The Global Religious Imagery of the Cult of Duc Cao Ðài
The Global Religious Imagery of the Cult of Duc Cao Ðài

Summary/Abstract: In 1926, in Tây Ninh province, about100 km away from present day Ho Chi Minh City, a new spiritual movement was born, aiming at the symbolic unification of all the world’s major religions into one. Its hierarchical structure resembles Roman Catholicism while on the other hand integrating elements from Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism and Islam. Besides worshipping the prophetic figures of the world major religions (Jesus Christ, Buddha and Mohammed), the Cao Đài claim to have communicated in spiritist séances with secular western and eastern literary, historical and political figures such as William Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Jeanne D’Arc, Sun Yat Sen, Vladimir Lenin and the Vietnamese poet and prophet Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm, worshipping some of these (but not all) as saints. Within the present article, I aim at analyzing the syncretic religious imagery of the Cao Đài and discuss the manner in which they construct their religious narrative as well as worldview.

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