the World-Honored One — intervened to release her, telling the adepts to let the youngest daughter of the Jade Emperor follow him instead. Liễu Hạnh took refuge, quy y: she received the cà sa, the patchwork robe of the monk, and the lotus crown, and entered the Buddhist path, keeping her sovereignty and her Mother-hood intact. Within the frame this is not a defeat but a covenant. It is the moment the untamed goddess is reconciled with Buddhism and settles from a wild theophany into the ordered pantheon — the hinge on which, in the cult’s own reading of itself, a fierce local numen becomes the crowned Mother of the Tứ Phủ, the Four Palaces. The three trainings named over the gate, Precept, Concentration, Wisdom, are her vows made architecture. Đền Sòng thus teaches the Mother twice over: as the dragon who would not be put down, and as the pledged saint who took the robe.

That doubleness runs through the whole northern religion the temple serves. The Four Palaces order the unseen world into the realms of Heaven, Water, Forest, and Earth, each with its Mother and its color and its descending ranks of spirits. Liễu Hạnh crowns them in red as the Mother of the Sky; beside and beneath her stand Mẫu Thượng Ngàn, the green Mother of the forests and uplands whose devotion runs among the Mường and Tày kin of the mountains as well as the lowland Kinh; Mẫu Thoải, the white Mother of the waters and daughter of the dragon-king; and Mẫu Địa, the yellow Mother of the earth and its harvest. Something in this water-and-mother worship runs older and wider than the Lê-era temples, and its antiquity is a matter scholars genuinely argue: how far the cult reaches back before its organized form, and how much it drew, as the Việt moved south in the Nam tiến, from the goddess-worship of Champa — the Chăm mother Po Nagar of the coastal towers — are both live questions rather than settled facts. What is not in doubt is that at Sòng Sơn the Mother’s presence is felt at its most concentrated, and that the temple has long been one of the great living theaters of her worship.

For Đền Sòng is a principal seat of the mediumship the cult calls lên đồng or hầu đồng. In that devotional art a medium — a thanh đồng, often a woman or a gay man for whom the cult is a recognized spiritual home — becomes for a time the seat of a descending spirit of the Four Palaces, robed in the palace’s color while the chầu văn hymns are sung to summon and to praise it. Cô Chín, the spirit of the Nine Wells next door, is among the most sought of all the figures called down here, and the two temples together draw the mediums who serve her. The rite belongs to the public record of the religion, not to any account that could instruct it; what belongs here is only that Sòng Sơn is one of the places where the Mother is held to come nearest, and where the hymns that carry her name are sung to bring her down.

Ba Dội, the burning, and the list

The living pulse of the temple is its spring festival, the Lễ hội Sòng Sơn–Ba Dội, which runs across the second lunar month. The temple and government sources give the arc from about the tenth of the month to the twenty-sixth, with the climax late — the principal day the twenty-sixth, kept as the Mother’s day. The festival’s compound name binds the shrine to the pass above it. Ba Dội is the old name for the Tam Điệp defile, the mountain barrier where, in the winter of 1788 to 1789, the general Nguyễn Huệ — soon the emperor Quang Trung — mustered his army before the march north that broke the Qing invasion; and so the festival’s great procession carries not only the palanquin of Thánh Mẫu Liễu Hạnh but a palanquin of Quang Trung as well, up to the monument at Ba Dội, across to the temple of the Nine Wells, and home again. A goddess and a warrior-emperor ride the same road, the sacred and the national folded into one circuit.

Around that solemn heart the festival opens into folk spectacle. A women-only procession bears the Mother; the đảo vũ rites pray for rain; and the days fill with the old performing arts of the north — tuồng and chèo theater, the antiphonal hát trống quân, the hát xẩm of the strolling blind singers, the chamber-song of ca trù — alongside wrestling, human chess played with living pieces, tug-of-war, and a communal rice-cooking contest. It is at once a rite, a fair, and a homecoming, and in the new-year and festival season Đền Sòng and its neighbor the Nine Wells draw pilgrims by the tens of thousands.

That this crowded devotion should exist at all is the sharpest turn in the temple’s modern history. For much of the twentieth century the mediumship enacted here, like all of Đạo Mẫu, was condemned by the state as mê tín dị đoan — “superstition” — and suppressed under the Democratic Republic; temples went quiet, rites went underground. The label was a polemic, a framing inherited from colonial and socialist campaigns against popular religion, and it belongs in the record as a verdict a government passed on a developed Mother-religion, not as any description the religion has ever accepted of itself. Scholars now name it for what it was. The foremost student of the tradition, Ngô Đức Thịnh, did much to have Đạo Mẫu understood as an ordered faith with its own pantheon, liturgy, and hymn-canon; the ethnomusicologist Barley Norton, whose Songs for the Spirits (2009) is among the fullest studies of the chầu văn and its mediums, places Liễu Hạnh and the deified Trần Hưng Đạo at the summit of the spirit pantheon; and the anthropologists Karen Fjelstad and Nguyễn Thị Hiền, in their Spirits Without Borders, have followed the same devotion into the diaspora.

After the Đổi Mới reforms of 1986 the temple revived vigorously, and the 1993 national-relic listing set the revival on legal footing. The wider turn came in 2016, when the UNESCO Intergovernmental Committee inscribed Practices related to the Việt beliefs in the Mother Goddesses of Three Realms — Tín ngưỡng thờ Mẫu Tam phủ — on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, reframing exactly the practices once driven into the shadows as living heritage of a state that had helped nominate them. The fuller story of that suppression and revival belongs to the cult’s home ground and to the history of the Việt themselves; here it is enough to mark that the shrine which was banned is now listed.

Recognition brought its own frictions. Around the festival a commerce has grown — of pilgrimage and tourism, of costume and offering and blessing — and with it the running argument, inside the cult as much as outside it, over where devotion ends and market begins; it is the double edge that Norton and that Fjelstad and Nguyễn Thị Hiền alike record as the revival’s own shadow. The argument is a living thing’s, not a dying one’s. Each second month the two villages fill, the women bear the Mother up toward the pass where an emperor once gathered his troops, the blind singers work the crowd, and the pilgrims cross the few hundred meters between the two temples to draw water at the Nine Wells. On the ground where the adepts of the Inner Way burned her shrines to nothing, and where the pressed goddess went into the earth as a dragon rather than be taken, her temple stands repaired and thronged — the most numinous, they still say, in all the land of Thanh.

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