(Original title: With the life of a one-year-old girl, "sacrifice" to the mountain god? Thai social news in the demons and ghosts, how can there be so many... ）
On September 5, 2021, another Thai girl from a mountain village disappeared.
The reason why the word "and" is added is because this kind of disappearance has occurred more than once in Thailand in recent times.
The girl who went missing this time, named "Gina", was less than two years old.
On the night of September 5, while playing with cats at home, he suddenly disappeared inexplicably.
It happened in a village in Mae Dham District, Chiang Mai Province, Thailand.
When the girl disappeared that night, her father, Suriya, 43, was riding a motorcycle away from home, taking the family's accumulated garbage to a dump two kilometers away.
The little girl's mother, Mara, 23, is preparing dinner in the kitchen.
Little Gina was playing with the cats in the house.
Gina's mother cooked the meal and called the daughter in the house, but no one agreed.
When I went outside the house to look for it, I couldn't see the girl.
The young mother was in a hurry, looking back and forth on the village road in front of her house, shouting her daughter's name as she walked, and going door to door to ask her neighbors on the road.
A neighbor said he seemed to have seen Gina walk out of the house and run about 10 meters from home, and then disappeared.
Hearing this news, Gina's mother's heart sank, and she suddenly felt that the sky was spinning.
Leaving home and disappearing on the road, was it abducted by passers-by, or was it lost?
The Thai villagers are all enthusiastic, and when they heard that little Gina was gone, they helped find someone.
In the blink of an eye, the whole village was mobilized, turning the village upside down inside and out, but still found nothing.
Gina's parents, who were mad, began to desperately recall, pouring out all the useful or useless clues in their minds.
Gina's father recalled that it was as if he had seen a white pickup truck and a black car in the village, but he didn't pay attention.
Gina's mother was even more godless, and to the media and police who came to inquire, she cried and said that she would rather exchange her life for her life and begged her daughter to return safely.
The villagers could not find the children, and the government agencies immediately mobilized.
Local police, border garrisons, rescue teams, Shantang volunteers , a search and rescue team of more than 200 people from all walks of life , began a carpet search in the fields, ponds, mountains and orchards near the village.
The local government even dispatched helicopters to search for the missing girl from high in the air.
Three days passed and nothing was found.
In desperation, the girl's parents began to pray to the gods and went to ask for signatures from various senior monks and "masters".
While searching, the police are also investigating.
After a visit, the local police in Chiang Mai locked in a suspect who abducted a little girl.
The man was a Burmese citizen named Sai Ou, a friend of the girl's father.
After being detained by Thai police, he was subjected to two days of intensive interrogation. At first, he always denied that he was related to the disappearance of the little girl, but under the attack of the police, he changed his mouth again, only admitting that "he definitely did not kill the little girl".
On September 8, Sail finally "confessed".
He confessed that he had indeed taken advantage of the lack of preparation to secretly take the little girl away from his home and put her in front of a cave three kilometers away from the village.
He abandoned the girl in front of the cave and did not hurt her.
As for the reason for this, it was "taken to the gods" and used a little girl to please an elf named "The Forest Prince".
Eventually, led by Sai Ou, police and search and rescue personnel found the little girl in a grass shed on a banana plantation near the mountain forest.
Thankfully, the girl was still alive, but physically weak.
When he was found by rescuers, he was lying in the grass shed, still playing with a mineral water bottle in his hand.
The news of the girl's safety and security came, and the parents of the girl, who had suffered for three days in despair, cried with joy.
In mountain villages, girls are abducted, which does not seem to be a rare and strange case, nor is it exclusive to a certain country.
However, in Thailand, whenever a similar case occurs, the suspect always has a similar motive.
In other countries, missing girls may be abused, trafficked, and kidnapped.
But in Thailand, the overwhelming motive for the disappearance of baby girls is usually to sacrifice to the gods and ghosts.
In May 2020, a three-year-old girl named "Little Lotus Mist" disappeared and was killed in the mountains.
The uncle of "Little Lotus Mist", who led the villagers to "discover" the girl's body, the man nicknamed "Uncle Peng", became the object of suspicion.
However, because Uncle Peng has a good image and eloquence, a tearful "I am not a murderer" confession on TV has miraculously made him a well-known Internet celebrity in Thailand.
Fans on the Internet shouted for him and raised money for him; rich people donated mansions to live in; stars and singers invited him to perform on stage and shoot a personal MV for him - the suspect turned into a Thai star with fame and fortune!
It was not until a year later, in June 2021, that the police finally solved the case and confirmed that the animal-faced uncle "Uncle Peng" was the culprit of the girl's murder!
Uncle Peng turned himself in and remained in custody and released on bail on September 7.
The "Little Lotus Mist Case", the motive for the murder, is also "addicted to witchcraft", exchanging the life of a young girl with the ghosts in the mountains and seeking to "change her life against the sky".
The modus operandi is also very similar, turning the little girl into the inaccessible mountain forest, taking off her clothes and shoes, and waiting for the little girl to die naturally.
What makes people think about it is that the act of "Uncle Peng" signing a contract with the devil seems to have really played an "effect". In the following year, he really rose to fame, soared, and gained life achievements that were almost "lucky", and briefly climbed to the peak of fame and fortune.
However, this "peak of life" lasted only one year, and its price was the prison disaster of the second half of life.
In addition to "social news", in the "Current Politics News" section, Thailand is also full of various cows, ghosts and snake gods.
In March 2010, Thai red shirts "went viral in Bangkok" in an attempt to subvert abhisit's government. With the "blessing" of the Brahmin priest Shaklabi, the members of the Red Shirts drew blood into buckets and sprinkled it on the outer wall of the Prime Minister's Office building to launch a "blood curse attack" on Abhisit.
And Prime Minister Abhisit also invited high monks and witches to open an altar in the Prime Minister's Palace to "dissolve" the curse of the Red Shirts.
When the "Yellow Shirts" subverted the Yingluck government, the demonstration leader Suthep publicly paid homage to the founder of the Royal Thai Navy, "Prince ChunPeng", which means to restrain the "reincarnation of the disaster star" Thaksin who is unfavorable to the Thai royal family through the séance of the royal ancestors.
In August 2020, the government and the opposition moved, and then went to the scene of the opposition subverting the regime of General Prayut, and the 10,000 people in Khon Kaen Province, they found another grand master to carry out a "collective curse on the scene of the 10,000 people vowing to the night" against the Prayuth cabinet, which was quite powerful.
Thailand is a Buddhist country, deeply rooted in religious beliefs, and the people are indeed full of kindness, compassion, tolerance and kindness. This, in any case, is undeniable.
But, in some deeper dimension, the spiritual world of the Thais is the rule of "witches", not the realm of "gods".
Indians, ignoring the present world and paying attention to the other shore, live entirely in the "spiritual world" above the scale of billions of years; Chinese on the contrary, they basically do not believe in ghosts and gods, and devote all their energy to paying attention to reality and paying attention to the bricks and tiles of the red dust and the world.
Thailand (roughly Indochina, which roughly includes Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia), seems to be somewhere in between.
They are not entirely concerned with reality, but they believe in ghosts and gods, and sincerely believe that there are supernatural forces in the world.
But this "belief" is not total trust, not unconditional faith, but a field of "magic" that can be designed and traded, constructed with a secular pragmatism.
In principle, the Thais, along with the many ethnic groups of the Mekong Valley, mixed with their respective religious beliefs, mixed with the primitive animist "forest spirit worship", a religion mixed with witchcraft, or a kind of witchcraft disguised as a religion.
The gods can be redeemed, luck can be designed, and the begging of the gods, if fulfilled, needs to be rewarded according to the contract.
This kind of "secular reward god" Chinese understand it.
The difference is that the purity of the Thai faith is far above that of Chinese. We can ask the Buddha to send the King of Stove, but few people will believe in this set of things to the point of "sacrificing human lives".
Finally, let's end with a story that a friend told me.
A Chinese who has lived in Thailand for many years once told me about this experience:
In a shop, two Thai little sisters stole money, the shopkeeper tried to coerce and induce, the little sister is determined to be innocent, resolutely do not admit it.
Finally, the shopkeeper brought the two little sisters to the statue and said to them: You say it to the Buddha, if you dare to say that you are innocent to the Buddha, I will act as if it never happened.
As a result, two Thai girls admitted to stealing.
Chinese friends said that the experience gave him a great shock, truly realized the power of the "faith" of Thais, and prompted him to invest the rest of his life in Thailand.
I used to, and was deeply moved by, this story.
But looking back now, it seems that in addition to being moved, there is a trace of inexplicable confusion.
Is it a divinity or a human nature to turn one's back on the mercy and justice of the gods, and then to fear the punishment that may be brought about by deceiving the gods?
Is the belief that corpses and sacrifices bring good luck to oneself, a form of witchcraft, or a belief?
Is it a belief to dedicate 10,000 golden and brilliant temples in the name of the gods and Buddhas, but to flexibly circumvent the dharma and rules in real life, is this a belief, or is it a kind of egoism that is packaged as faith?
Perhaps, these questions are meaningless.
There are always good people and bad people in the world, and comparing the bad people who sacrifice with human lives with the "good people" who worship the Buddha is not very reliable.
Mortals will always leave themselves a way out of life, believing that there is a god in the world, and also believing that the occasional windfall and calculation are the extra care of "God" for themselves.
May there be more good people with faith; may this "faith" Thailand have more true compassion and selflessness, and less magic and incantation.
A little more magic, a little less magic, especially "black magic", compared to the future of Thailand will be a little better.
Text: Thai net Yue Han