Chapter 2
A young carpenter, rather more systematic about such things than Javanese generally are, told me that there were three main kinds of spirits: memedi (literally, frighteners), lelembut (literally, ethereal ones), and tujul.
Memedis merely upset people or scare them, but they do not usually do serious damage. Male memedis are called gendruwo and female ones wéwé (married to the gendrmvos, they are always seen carrying small children on their hips in shawls, just like human mothers). Memedis are usually encountered at night in especially dark or lonely places. Often they will take the form of parents or other relatives, dead or alive—sometimes, even, of one’s own children. The carpenter remembered that a few years ago there was a little boy lost in the neighborhood. They looked high and low for him for a whole week. When they finally found him he was hiding under the back of the house and was too frightened to talk because he had seen a gendruwo which had taken the form of his father. Evidently his “father” had been sitting up in the top of a tree and had urinated on the boy. Actually, said the carpenter, he need not have been so frightened; these spirits are largely harmless and merely like to scare you.
Lelembuts, in contrast to memedis, can make one ill or drive one crazy. The lelembuts enter the individual’s body, and if one is not treated by a native Javanese curer (called a dukun) one will die. Western doctors can’t do anything for madness or sickness caused by lelembuts; only dukuns can. A dukun can often tell where lelembuts have gone into the body and pull them out by massaging just that place—for example, the foot, or the arm, or the small of the back. Since lelembuts are not visible at all, they do not assume the appearance of relatives, but they are very dangerous to human beings.
Lastly, the tujuls are spirit children, “children who are not human beings.” The carpenter pointed to two three-year-old children standing there listening to our conversation and said: “Tujuls look just like these kids, only they aren’t human but are spirit children.” They don’t upset and frighten people or make them sick; quite the contrary, they are very much liked by human beings, for they help them become rich. If one wants to communicate with them, he must fast and meditate and then after a while he will be able to see them and to employ them for his own uses. If one wants to get rich, he sends them out to steal money. They make themselves invisible and travel great distances in a short time and so have no difficulty finding money for one.
Another kind of tujul is called a mentèk. These are also small children, and they wear no clothes; some people say they are the tujuls’ cousins. Men-teks live in the rice fields. “Suppose,” said the carpenter, “you and I have rice fields. I have a mentèk, which I got through fasting and meditation. I send him to take the grains out of your rice and put them in mine. Then later when the harvest comes your stalks are empty and mine are full and doubly fat.1 Of course, this is not a nice thing to do. Later, after I died, I would have to face God and be punished for this. But while you’re living it’s nice to have a tujul of your own.”
There is no doctrine in these matters. The carpenter’s views are his own, and, although they are roughly typical, the details about spirits vary from individual to individual. There is much discussion and dispute about the spirit world, and, while there is general agreement on the reality and importance of supernatural beings (called, as a class, bangsa alus), each individual seems to have some ideas of his own as to their exact nature and some personal experiences to prove it. Abangan spirit beliefs in Modjokuto are not part of a consistent, systematic, and integrated scheme, but are rather a set of concrete, specific, rather sharply defined discrete images—unconnected visual metaphors giving form to vague and otherwise incomprehensible experiences.
Memedis are the most easily understandable of Javanese spirits for Westerners, because they are almost exactly equivalent to our “spooks.” In fact, some show signs of having been borrowed from European sources: the djrangkong, who is a man “with his flesh off,” i.e., a skeleton; or the wedon, a spiritual being covered with a white sheet like our ghosts. The memedi who kept adding salt to an informant’s food for three months, the disembodied pair of hands at which the same man threw a plate of hot peppers, and the ghost whose shadow remained on the wall even after the fight had been turned off may also owe something to our cultural tradition. But others have a distinctly Indonesian flavor: the panas pad, whose head is where his genitals should be and who walks on his hands, breathing fire; the djims, the more Islamic spirits who pray five times a day, wear prayer robes, and chant in Arabic; the pisatjis (“wanderers”), small children without parents or fixed abode who are con-
sequently always on the lookout for human beings to live in; the uwils, who are only rarely encountered nowadays but who are said to be former Buddhist soldiers; the sétcrn gundul (“bald devils”), who have all their hair shaved off except for a kutjung, the specially cut “topknot” that small boys used to wear in the old days, a custom now almost wholly abandoned.
One of the best-defined and generally agreed upon variety of spirits is the sundel bolong—“prostitute with a hole in her.” A sundel bolong is a beautiful naked woman, but her loveliness is marred by the fact that she has a large hole through the middle of her back. She has long black hair which hangs down over her buttocks and so conceals the hole. Opinions seem to differ as to whether or not she is attractive to men. Some say that when a man sees her he is immediately frightened and runs away. Others say that on the contrary she is very attractive and usually asks the man to go off with her, an offer very difficult to reject. If he goes, however, she castrates him.
Gendruwos, the commonest type of memedi, are generally more playful than harmful and enjoy playing practical jokes on people, such as prodding women in the buttocks (especially when they are praying), removing a person’s clothes from the house and throwing them into the river, tossing rocks onto the roof all through the night, jumping out big and black from behind a * tree near the cemetery, and so forth. When Pak Paidin fell off the bridge on which he was working, he knew a gendruwo had pushed him, for after he landed in the water the spirit pinned his arms behind him and spoke to him (in classical literary Javanese; gendruwos always speak archaically, said Paidin), asking solicitously if he was all right. Evidently the spirit had no evil intentions.
But gendruwos, fun-loving as they may be, are not always harmless. Often they will appear in the form of a parent, grandfather, child, or sibling and say, “Hey, come along with me.” If one obeys, he will then become invisible. Then the real relatives, missing the victim and suspecting what has happened, will go about beating on hoes, sickles, pots, and so forth, making as much noise as they can. The gendruwo, upset by all this racket, will then offer the victim some food. If he eats it, he will remain invisible; if he refuses it, he will become visible again and his relatives will be able to find him. One day, in the neighborhood across the street from my house, a boy was missing and it was thought he had been snatched by a gendruwo, and so the people went around making a terrible racket. It turned out finally, however, that he had hitched a ride into a nearby town and had not been spiritually kidnapped at all.
Sometimes the gendruwos will take even more serious liberties. They will adopt the form of a woman’s husband and sleep with her, she being none the wiser. Then there will be children of these unions who will be monsters. There was one in Modjokuto—a large, black, and curiously misshapen child who lived to be sixteen and then died. All in all, gendruwos, despite their generally pleasant dispositions, are not to be trifled with, and one should not even talk about them—although everyone does—for they may overhear and become annoyed. No one, child or adult, in the household with which my wife and I lived would dare go to the toilet alone after sundown for fear of gendrmvos.
what the carpenter called lelembuts (but others might as easily claim are gendrmvos, sétans, demits, or djims), the kind of spirits which enter and possess one, are a rather more serious affair, for an encounter with them may end in sickness, insanity, or death. The kind of complex difficulties one can get into in dealing with this sort of spirit is exemplified by an experience of the family with whom I boarded. A few years before I arrived, they attempted to chop down a clump of bamboos in the back yard of their house. They were aware that some lelembuts lived in the bamboos, but Pak Ardjo, the head of the household, sprinkled some salt on them the night before and recited a short spell, hoping that would take care of the matter. The men hired to cut the trees were forewarned and extremely careful, but, unknown to them, one of the trees fell on an invisible earthenware pot owned by one of the spirits and broke it. Some of the spirits who were living there and who were santris (Moslems) had a big prayer house to say their prayers in; and the earthenware pot was one of those large pots the santris use to wash their feet and hands in before they pray.* The breaking of their pot made the santri spirits very angry, and they gave one of the workmen a crack on the back of the head. He felt the blow and immediately went home, but by the time he arrived there he was crazy, raving on and on in a meaningless manner. That night he had a dream in which he met the village spirit of a nearby village who told him that a group of young men were coming after him, but, if he ducked through the legs of the village spirit toward the north, the young men, who were really the lelembuts, going south, would miss him. He did, and they did, and the next day he was well.
Javanese theory of possession is rather highly developed. Lelembuts, say some, always enter the body from underneath through the feet. (That is why people wash their feet before praying in the mosque, one man told me. It is also why it is better to heat one’s feet over the stove before visiting a woman with a newborn child, because infants are particularly liable to a kind of spirit seizure called sawanen.) Others, probably the larger group, hold that
* This ascription of religious and social differentiation to the spirits is not atypical. One informant, discussing djims, said: “There are two kinds: the Islamic, who live in the mosques and langgars (prayer houses), and the non-Islamic, who live just anywhere. A djim will enter the body of a person if it should happen the body of that person is empty. Emptiness isn’t caused by the djim, it’s just sort of an accident. For instance, if a person is startled, confused, mixed up, and doesn’t know where he is, he becomes empty and the djim can enter him easily. If an abangan person is entered by an Islamic djim, he can then chant even though before he couldn’t. But abangan djims don’t enter santris; they don’t dare. . . . There are many Islamic djims in Mecca, and some hadjis (pilgrims to the Holy City) bring them back with them to help them get rich. This is why hadjis are the richest people in the whole world.” spirits always enter through the head. That is why a baby’s fontanel must be kept covered with a mixture of onions, hot peppers, and mashed coconut (the “hot” food “startles” the spirit, who is thus frightened off), and why people who are feeling slightly indisposed rub lime on their foreheads.
A mere faint, lasting less than ten minutes, is not usually considered to be a possession. A rub on the face with a sarong of the victim’s mother will usually suffice to bring the victim around. For seizures lasting longer, one elderly man, a hospital worker and my best informant on these matters, classified the varieties of possession into six types. Others might list fifteen, or, more likely, lump them all into one complex and ill-defined category.
His first type was kesurupan, which is derived from a root which means “to come in,” “to enter (something),” but also has the secondary meaning “sunset.” This, perhaps, reflects the belief that the period during which the sun is setting is an especially dangerous one so far as the spirits are concerned, for, like the Javanese themselves, the spirits are all out wandering about and visiting their friends at this time and one is likely to run into one in the street. (But twelve noon and twelve midnight are unusually dangerous times too.) Kesurupan is the common or garden variety of possession and accounts for the great majority of cases. A dukun (curer) is called (or, failing that, an old man, such as the informant himself, who knows about these matters) and addresses the stricken one: “What is your name? Where is your home? Why have you come here? What do you want?” These questions are addressed to the inhabiting spirit, who answers through the mouth of the possessed: “My name is Kijaji Bendok. My home is on the bridge in front of the market. I came here to eat and drink.” The spirit involved here is a santri, because kijaji is the title given to Koran scholars and teachers, men comparable to the Mid-Eastern ulama. But the lelembut could as likely be an abangan, in which case he might be called Sapu Djagad (sweeper of the world), or a prijaji, with a name like Radèn Baku Sentot, radèn being a Javanese court title. These are all well-known lelembut names. Having heard the spirit, the dukun will reply: “I will give you something to eat and drink, but when you are finished eating and drinking you must quickly go home again.” According to Javanese ideas, said the informant, the lelembuts drink liquor, rice wine usually, and eat incense. When he is through, the spirit will say out of his victim’s mouth: “All right, I’ll go home now.” Then the victim will shake three times or so rather violently, will go suddenly weak, and faint. When he recovers, he will remember nothing of what has gone on.
The second type, kampir-kampiran, means literally “to take a flying visit to someone,” “to come from a long distance and stop in briefly at a friend’s while on the way somewhere else.” Thus kampir-kampiran as a possession is the same as kesurupan except that the spirit is not from a local bridge or bamboo clump but is, say, a spirit from the Indian Ocean on his way to a large volcano to the east of Modjokuto who just happened to bump into the victim on the street. Kampel-kampelan is also similar except that the victim is not so obviously sick. He walks around and behaves more or less as usual, but acts rather oddly at times. For example, if Parto (the informant) comes back from the Hindu ruins just to the north of Modjolcuto and begins to hit his little boy, something he never otherwise does, his wife will say to him. “You must have been entered by a spirit at the ruins.” This kind of possession is mild, and usually a good bath will cure it.
Sétanan is like kampel-kampelan except more serious. One is still walking around and not severely ill, but it takes a dukiin to get the spirit out of him. The dukun will discover where one got the sétan and tell him to make certain kinds of offerings in order to be rid of it. The offering (ulih-ulih or sadjèn) usually consists of flowers, incense, perhaps certain kinds of leaves. The sétan eats this and leaves his victims in peace. Kedjiman is the same except that, whereas the sétans are Javanese and abangan, djims are Arabs and santri. These can stay a very long time. The man who has them is not sick, but is odd and behaves curiously. For example, he may eat an extraordinary lot, or, on the contrary, go very long without eating. His senses may be abnormally sharp and he may think a lot, often with greater cleverness than usual.
Kemomong, the last type, is a kind of voluntary devil’s pact. A man, usually someone who does not believe in God, becomes friends with a sétan —such as the one on the market bridge mentioned above—and the sétan enters him, a voluntary partnership on both sides. The man then becomes half crazy but may develop certain powers, say of curing, which he evidently feels are worth the cost; or he may merely do it for the experience of it, much as Brataséna, the shadow-play hero, once died on purpose merely because he had never been dead and wanted to see what it felt like.
Tujuls are another matter. Although some people say they can be gotten just by fasting and meditation, and others argue that you need not do even that (“It all depends on the tujul; if he wants to help you he will, if he doesn’t he won’t, no matter what you do”), most people think one has to make a kind of devil’s pact to get a tujul to do one’s bidding. The three people in the town of Modjokuto most universally held to be in possession of a tujul—a wealthy butcher, a very nouveau riche woman textile trader who prospered rather suddenly during the Japanese occupation, and an old-line hadji businessman who had been quite rich in the years before the war but who had not prospered since—were all said to have made such a pact. Each of them journeyed to various Hindu ruins lying in a great circle around Modjokuto, one in each of the directions: Borobodur to the west, Penataran to the south, Bongkeng to the east, and the grave of Sunan Giri, a Javanese culture hero, near Gresik to the north. At each of these ruins they swore an oath that if the spirit would give them a tujul they would deliver a magically killed human sacrifice for the spirit of the ruins each year—either a close relative or a friend. Later, it was generally agreed, these sorcery-practicing tujul-owners would have a very slow
and difficult death: their breath would come shorter and shorter, they would have continued pain and a prolonged high fever, and would have a tortuously slow time leaving the world.
Dying by inches is perhaps a small enough price to pay, because once one has a tujul the money flows in. The tujuls are able to steal with no chance of detection; and all one needs do for them in return is to give them a place to sleep and to put out for them each evening a little rice mush, which, since they are children (they are said to skip and hop in little circles when walking, as tiny children will), is their natural food. In town the tujuls steal money— the butcher’s tujul was vigorously accused (out of his hearing, of course) of stealing money from the women traders in the small market in our neighborhood at least once during my stay, but in the villages they are more likely to steal rice. One quite common rice thief of this sort is called gebleg because, though it is in the form of a chicken, it shuffles its feet heavily when it walks (making the sound bleg-bleg-bleg). It stuffs the rice up under its wings and walks back to its owner; then it flaps its wings, and the rice falls out into the owner’s granary.
People who are accused of having tujuls fit quite easily into a single social type. They are always rich, often having become so quite suddenly, and, usually but not always, they are misers; they wear old clothes, bathe in the river with the poverty-stricken coolies, and eat corn and cassava—a poor man’s dish—rather than rice, while all the time (it is said) their house is full of gold bars. Also, they often seem to be deviant socially. They talk loudly, are aggressive, lack manners, are sloppy dressers, and have a quite un-Javanese habit of blurting out to people just what is on their minds. The woman trader is of this sort. Before the war, said an informant (male), she was calm and withdrawn like Javanese women usually, but then all of a sudden she got rich, and now she is like a wild animal.
One of the most famous tujul owners in the Modjokuto area is an old hadji who lives in a village a few miles to the east of town. The richest man out that way, he is also the most miserly. He acquired his tujuls through the usual pact—promising to deliver four dead people to the spirits each year. He seeks his victims everywhere; he even looked for them in Mecca. The odd thing is that, although he has been doing this for years, it was only discovered in 1951 by another man—something of a dealer in the occult himself—who developed countermagic against the hadji. He gathered together thirty-three students and taught them special magical techniques for defeating tujuls. One Friday midnight the students attacked the tujuls of the hadji, but the latter called in reinforcements from among the spirits at the various ruins. The attacking students wore black spectacles in order to see the spirits and used flashlights as weapons, for where there is light there can be no spirits of any kind. The tujuls threw a tjakra (a magical ring-shaped weapon, used by Krishna in the Mahabharata) at the students but did not kill them, and, although the struggle was hard, the four victims were not taken. Now, it is said, every Friday midnight this struggle continues. People who see the students fighting think that they are mad because they strike the empty air. The first battle took place in the Hadji’s front yard, but now the war seems to move about from place to place.
there are numerous versions of the Javanese creation myth, Babad Tanah Djawi* In the one related to me by a shadow-play puppeteer in the village just to the north of Modjokuto the story opens with Semar, the wonderfully comic and wise shadow-play clown and the greatest of Javanese culture heroes, speaking with a powerful Hindu-Moslem priest, the first of Java’s long line of colonizers. The priest asks Semar: “Tell me the story of Java in the times before there were any men.” Semar replies that in those days the whole island was covered with primeval forest except for the small patch of rice fields he himself cultivated at the foot of Mount Merbabu (a volcano in Central Java), where he lived peacefully tilling the soil for ten thousand years. “What are you?” asked the startled priest. “Are you a man? Your age is tremendous! I never knew a man ten thousand years old before! It is not possible! You can’t be a man. Even the Prophet Adam only lived one thousand years! What kind of being are you? Confess the truth!”
“In truth,” says Semar, “I am not a man, I am the guardian spirit—the danjang—of Java. I am the oldest spirit of Java, and I am the king and ancestor of all spirits, and through them of all men. But,” he continues in a changed tone, “I have also a question to ask you. Why are you ruining my country? Why have you come here and driven my children and grandchildren out? The spirits, overcome by your greater spiritual power and religious learning, are slowly being forced to flee into the craters of the volcanoes or to the depths of the Southern Sea. Why are you doing this?” And the priest replies: “I have been ordered by the king of Rome [‘An Arab country west of India,’ explained the puppeteer] to fill this island with human beings. I am to clear the forest for rice fields, to set up villages, and to settle twenty thousand families here as colonists. This is the will of my king, and you cannot stop it. But those of the spirits who will protect us may continue to live in Java; I will tell you what you must do.” He then proceeds to outline the entire prospective history of Java down to modem times and describes Semar’s own role in the process, which is to be a spiritual advisor and magical supporter of all the kings and princes to come—that is, to continue to be Java’s chief danjang.
Thus, in this version at least, what the Javanese have in Babad Tanah Djawi (“the clearing of Java”) is not so much a creation myth as what might be called a colonization myth, which, considering Java’s history of successive “invasions” of Hindus, Moslems, and Europeans, is not surprising. To
* There is extant a written semi-historical legend entitled Babad Tanah Djawi composed at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the court of the Mataram kingdom of Central Java, evidently to legitimize Mataram’s ruling dynasty. A myth of the same name is still recounted orally in the countryside, but the versions of it are not always in very close concordance with the written Babad Tanah Djawi.
mbabad is to clear a tract of wilderness and turn it into a village complete with surrounding rice fields, to create a small island of human settlement amid a great sea of forest-dwelling spirits, although nowadays it is also used for the general preparation (plowing, raking, and so on) of a rice field which one must do at the beginning of the rice-growing cycle each year. The picture the myth presents is one of an incoming flow of migrants pushing back the harmful spirits into the mountains, uncultivated wild places, and the Indian Ocean as they move from the north coast to the south, all the while adopting some of the more helpful ones as protectors of themselves and their new settlements.
The usual name for a spirit with a fixed abode who may support the wishes of men is demit, although here again people are not consistent but tend to use such words as demit, dcmjcmg, lelembat, and sétan in both a wide and narrow sense, to indicate spirits in general and to indicate certain fairly definite sub-types of them in particular. Demits in the narrow sense live in holy places called pundèns,2 which may be marked by a small Hindu ruin (perhaps one little broken statue), a large banyan tree, an old grave, a nearly hidden spring, or some such topographical peculiarity.
There are a number of such pundèns in the Modjokuto area at various oversized or misshapen trees or at the various Hindu temple ruins scattered around, but by far the most famous, most often worshipped, and reputedly the most powerful is one in the dead center of the town of Modjokuto, at the edge of the public square (alun-ulun). His name is mBah Buda, literally “Grandfather Buddha,” bait the “Buddha” does not refer to Gautama, but merely to the fact that the shrine where he lives is marked with a Hindu-Buddhist relic.
The shrine, enclosed by a solid white fence, lies at the foot of a massive banyan tree and consists of a small foot-high stone statue of Ganesha, the Hindu elephant-god of wisdom; and there is a story that goes with it. A long time ago, “in the Buddhist time,” the Sultan of Solo, the great court city of Central Java, was warring with the King of Madura. The Sultan of Solo was winning, and he pursued the fleeing Madurese king north and east toward the latter’s homeland. En route he stopped at Modjokuto, then still an unsettled forest lying between the two kingdoms, to rest his troops. Thus the town which is here called Modjokuto got both its name—for its actual name is said to derive from an Old-Javanese word meaning “resting place”—and its shrine— for the king left the Ganesha to mark the place under the great banyan tree where he rested. Whatever its origin, however, the Ganesha is now certainly occupied by a demit. Once when it was taken to Bragang, some fifteen miles away, it returned under its own power. On another occasion a Dutch controleur (the lowest-ranking European official in the colonial bureaucracy) stationed in Modjokuto who kicked the Ganesha—evidently to show his disdain for the devices of the heathen—died within a week of a broken neck, and within the year his whole family followed him to the grave.
If one wants mBah Buda to do something for him, he must go to the shrine —though some say one can do this part at home—and beg pardon and forgiveness from the demit and promise to give a slametan in the demit's honor if his request is fulfilled. What is crucial for success is to want one’s wish badly enough, to want it with an unmovable and single mind and think of nothing else until it is granted. One petitioner compared it to crying for something as a child does: “You don’t cry outside, but inside, within your heart; you have to want it so much that you’ll die if you don’t get it; and if you do want it badly enough and keep at it long enough you will most certainly get it.” What one usually wants is restored health either for oneself or close relatives, or perhaps to find a lost object or to insure someone’s safety on a long trip. There is a difference of opinion as to whether one can wish for such things as success at cards, a new gong for one’s gamelan orchestra, or the love of another man’s wife, some people holding that mBah Buda responds only to “serious” requests; but it is clear that people ask for some rather unexalted blessings on occasion:
In connection with this [a discussion of divorce] Sutinah [the informant] told me about a time when she gave a slametan to mBah Buda when her older sister was still married to her second husband, and she said to the sister: “If you get a divorce and there isn’t too much trouble connected with it and everything is smooth and easy, then I’ll give a slametan to mBah Buda." Later, after the divorce, she gave the slametan and sent some of it [the food] to her sister too, with a note saying, this is the slametan for you-know-what.
The slametan one gives the demit after one has gained his wish (should one forget to do so, a black snake with white arrow marks on his back will crawl between one’s legs and remind him) should be given on a special day— the day on which Friday of the Western seven-day week coincides with Legi of the Javanese five-day market week, a coincidence which occurs every thirty-five days.
The slametan is a simple one of rice, a little chicken or fish, soybean-cake, and so on, plus some flowers. One can either take it to the shrine oneself or send a child with it, and most people do the latter. At the shrine the child gives the food to the caretaker, telling him what the offering is for—what the “in-tendon” is. The caretaker takes the food, burns incense, and spreads the flowers on the Ganesha’s head. Next he gathers up some of the old flowers others have brought and makes them up into a little packet which he gives to the child. This is taken home and mixed with water, and the person who gave the slametan either drinks it or uses it as a salve for purposes of general welfare or over-all slamet. People who find it awkward to cook up the rice can buy the flowers in the market for an Indonesian quarter and give one rupiah to the caretaker for the rice. The food is given out to the poor who crowd around the shrine waiting for it (anyone who is “brave” enough to ask for it, the caretaker said), but every time I watched this ritual it seemed that the caretaker, admittedly not very well-off himself, got the lion’s share of the food, which was considerable. On a good day I have seen over fifty people, some of them from twenty miles away, giving a slametan to mBah Buda.
Danjang is commonly but another name for demit (jang is a Javanese root meaning “spirit”). Like demits, danjangs live in special places called pundèns; like demits, they respond to people’s pleas for help and receive vowed slame-tans in return; and like demits, they never harm people but seek only to protect them. Unlike demits, however, some danjangs are considered to be spirits of actual historic figures now deceased: the founders of the village to which they are attached, the men who were the first to mbabad (i.e., clear) the land. Each village usually has one major danjang.* This danjang désa, when still a man, came to the village when it was but wilderness, cleared it, and distributed the land to his followers, family, and friends, becoming the first village headman (lurah). When he died he was buried, usually near the center of the village, and his grave thereupon became a pundèn, and he continues to watch over his village’s welfare. (Sometimes, however, there is no specific grave for the founding danjang.) Certain people may still regard themselves as his descendants, and he is said to determine magically who shall be village chief by controlling the movements of a special kind of political spirit called a pulling (most people say he actually is the pulung) :
He said that there was a land of “spiritual stuff" called a pulung which, visible and shaped like a moon, descends on the chosen candidate for village chief. Only village chiefs and^the king of the entire country have pullings (the latter’s being much larger), which shows that the position of a lurah is more important than that of a bupati or wedono [heads of a regency and a district, respectively]. When one lurah dies or goes out of office, his pulung leaves him and searches for the new lurah. (It sometimes momentarily goes abroad and is visible while he is in office when something special is up or the village is in danger.) The candidates often sit in the village square, and the pulung hovers over them choosing the one that is most pure. Lurah candidates sometimes give a slametan at the danjang's grave in order to attract the pulung. There is one pulung for every village. It stays with the lurah until he dies or no longer acts nobly. In the latter case it leaves him, his village becomes sick, famished, disorderly; people will no longer obey the chief. Soon he is forced to resign, and the man to whom the pulung has gone becomes the lurah. I asked him what had happened to the pulung that used to go to the king, and he said he thought it had gone to Djakarta and that Bung Karno [the President of the Republic] had the king’s pulung now.
The area over which the danjang désa has power is called the humaran. Kumar a (or kemara) means a voice out of the blue, a voice coming out of nothing, as when two weeks after a famous dukun has died one will suddenly
* Sometimes the danjang is considered to be merely a vague protective spirit, resident in a larger tree or some other natural phenomenon, who was a guardian of the area before human beings arrived, and is distinguished from the founder of the village, who is called the tjikal-bakal. Usually, however, the two are merged and the term danjang désa (“village danjang”) is used to refer to a single founder-guardian spirit. There may, however, be secondary danjangs (or demits) in the village besides the main one.
hear his voice without any visible source for it. Thus the humaran includes all the space above the village from which one could hear the sound of a human voice speaking on the ground. In addition, the four corners of the village are sometimes held to be occupied by protective spirits, also often called danjang and conceived of as spirit sons of the main danjang, who finds his permanent home in the center of the village.
In the town of Modjokuto itself, the danjang désa is a thief, Maling Kandari, buried in the old cemetery to the east of the center of town. But, in line with the general decadence of village political structure in the urban setting, he does not play a very important role in the minds of most townsmen. Only a few older, lower-class people seem to know much about him, and then only that he gained his control over the town area through trickery, deceit, and traffic with evil spirits.
In the villages, interest in the danjang désa is greater. For example, in Sumbersari, the village immediately to the north of Modjokuto, the name of the danjang is mBah Nur Wakit. Nur Wakit came to Sumbersari from the west, from Djogjakarta in Central Java. The King of Bragang, who was then ruling the area (in the story; actually the last King of Bragang had died three hundred years before Sumbersari was founded), granted him the uncleared land. He placed his wife in the dead center of the area he had been granted, protected her only by a thin fence of banana leaves, and instructed her that no matter what occurred she was not to move a muscle but to sit unmoved where he had placed her. He then ran around the entire village to determine its borders. A great typhoon blew up and the rain came in torrents; all the trees fell down and the land was cleared without anyone’s lifting an axe. Nur Wakit’s wife, seated immobile while trees fell all about her, was unharmed.
Nur Waldt, in addition to being the first lurah, was also a kijaji, an Islamic religious scholar and teacher. After a while his teaching duties grew so great that he turned the job of lurah over to his son, but when the latter drafted some of Nur Wakit’s students to work his own land for him, Nur Wakit cursed him blind. Although by birth Nur Waldt was a radèn mas— that is, a noble—he did not like to mix with prijajis; he thought them too proud and haughty, which is why he went out to the countryside to live among the common people. Like most ardent santris, he disapproved of the gamelan (the Javanese percussion orchestra) and the wajang (the shadow-play), and during the time he was lurah, gamelans were unable to produce any sound in Sumbersari. Even today a man who holds a wajang is likely to fall sick or grow poor as a result. Almost all the lurahs in Sumbersari have been santris, the villagers say (just as in town they were reputed to have all been thieves), and those few who have been abangans.have lasted only a year or two. That these considerations are not merely theoretical in the minds of people today can be seen from the following note from an abangan informant:
Just two months ago there was [a special ceremony for an only child at which a wajang is traditionally given] in Tempel [a village]. . . . There wasn’t any wajang because wajangs aren’t allowed in Tempel because the danjang is a santri; so instead they had a kentrung [another kind of entertainment in which a man recites stories], ... If you have a wajang in Tempel you will get poor; that is what happened to her father-in-law . . . and to a man named Pak Setro, who had wajangs in spite of the prohibition.3
Nur Wakit finally died in 1889 and was buried in the center of the village, at the very spot on which his wife had waited while he cleared the land and where he had later built his religious school. Like any good danjang, however, he still guards his village. Every so often he emerges from his grave, talcing the form of a pure white tiger, in order to warn the village of an impending epidemic, flood, or other disaster. At these times, one may glimpse him just for a moment, digging like a cat with his front paws at the crossroads. He never attacks anyone, for his purpose is to warn the inhabitants of the approaching trouble; as soon as he is certain he has been seen, he disappears. He digs briefly at each crossroads to make certain someone sees him, and then he goes to the home of the lurah—perhaps in a dream—and tells him what kind of magic to make in order to protect the village against the threatened disaster. Satisfied that his village is safe, he returns to his grave.
Properly speaking, mentèk is the name of a rice disease.
Strictly speaking, a pundèn is anything toward which one offers reverence for pundi, the root, means to praise or offer reverence. Thus a magical dagger or a grave of a hero may be a pundèn. Some of the pundèns in the Modjokuto area were such (mythical) burial places of heroes from the Hindu-Javanese times.
In a neighboring village west of Modjokuto the danjang is an abangan who was particularly fond of drinking gin and smoking opium. In that village a wajang brings good luck, and Arabic music, a favorite santri amusement, brings misfortune.