Unlike a Daoist priest, whose authority rests on textual training and formal ordination within a lineage, a jitong's standing rests entirely on the community's recognition that a specific deity genuinely speaks and acts through his or her body. Most jitong describe their first possession as unsought and often unwelcome, arriving as a sudden, disorienting seizure, frequently in adolescence or young adulthood, that alarms the individual and their family before a temple or an experienced medium helps interpret it as a deity's call rather than illness.
There is no seminary, examination or central licensing authority; a jitong's legitimacy is established and continually re-established through the plausibility and apparent efficacy of successive public performances, watched and judged by a temple community that can, in principle, withdraw its confidence if the possessions come to seem inauthentic or the advice given proves unreliable. During possession, the jitong is understood to lose personal awareness and control entirely, sometimes speaking in a voice or dialect not their own, offering prophecy, medical or business advice, or resolving disputes, and often performing feats of self-mortification, such as piercing the cheeks, back or tongue with skewers, blades or small hooks, that participants and observers alike treat as visible proof that the possessing deity, not the ordinary human being, is currently in command of the body and immune to pain.