The spirit medium — tangki in Hokkien, jitong in Mandarin, meaning divining youth — is a lay figure who allows a god to occupy his body and speak through it. During temple festivals and processions the medium enters trance, often to drumming, and thereafter speaks in the god's voice, gives judgments on illness, business and family disputes, and writes charms in the god's hand for petitioners. The characteristic feature is self-mortification: skewers driven through the cheeks, a spiked ball swung against the back, sitting on a nail chair, cutting the tongue for blood to mark charms — performed as evidence that the god is present and the man is not, and reported by practitioners to be painless and to heal unusually fast. Ordained Taoist priests regard mediumship as genuine but occupying a lower register than liturgy, and the two coexist in the same temples. In Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and Fujian this is where a very large share of everyday religious problem-solving actually takes place.