The story of religion in China since the market reforms of the late 1970s is often told through its destruction under Mao and relative flourishing thereafter. This talk describes the cosmological accounts of spirit mediums who offer a different history of the present. The talk will draw from the speaker's new book A Time of Lost Gods: Mediumship, Madness, and the Ghost after Mao (2020), based on ethnographic research across a temple, a psychiatric unit, and the home altars of spirit mediums in a rural county of China’s Central Plain. The spirit mediums approach Mao’s reign not simply as an earthly secular rule, but an exceptional interval of divine sovereignty, after which the cosmos collapsed into chaos. One symptom of this post-Mao cosmic chaos, according to the mediums, is the psychiatric affliction of human beings. Caught between a fading era and an ever-receding horizon, those “left behind” by labor outmigration refigure the evacuated hometown as an ethical-spiritual center to come, amidst a proliferation of madness-inducing spirits.