Chapter 6
In contrast to other rites of passage, all funerals (lajatan) are still inevitably conducted by the modin, the official religious specialist of the village. A few people call him now and then to lead prayers for birth and circumcision ceremonies (he is almost always a strong santri), and in any case he must take the groom down to the naib’s office for the Islamic part of the marriage ceremony; but it is at death that he really comes into his own as general director of the entire affair.
When there is a death in a family the first thing they do is to send for the modin, and the second is to spread the word around the neighborhood that a death has occurred. If death occurs in the late afternoon or during the night, they wait until the next morning to begin the funeral process.
Javanese funerals occur as quickly as possible after death. A man dead at 10 a.m. will be buried by noon or shortly thereafter, and a man dead at 4 p.m. will be in the grave by ten the next morning. Although the family will sometimes delay an hour or so if some relatives are coming from a distance, apparently they rarely delay long enough: these distant relatives never seemed to be on time for any of the funerals I saw. The usual reason
given when one asks why there is so much haste is that the spirit of the
dead man is flying around loose (it is often conceived of as a bird) until he is buried, and this is dangerous to everyone, especially to the survivors. The sooner he is buried, the sooner his spirit can return to its natural home.
As soon as they receive the news of a death, the neighbors drop whatever they are doing and go off to the house where the death has occurred. (Even salaried workers on the railroad and in the government offices leave immediately on such news.) Each woman brings a tray of rice, which,
after a handful of it has been thrown out the door by the bereaved, is
immediately cooked for a slametan. The men bring tools with which to make grave markers, a litter to carry the body to the grave (in most cases, however, this is rented or provided by the burial society), and wooden supports to put inside the grave. Actually, only a half-dozen or so of the very close neighbors need bring tools; the other men just come and stand around chatting in the yard.
More than any other single passage rite the funeral draws everyone. Class lines, ideological antagonisms, and personal quarrels often modify the strictly geographical attendance at other slametans, especially in the town of Modjokuto, but everyone who lives near a dead man and anyone in the town who knew him at all well or is in any way related to him comes to his funeral. Again, one finds the notion that one should go to other people’s funerals so they will come to his. When I questioned one man about a burial society to which he belonged, he said that the money one gets at death is only nominal. What is important is that all the members of the society are obligated to come to a member’s funeral.
When the modin arrives, he strips the corpse, laying a sarong loosely over the genitals, ties the jaw up with a string over the top of the head so it cannot drop open, and ties the feet together. The arms are crossed on the chest, right hand over left, with the tips of the fingers touching the shoulders, and the body is laid with its head to the north, a lamp being sometimes lit above the head. The corpse is then washed by the close relatives and friends of the deceased—preferably (but not necessarily) the women if the deceased is female, the men if male—under the direction of the modin. The relatives hold the corpse on their laps while sitting on chairs so the water drenches them and their clothes. This act is called pcingkon, the same word which is used when one cradles a small child on one’s lap, or when the groom cradles the not yet pubescent wife, and as such is a last demonstration of nurturing love by the survivors for the deceased.
The corpse is bathed in the front yard, protected from general view by hastily erected bamboo matting—although people feel free to look over the matting at will. Usually three different kinds of water, each in a different earthenware container, are used: one with flowers in it; one with money, a special kind of tree leaf, and various herbs in it; and one plain, without anything in it. In addition, there is a shampoo for the hair made of burned rice stalks. The modin pours the first dipper of water on the corpse, and then the other relatives each take a turn.
Being able to hold one’s deceased father, wife, sister, uncle, or whomever on one’s lap while he is being washed, is called being tegel—able to do something odious, abominable, and horrible without flinching, to stick it out despite an inward fear and revulsion. No one is absolutely required to do this; and if none of the family members or close relatives is tegel, the corpse may be laid crossways on three banana-tree trunks. Since they are expected to be tegel and if they are not are severely criticized, most people would feel deeply ashamed to withdraw from this duty or to show any strong open emotion while performing it. A young girl I knew was crying slightly when her father died rather suddenly, and her relatives told her she would not be allowed to wash the body if she did not stop crying, which she immediately did. Two reasons are given for the prohibition of tears near the corpse: it malees the atmosphere dark so that the deceased will have great difficulty finding his path to the grave; and it so upsets the deceased that he cannot bear to leave the house.
After the bathing the bathers wash their hands and feet in the water which is left. The orifices of the body are plugged with cotton dipped in perfume, the body is wrapped in white muslin and tied in three places (feet, waist, and top of the head) by the modin, and then about a half-dozen santris begin to chant the Koran under his leadership. The chant takes place next to the corpse, which has now been placed in the main living room, and lasts from five to ten minutes. Then the body is placed on the litter, a bamboo framework over which brand new textiles have been stretched with strings of flowers laid across them. These textiles are not buried with the corpse; and one of the standing graveyard jokes seems to be to bargain with the man who carries them back from the grave as though he were peddling them.
The litter is carried into the yard, where the descendants (usually children) of the deceased duck back and forth under it three times. This is to indicate that they are ilclas—that their emotions have been quieted and have been flattened out into a true detachment, that they feel no psychological pain at the departure of the deceased, and that their hearts are already free. A few coins wrapped in paper are then distributed to each person at the funeral to symbolize the same idea: as they can give away money without feeling any remorse, so they can let the deceased go with no wish to cling to him emotionally. (Sometimes, but not always, a few of the guests are given banana-leaf dishes of rice to eat at this time, in which case they get no coins, for the latter are a substitute for the former.) A vessel filled with water is thrown on the ground and broken, also to symbolize ilclas, and the litter moves off to the graveyard, carried by the men, while the women remain behind at the house, scattering salt so the soul will not come back and disturb them. (Children, except the dead man’s own, are kept away from funerals because they are so easily entered by spirits.)
As there is almost always a graveyard within a half mile, the funeral procession is not extended. At the head of it walk the men carrying the homemade wooden grave markers—sharply pointed ones for a male corpse, flat or rounded ones for a female—marked usually only with the name and date of death of the deceased. They are followed by the men carrying the planks for the grave.* Next comes a man carrying a golden or bronze bowl containing yellow rice, turmeric, various coins, flowers, and betel, all of which he strews along the ground as he walks to show the following corpse, borne usually by four to eight men, the way to the grave. Behind the corpse, over whose head is held a parasol to shield it from the sun, comes the body of attending men, rarely less than fifteen, sometimes as many as two hundred.
* The grave is prepared during the time the washing and winding are going on. It is dug about three feet wide and about two or three feet deep. In the floor of the excavation a slit-trench just wide and deep enough for the corpse is cut. The planks are placed over the trench after the body has been placed in it so that when the grave is filled no earth falls directly on the corpse.
People change off in the jobs of scattering the rice and flowers, holding the parasol, and bearing the corpse, for it is considered necessary that all male members of the family and very close friends should “feel the weight of the corpse” for at least a short time.
The ceremony at the graveyard is brief. The body is taken off the litter and put into the grave on its side, being handed down to three men standing in the grave. The body is laid to rest on seven stones with its head pointed to the north. The strings on the shroud are loosened and the face exposed so that the cheek touches the earth, and then either the modin or some other santri jumps down into the grave and shouts the Confession of Faith three times into the dead man’s ear. The planks are then laid in place, the dirt pushed into the grave, and die grave markers erected. The modin reads the tèlkim, a set funeral speech addressed to the deceased, first in Arabic and then in Javanese (some old-fashioned moditis refuse to translate it, however, regarding this as against the strict tenets of Islam):
Oh, you are already living in the world of the grave (Moslem corpses remain slumbering in the grave until Judgment Day—a kind of limbo). Do not forget the Confession of Faith. You will shortly be visited by two messengers of God, two angels (Munglcar and Nakir, who visit each new corpse to question him about his faith, etc.). (The angels will say:) “O human being, who is your God and what is your religion, and who is your prophet and what is your religious lodestar, and what is the direction in which you turn to pray, and what has been commanded of you and who are your brothers?” You must answer clearly and forthrightly; you must not be afraid or startled: “The Lord Allah is my God; Islam is my religion; Muhammad is my Prophet; the Holy Koran is my lodestar; I turn toward the Black Stone of Mecca to pray; the five daily prayers are what I have been commanded; all Moslems, men and women, are by brothers.” O Pak Tjipto (the name of the deceased), you know already know that the questions of the angels do in fact exist, that life in the grave does in fact exist, that the balancing of good and evil deeds does in fact exist, that heaven and hell indeed do in fact exist, and that the Lord Allah will wake each individual in the grave on Judgment Day is a fact as well.
After this the great mass of mourners goes back to their homes or jobs, but a small group of close neighbors, friends, and relatives returns to the house for a slameian. (This group must include all those who actually worked at the funeral—who dug the grave, made the grave markers, etc.). All death slametans are marked by two special food symbols; the small round rice-flour pancakes called apem, which are the special food of the dead and of one’s ancestors;* and a flattened-out disc of rice with two large cones of rice seven or eight inches high. The flattened rice again symbolizes iklas; but in addition the contrast between the flat disk and the cones is supposed to suggest the difference between death and life—the flattened-out featurelessness of death and the phallic upward-directedness of life. However, some others say one of the cones is for the living, the other for the dead.
Slametans of exactly the same form, but of increasing size in terms of the
* Sometimes one finds apem cakes at other slametans too, where their intent is always to honor the ancestors; but their real place is in death rituals.
number of guests and the length of the chant, are held three, seven, forty, and one hundred days after death, on the first and second anniversaries of the death, and on the thousandth day after death. Each child of the deceased who maintains a separate household must give the whole series of slametans. The last slametan, which marks the point at which the body is thought to have decayed entirely to dust, is the most elaborate. One is supposed to kill ritually a dove, goose, or other fowl, which is then washed in flower water, shampooed, and wrapped in muslin exactly as the corpse was. (This ceremony is called the kékah, and sometimes occurs at an earlier slametan, but in any case only once. It is often omitted altogether nowadays.) The apem and the rice-disc symbol of death are omitted; the whole chicken for the Prophet and the various other foods used for slametans on happier occasions are re-introduced; and once again one gives out coins to the guests as a symbol of one’s final turning from the dead toward the living. After this slametan the gap between the dead and the living is absolute, but for one’s parents one should go to their grave to strew flowers on each anniversary of their death, on the day before the Fast begins, when one is ill or when one’s children are, and any time one happens to dream of them, for this means that they are hungry and wish to be fed. (One may, if the dream is vivid enough, give a small slametan and take some of it to a prayer house and have the santris there chant a while for the dead; or one may merely put some food, tea, and flowers at the crossroad.)
After death one also puts out food for the dead—the kind of food the deceased especially liked—near the sentong tengah spot in the house or by the bed he died in for 40 days after death, and usually a sadjèn is added. One I saw included an ancient photograph of the deceased. If one wishes, he may for about 35 rupiahs hire some santris to chant in their prayer house an hour or two each night for seven days after death, and even some pretty anti-Islamic people do this. As an old santri lady said to me in reference to my vigorously abangan landlady, “People like Bu Ardjo hate santris like me, but they need us to do their praying for them.”
the mode of a Javanese funeral, as one can see from the foregoing description, is not one of hysterical bereavement, unrestrained sobbing, or even of formalized shrieks of grief for the deceased’s departure. Rather it is a calm, undemonstrative, almost languid letting go, a brief ritualized relinquishment of a relationship no longer possible. Tears are not approved of and certainly not encouraged; and one sees remarkably few of them. The effort is to get the job done, not to linger over the pleasures of grief. The detailed busy-work of the funeral, the politely formal social intercourse with the neighbors pressing in from all sides, the series of slametans stretched out at intervals for almost three years—the whole momentum of the Javanese ritual system—are supposed to carry one through the grief process evenly and without severe emotional disturbance.
Iklcis, that state of willed affectlessness, is the watchword, and although it is often difficult to achieve, it is always striven for.
I went to buy a sarong from Mudjito, whose wife died suddenly about two weeks ago. Mudjito was still rather upset about it evidently, smiling a nervous smile from ear to ear and talking about it without a pause for breath from the moment I came in until the moment I left. ... He said first, as Javanese inevitably do when they “have trouble,” “I beg your pardon a thousand times because my wife is not here” (that is, please lighten my burden of grief by giving me your pardon); and I mumbled in return that I was sorry I had not come to see him sooner. He then went on at great length about how he was iklcis, that it was God that took his wife away, and that he had no right to complain. He said that he was just iklas and bent to the will of God (Mudjito was a santri and thus more likely to ascribe things to the will of God than an abangan would be). There was nothing he could do anyway. When first she died, he could see no reason to go on working (I noticed him already in the store the day after the death, people going in and out paying their respects). What was the point of it? He said that he felt that his wife was not evil and had done no wrong, and he felt that she didn’t deserve to die so young. But after a while he began to see that ... he should be iklas, and he slowly talked himself into being iklas, and now that he was truly iklas he didn’t feel anything at all any more. He said that’s the way one should feel. One’s feeling should be flat, even, always on the same level. One shouldn’t go up and down in feeling, very unhappy one minute and very happy the next, but try to keep one’s feelings evened out. He said that happiness and unhappiness are irrevocably connected with one another; so, if one is happy now, he will surely be unhappy later on, and one should not indulge himself in either feeling. If one feels happy, one should remember the unhappiness he had before and that he will have again; and if one is unhappy, he should remember the happiness he had before and he will have again later, and so keep his emotions averaged out. This is what he has tried to do. It is the right thing to do. It is wrong to be very sad, depressed, and upset; one should try to keep his feelings without mountains and valleys—on a level plain. He said one shouldn’t keep strong emotions locked up in his heart, but iklas. “Just like when I sell you this sarong, I should feel I got the right price, and you should too, so that neither of us is upset inside his heart. We must be iklas toward it, and that is the way I feel about my wife’s death.” ... He said he felt at first as if he would like to die too, but then he talked himself out of it and said he had to carry on to see the children raised.
Sometimes this self-discipline proves to be too difficult and more direct measures need to be applied.
I asked him if he was upset when his mother died a few years ago, and he said no, she was already old; and besides, he had been down to see her about four or five days before she died, and she was very ill, and so he knew she was going to die. So he was not startled by it. . . . He said one doesn’t get upset when people are old and sick and then die. How about for babies, I asked. He replied, “Yes, for them you often get very upset. If they are only a month or two old, you don’t get very upset,1 but if they are already a year or a year and a half old and you have been watching them play around and they are very cute and all and then they die, you can get quite upset.” He said that when his youngest child died (evidently not so long ago) at the age of one and a half, his oldest son, who is about 17 or 18, cried solidly for a week, couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep or anything. Finally, he went and got a dukun for him, and the dukun came and gave the boy some magic tea to drink and uttered a spell over the boy enjoining him to forget about the death, which he then did. He stopped crying and ate and slept normally.
Despite deviations such as this, most people do what can only be called a remarkable job of at least not showing their grief.
Death does not seem to hold any overwhelming terrors for most Javanese, and people talk about it directly with little show of anxiety. Once at a funeral of a man whom I did not know and had never seen I was sitting with two old men, one about sixty, the other about seventy. “How old was the deceased?” I asked, somewhat tactlessly trying to find out how much of a blow his death had been to his family. “Was he already old or did he die in middle age?” “Oh,” said the sixty-year-old, “he was already quite old; it was already his time to go. He was just a little younger than Pak Paidin here,” pointing gracefully with his thumb to the seventy-year-old, to which Pak Paidin immediately agreed without any show of gloom or even graveyard humor, but merely as a man would agree with any simple statement of fact.
Whatever the deeper psychological reasons for this relative equanimity about personal extinction may be, assuming it is real, there are beliefs on the intellectual level to which one might point in partial explanation. One informant insisted that curers can never have any effect on the length of one’s life. If one is going to die at thirty, he will die at thirty; if at sixty, sixty. All the dukun can do is make life easier for one so that, instead of being ill from one’s thirtieth year until one’s fated death, at, say, seventy-five, one goes to a dukun to be cured and live happily to the day of death. There are variations on this belief in fate, however; for some hold that a man’s life will be lengthened if he behaves ethically, and other people (or sometimes the same ones—the logical compatibility of separate beliefs is not usually a serious issue for abangans) think that premature death may be the result of sheer accident, sorcery, consorting with evil spirits, taking a false oath, an especially fast pace of living, persistent and prolonged emotional upset, or a sudden trauma of some sort.
But perhaps the major intellectual reason Javanese seem not to fear death so much as some other peoples is that it seems to them to bear the characteristics of that emptiness of emotional and intellectual content, that inner restraint of the will, that they value so highly.
He talked a little about his attitude toward death. It was all determined absolutely by God, so there was no use worrying about it and no use feeling sorry when someone else died. I asked him why some sinners flourished as the green bay tree, and so forth, and he said that he thought God was giving them a chance to understand. He laughed and said, “Yes, you often see old bent-over men who are real sinners.” And he said he thought that God keeps them living in hopes they’ll finally see the light, whereas the young good ones are all right anyway and so they die early, as a land of reward, for it is a good thing to be dead. He spoke happily, not in any weitschmerz mood. I asked why he thought this, and he said, “Well, when you are dead, you don’t want anything: you don’t want an auto, you don’t want money, you don’t want a wife, you don’t have any wants at all. Like God—God doesn’t need any money, or wife, or auto, does He? Well, that’s wonderful, not to want anything; and after you’re dead, that’s the way it is.” I said, “Well, if it is so good being dead, why don’t people kill themselves?” He was properly offended at this idea and said, “That would be wrong because it would be from your own will. It is up to God to decide when you should die, not yourself. It is wrong to commit suicide because you are trying to take into your own hands affairs which are properly God’s.” But he said he was ready to die any time (he was about seventy); he thought it a good state not to want anything, not to need anything, like God, and he seemed to find it rather unimaginable (mboten masuk akal—literally, “it doesn’t go into the mind”) that this didn’t seem like an obvious and self-evident proposition to me.
Three separate notions of life after death, again often held concurrently by the same individual, are present in Modjokuto. The first is the Islamic version of the concept of eternal retribution, of punishment and reward in the afterworld for the sins and good deeds in this one. This is, naturally enough, strongest among the santris, often—especially among the more modern groups —complete with ideas of hell-fire, the constant moral inspection of the individual by God, and the awfulness of absolute Judgment (but never, of course, original sin, a concept notably absent in Islam). One finds it throughout the society, although usually rather vaguely conceived and only half believed in outside of strictly Moslem circles.
Much more popular with abangans is the concept of sampuma, which means literally “perfect” or “complete” but which indicates in this context that the individual personality completely disappears after death and nothing is left of the person but dust. (Like many peoples around the world, the Javanese, although they often conceive of the dead as spirits annoying the living or demanding worship from them, never consider seriously what it must be like to be a spirit and never reflect that they will become one themselves. One sometimes hears the idea that spirits of the dead who attack people are those of individuals who have been evil in their lifetime, and sometimes also sétans and the like are held to originate partly from this source, although this is as often explicitly denied. )
The third view, which is extremely widely held by all but santris, who condemn it as heretical, is the notion of reincarnation—that when a person dies his soul enters shortly thereafter into an embryo on its way to being bora. The usual way in which this occurs is that a pregnant woman feels a sudden intense craving for some special food—an orange out of season or a duck egg —and the soul is inside this food and so enters the woman’s womb and is reborn as her child* Often but not always reincarnation occurs within the same family, although the relationship may be rather distant and the individual in whom the soul is reincarnated need not necessarily be of the same sex as the deceased. It may be heralded by a dream on the part of the mother or established by a similarity of features in the child and die recently deceased or by a similar birthmark. It is not wise to tell a child when it is still young of whom it is the reincarnation, for this might make the soul within the child ashamed, and he would fall sick. After he is over six or so, it does not matter any more. When I asked people of whom they were the reincarnation, they never seemed to know, although they could almost always tell me of whom their children were reincarnations. Sometimes people hold to the Hindu notion of advancement and regression in the stages of being according to one’s deportment while alive; but most abangans leave this sort of thing to prijajis to reflect upon and use the idea of reincarnation primarily to explain personal peculiarities in their children and strange behavior on the part of an odd animal now and then, such as dogs who fast, as humans often do, on Mondays and Thursdays.
The Javanese have sometimes been said to worship their ancestors, but, except for the vague apostrophes to “the ancestors” taken generally or to one’s own ancestors as “grandfathers and grandmothers” in spells and at slametans, the burning of incense to “ancestors” on Thursday nights by a few people, and the decoration of family graves now and again, evidence of any kind of ancestor cult is absent in Modjokuto. Javanese claim they reckon kinship ascent eight generations back and have terms for each level (father, grandfather, great-grandfather . . .); but I never knew anyone who knew his ancestors by name back farther than his grandfather, and I have never heard of an ancestor, other than parents, being petitioned by name. Javanese “ancestor worship”, in present-day Modjokuto at least, amounts to little more than a pious expression of respect for the dead plus a lively awareness of the necessity of being on good terms with one’s own deceased father and mother and of being sure to feed them some rice or flowers when they appear in one’s dreams.
Funerals for infants arc almost always abbreviated, and usually only the initial slametan and perhaps the three-day slametan are held; also, as the baby is innocent, the tèlkim speech at the grave is omitted, as it is for children generally.