Chapter J
In addition to the cycle of slametans connected with the points of passage in the life of the individual, there is another cycle, much less elaborated and emphasized, connected with the yearly Moslem calendar.1 Having adopted the Islamic pattern of time reckoning by lunar months and the holy days which are attached to it (the orthodox significance of which remain a concern only of santris), the Javanese have felt obliged to celebrate its sacred time periods in the only way they know: by giving slametans. However, except for the Prophet’s Birthday and the complex of slametans centering around the Fast,2 these ceremonies have remained simple and rather unimportant and are given only sporadically.
The following are calendrical slametans which the Javanese recognize:
1 Sura: This is a Buddhist rather than a Moslem holiday, and as such it is celebrated only by those who are self-consciously anti-Moslem. With the development since the war of some vigorously anti-Moslem sects and individual religious teachers preaching a return to “original” Javanese customs, slametans on 1 Sura have perhaps increased slightly in frequency. Some particularly anti-Islamic individuals even fast in Sura instead of in Pasa, but this is rather rare.
10 Sura: In honor of Hasan and Husein, the grandsons of the Prophet,
who, the story goes, wanted to give a slametan for Muhammad when the Prophet was fighting with the infidels. They carried rice (where they got rice in Arabia is not discussed) to the river to wash it, but the horses of the enemy came by and kicked it away into the river. The two boys wept and then picked up the rice and found it mixed with sand and pebbles, but they made porridge of it anyway. Thus this slametan is marked by two bowls of porridge—one with pebbles and sand in it for the grandsons to eat, and one with peanuts and bits of fried cassava in it to represent the impurities, which the people eat. Although some people said this essentially Shi’ite but locally distorted ritual was still sometimes given, I never saw one in Modjokuto, and it is at any rate quite rare.
12 Mulud: The day on which, by agreed convention, the Prophet both was born and died. This slametan is called Muludan (this and the name of the month itself, Mulud, are derived from the Arabic mattlud, “nativity”). It is marked by a whole stuffed chicken (the insides are taken out, cleaned, and replaced, and the chicken is then tied up), the major offering to the Prophet at all slametans. This slametan is perhaps the most regularly given of the calendrical slametans.
27 Redjeb: This slametan (called Redjeban) celebrates the Mi’radj, the one-night ascension of Muhammad to face God. The food is the same as on Muludan, and although it is given fairly frequently (always on a very simple scale) very few non-santris have much of an idea what its purpose is supposed to be.
29 Ruwah: The beginning of the Fast, called Megengan (from pegeng, “to wean”). This slametan is invariably given by all those who have at least one parent dead. (Ruwah, the name of the month, comes from the Arabic arwah, “souls of the dead.”) Like the death slametans proper, it is marked by the presence of the rice-flour pancake called apem, which is the Javanese food symbol of death. Just before the slametan one goes to the cemetery to scatter flowers on the graves of the parents involved, and the dead parents supposedly come to the slametan to eat the odor of the food. One also bathes thoroughly to purify oneself for the Fast. The Megengan is given, unlike most other slametans, just before (rather than after) sunset, and as such marks the last legitimate daylight eating before the Fast.
21, 23, 25, 27, or 29 Pasa: The slametan held on one of these dates is called Maleman (from malem, “night, evening”) because it is given at night, eating in the daytime being forbidden during Pasa. (Relatively few non-santris, however, actually observe this prohibition, and people who are not keeping the Fast show no reluctance about eating publicly during the daytime while others are fasting.) One chooses one of these dates either just offhand or by a pétungan divination applied to one’s birth date. The last date, the 29th, is called Djagalan—the Day of the Butcher—because traditionally the butcher spent the other days slaughtering animals for other people’s slametans, and so the last day was reserved for him alone; but this is no longer observed. Sometimes people say that the 21st, 23rd, and 25th are for “true Moslems” (i.e., santris), die 27th for young people, and the 29th for the old; but how widely held this belief is I am not certain. Just about every abangan gives a Maleman on one or another of these dates. In the villages both Muludan and Maleman are commonly village-wide celebrations held at the village chief’s house, to which all the families of the village bring slametan offerings which are then exchanged, much as at the village cleansing celebration to be described later.
1 Sawal: The breaking of the Fast, called Bruwah.* Yellow rice and a kind of omelet are the special foods. Only people who actually fast are supposed to give this slametan, but some non-fasters do so also. The dead are sometimes held to return to earth for this slametan too, and people then follow it with another trip to the graves of their parents.
7 Sawal: A small slametan called Kupatan. The only people who are supposed to give this are those who have had small children who have died— which must include nearly every adult in Java, although this slametan is not in fact very frequently given. At seven in the morning one makes kupats, which are little packets of glutinous rice, and somewhat similar packets called lepets. Some of these are hung outside the door so that the small dead children can return and eat out there without bothering anyone inside.
10 Besar: This is the day honoring Abraham’s sacrifice and the day on which the pilgrims gather in Mecca for the re-enactment of the sacrifice. Although the holiday is important to santris, who butcher oxen and goats for the poor, the slametan is only rarely given. It should be noted that in none of these “Islamic” slametans are sadjèns prepared—or at least they are not supposed to be.
Muliidcin, the slametan for the birthday of the Prophet, and Maleman, the evening slametan toward the end of the Fast, are the two most important of the calendrical ceremonies. Abangans have a saying: “If you are willing to give the Maleman and are willing to give the Muludan, you are already a Moslem. If you don’t give the Maleman and don’t give the Muludan, you are not of Muhammad’s community”—a view of Islamization which is, needless to say, strongly rejected by the orthodox. To say to a man that he “doesn’t know Muludan (or Maleman)” is to say to him that he has no religion and is therefore an animal, a rather serious thing to say to a Javanese, for whom sheer animality is the quintessence of evil. (The only punishment for incest I could ever elicit was that “they would be made to eat grass like animals.”)
The exact meaning of Maleman is not easy to discover; everyone you meet seems to have a different idea—or no idea at all—about it. I have been told that it was on these days that the Prophet readied his arms and army to return to the war against the infidels, resting on the even-numbered days in between (which are called trowongan—“holes, gaps”), and finally returning victoriously to die battlefield on Rijaja, the great holiday which ends the Fast. Another rather ingenious gentleman, a puppeteer, told me the Prophet was incarcerated in hell all through the Fast, and toward the end people were expecting him to return and so prepared a feast for him; but on the 21st he didn’t come, on the 23rd he didn’t come, and so forth, and he finally arrived on Rijaja. Some say that it is one of these days—no mortal knows which— that the angels in heaven fix a mortal’s fate for the coming year, and so one gives a slametan in the hope that they will go easy on him.** Others say that
:|! This date, 1 Sawal, is also the great Javanese holiday Rijaja, which is described in the Conclusion of this report.
^'This notion is evidently derived from the more general Malaysian-Islamic concept of the Lailatul Kadar, the Night of Power. On this night—it is one of the Maleman dates, but again no human can predict which one—God sends an angel down to earth, and all who are fortunate enough to be giving a slametan on that night will receive great blessings in the coming year.
the Koran began descending on the 21st, continued to do so on the 23rd, and so on, being completely in the hands of Muhammad by Rijcija. (Actually, the date that the Koran began to descend is 17 Pasa, but only santris celebrate this day, and they do so with prayers in the mosque and through sermons.) Pak Parto, my most reliable informant in matters of this sort, said that for aban-gans the Malemans represent the first, third, fifth, seventh, and ninth months of pregnancy; Rijaja is the birth of the baby; and Kupatan represents the burial of the umbilical cord—all of which is ingenious, if nothing else. Still other interpretations of Maleman are that people are merely inviting the dead to return on Rijaja; it represents the abangan method of zakat-fitrah, the obligatory giving of alms of Rijaja; or it has no meaning whatsoever and represents the pagan love of ritual on the part of the Javanese who are unable or unwilling to embrace the strict simplicities of pure Islam. Stripped of its evaluative elements, this last statement probably comes as close to the truth as any.
Unlike the rites-of-passage slametans, Muludan, Megengan, Maleman, and Bruwah are given by everyone at the same time, the result being not only that prices in the market go up somewhat but that on those days people go around from slametan to slametan in a kind of neighborhood trading-off pattern. The neighborhood principle is most strong in these slametans, and one rarely invites anyone but the eight or so nearest neighbors, so that one sees small groups of men going about from one house to the next to hold five-minute slametans (which, nevertheless, take the women of the house the entire day to prepare), one right after the other. In my case I went to six slametans during the Maleman period and held my own on the 27th—the composition of the audience being just about the same at each one. One can avoid a little of this by sending out tond jo leans (or berkats)—i.e., slametan food wrapped in banana-leaf baskets—to the homes of a few of the more distant people or to relatives living elsewhere whom one wishes to honor.* For a person not to invite someone to his slametan who has invited him or who has sent him food, or to ignore a very close neighbor, would be a terrible insult, and seems never to occur (except that sometimes when two people are mutually angry, they will break off all communication entirely, in which case they will be omitted from each other’s slametans).
In connection with calendrical slametans we may discuss the ceremonies surrounding the agricultural cycle. In the town of Modjokuto these rituals are given very seldom and when given are not felt to be of much importance. Even in the countryside they seem no longer to have the importance or show the degree of elaboration ascribed to them by earlier writers. In general, crop slametans are given only in connection with the cultivation of rice, not for the cultivation of dry crops, although sometimes someone will put out a small offering in connection with an onion or soybean crop.
When the rice season is approaching, the peasant seeks out an older more knowledgeable man who applies a pétungan numerological system to select the correct day on which to “open” (i.e., begin plowing) the land. When this
* In the villages this pattern of sending out tondjokan food packets is rather more extensive and amounts to a wholesale exchange of food among the various households. This pattern is also sometimes called wèwèhan, “mutual gift-sending.” day arrives, a small slametan called wiwit sawali (“beginning the rice field”) is held at midmoming in the field, and anyone who happens to be passing by must be invited to participate. In the evening of the same day a small slametan is often held in the peasant’s house. Another small slametan is sometimes held in the house when the rice is sown in the nurseries, and yet another at the time of transplanting, although both of these are quite commonly omitted. Toward the end of the growing season, after the first weeding has taken place and the rice is beginning to bend over with the weight of its grains, a tingkeban or, roughly, “rice pregnancy” slametan, is held, also in the house. But the most important crop ceremony is the slametan metik, a harvest or first-fruits ritual, and this is still often carried out on a fairly elaborate scale, especially in the villages.
Behind the harvest ritual lies the story of Tisnawati and Djakasudana. Tisnawati, the daughter of Batara Guru, the king of the gods, fell in love with Djakasudana, a mortal. In anger, her father turned her into a rice stalk and, pitying her human husband, who merely sat and gazed sorrowfully at his transformed wife, changed Djakasudana into a rice stalk also. The harvest ritual re-enacts their marriage, and is often referred to as temantèn pari, or “rice marriage.”* For this ceremony a specialist called a tukang metik is employed. (Metik means “to pluck.”) About a month before the harvest is to occur the tukang metik chooses a day by numerology. If he chooses, for example, Ngahad-ICliwon (Ngahacl is another name for Minggu, or Sunday), then on the fourth consecutive Ngahad-Kliwon after his computation is made the harvest ceremony takes place, and the harvest itself the day after that. On the day of the ceremony the tukang metik, usually accompanied by guests of the owner of the field, circles the field several times, chanting a spell which begs for the forgiveness and blessings of Tisnawati (or mBok Sri) and Djakasudana. Then he burns incense, sets out offerings, and cuts a small number of stalks, depending upon the number of the day (usually 13, for example, in the case of Ngahad-Kliwon), these stalks being called the mantèn (bride and groom). They are taken back by the tukang metik, usually at the head of a procession of the guests, to the rice granary and hung up on the wall, where they remain until that year’s rice harvest has been entirely consumed or sold. Back at the house a slametan is held. That night the tukang metik returns to the field for more offerings, incense, and propitiatory spells, and the next day the harvest takes place, the output of the field having been increased by virtue of the ceremony.
both passage and calendrical slametans are oriented toward the sacralization of certain points in time, the former within the life cycle, the latter within;
* There is another somewhat similar legend which accounts for the origin of rice in terms of a transformation of a goddess named Déwi Sri into a rice stalk by Wisnu (Vishnu), and this legend is sometimes syncretized with the Tisnawati story so that Tisnawati is called mBok (Mother) Sri. There are also origin stories of a similar nature for other crops, but they are of very little importance.
the yearly round of social activities. The bersih désa, or “cleansing of the village” slametan, is concerned with sanctifying relationships in space, with defining and celebrating one of the basic territorial units of Javanese social structure—the village. What the village is cleansed of, of course, is dangerous spirits. This is accomplished by giving a slametan in which food is offered to the danjang désa (“guardian spirit of the village”) at the latter’s place of burial. In strong santri villages the bersih désa may take place in the mosque and consist entirely of Moslem prayers. In villages where there is no recognized place of burial for the danjang or where the place is inconvenient, the rite may be held at the house of the village headman. To this slametan each family in the village is supposed to contribute food, and the adult head of each family is in theory obligated to attend.
The bersih désa is always held in Sela, the eleventh month of the lunar year, but on different days in different villages according to local tradition. The celebration differs somewhat depending upon the personal characteristics attributed by the people to the danjang désa. For example, in one village near Modjokuto the danjang désa, whose name is “Bearded Grandfather,” is something of a reprobate and so demands that opium be burned for him and that a tajaban, a slightly disreputable form of entertainment involving female street dancers (who commonly are also prostitutes) and the ritual drinking of Dutch gin, be given. This is known to be what he wants because once he entered a man who was passing the spring in which he lives and demanded the opium and tajaban as the price for returning home and leaving the poor unfortunate man sane again. In another village the danjang désa is a more proper and aesthetic type, and for him a shadow play must be given.
In the suburban village in which I lived, the danjang désa was, as I have said, a pious santri who was buried in the center of the village. Thus the bersih désa in that village took the form of a death slametan for the danjang désa complete with Arabic chanting, apem cakes, and so forth. The date for it was fixed—always Rebo-Legi in Sela—so that people would not forget when it was; but the rnoditi, who conducted it the year I was there, said that the night before it was to occur he dreamed that Hadji Abdur, the village’s headman, wealthiest citizen, and leading santri for over twenty years, as well as a supposed direct descendant of the danjang désa, who died during the Japanese occupation, came to him and said, “Now [the modin’s name], I am looking for food.” This was a sign, said the modin, that it was time for the bersih désa to be held, for it is directed not only toward the village founder but toward all who have led the village since then.
About 50 or 60 of a possible 500 or so adult men attended the slametan, and I counted about 135 trays of food, the surplus being sent by means of small boy messengers by adults too busy or too uninterested to come themselves. Most of the trays were put out by the grave, but about 30 were brought inside the prayer house where the slametan proper was held and where all the village officials and leading santris were gathered. (In this village it just so happened that, although the village was almost evenly divided between abangans and santris, with a scattering of prijajis near the town, the village government was almost entirely in santri hands.) The village chief made a short speech (a local abangan made one to the people outside by the grave), explaining who the danjang was and the purpose of the slametan, and then led an Arabic chant for 15 or 20 minutes. Then each person took a bite or two of the food, the leftovers being given to the hundreds of children crowding around begging for them. Each guest participant took a little food home to put under his pillow or to make into a salve for well-being.
In the town of Modjoloito, where village political structure has rather atrophied and where most upper-class people feel themselves directly under the subdistrict officer rather than the village chief (who is more or less of an invalid anyway), the bersih désa is also rather attenuated. It was held at the graveyard, in which all past village chiefs are supposed to have been buried, on the edge of town. Although a rather large number of people came (due mainly to the fact that only one ceremony was held for the whole of Modjo-kuto—some 20,000 people), they were without exception, so far as I could see, all “little people,” many of them extremely poor and obviously there in hopes of a free meal. None of the social or political elite of the town was present (though some were said to have sent trays of food), and the ceremony was very perfunctory. The village chief—it was the first and last time I saw him out of his house during my stay—gave a very brief speech, saying that he was sorry that he was ill and that he could not get around much to see people and hoped that both he and the village would improve in health in the coming year. The modin then recited a very brief Arabic prayer, and the ceremony was over almost as soon as it had begun. No one with whom I spoke could name the danjang désa or tell me who was buried in the main grave in the center of the yard.
The bersih désa, designed originally to integrate people not too unlike one another, sometimes has difficulty doing so in the more urban contexts where geographical proximity is less important than ideological commitment or differences in social status. Thus in the village mentioned above, in which the danjatig désa demands a tajuban, two are given: the first in the afternoon, to which come only peasants, coolies, and other rural or lower-class types; the second in the evening, to which come mostly government officials, clerks, teachers, and the like. Even the ceremony I have recorded for my village seems to symbolize as much conflict as it does harmony.
The modin said that the purpose of the bersih désa was to bring well-being to the village. ... He said there were two interpretations of it. Abangans thought that the prayer was to the dead danjang, but this was wrong and the worst sin you could commit. Wito gave this interpretation of the ritual in his speech outside, and he, the modin, would have prohibited it if he could because this was like having an extra God, and such a sin was never pardoned. The prayer was sent directly to God, he said.
what I shall call “intermittent” slametans, those given from time to time for some special occasion or purpose which does not typically recur at any set intervals, are somewhat less common in Modjokuto than the regular ones described above and almost always rather simple affairs. Slametans for change of residence, change of name, embarking on a journey, bad dreams, prevention or encouragement of rain, anniversaries of clubs and fraternal organizations, sorcery, curing, and for an only child—all fall within this category. A namechanging slametan I gave for myself and my wife is typical. The impetus for it came from the headman of the village next to ours, who decided that our American names were too difficult either to pronounce or to remember.
In the evening the village chief of Sawahrecijo came by. His rural accent is very thick, but I gathered he had come to name my wife and me. The chief chose the name according, he said, to the appearance of my body (he mentioned another name as being unsuitable, being too “big” for me), my character, and so forth, and came up with Kartopawiro. Karto seems to mean something like “orderly,” and pawiro “manly” or “brave”—all of which is encouraging. He asked me if the name fitted, because if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be proper. I said it did and that he was undoubtedly an expert in choosing names; and he said, indeed, it was a difficult business to choose a name for a person, for if it didn’t fit, bad things would happen. Many people came to him to help them choose a new name that would fit them and bring them good fortune. He said he had learned how to do this from his parents, but not only from them but from all of his ancestors. He said that all my ancestors would come to my slametan, and that I could inform them as well as my neighbors of the new name.
Since the slametan I gave under the direction of my landlord more or less duplicated the pasaran five-days-after-birth ceremony, in a sense I was “reborn” under my new name. A similar pattern occurs sometimes when a marriage does not go well. In order to try to save the marriage, a second ceremony and slametan are held, called bangun nikah—“to build up a marriage”—in which some of the events of the original ceremony are duplicated on a smaller scale and the same foods prepared for the slametan. Sometimes a slametan of this sort will be given just because a husband says to his wife, “I’ll divorce you,” and doesn’t mean it. If such a slametan were not to be given, then the marriage would probably soon break up.
This pattern of the slametan as a defensive reflex against any unusual occurrence—having your house robbed, your child fall from a tree, or an outsize toadstool grow in your backyard—is quite common and is perhaps best seen in the reaction to anxiety dreams.
He said that Javanese believe dreams foretell the future. “If you dream something, it must happen; when—in a year, a month, a week—you can’t tell, but it must happen. If you dream about something fearful happening but you don’t necessarily know what, you have to give a slametan to prevent it.
If you see someone giving slametans all the time, this may be the reason—because he has had many bad dreams.”
Yet another stimulus for the giving of intermittent slametans is an adherence to the “heterdox” teachings of some self-appointed religious teacher (glint). Thus, for example, one of my informants followed the teachings of a man who claimed that the truly Javanese way to do things was to give a slametan on your birthday each 35 days, but no others. Although the in-
TheSlametan Cycles: Calendrical, Village, and Intermittent »85«
formant was unable to avoid the regular slametans, as advised, she did add these new slametans as extra protection. Influence from Dutch customs— mostly among the prijajis—sometimes leads to out-of-the-ordinary slametans; some people, for instance, give silver wedding anniversary slametans or engagement parties. There are certain traditional occasions for slametans which are irregular in occurrence, such as the necessity to give one for an only child so he will not be eaten by the Hindu demon Batara Kala. One must give a wa-jang with this, and its expense prevents it from occurring very frequently nowadays, although sometimes people give it in combination with another occasion, such as a circumcision. Lastly, there are slametans which can only be ascribed to the effect of the “new era” in Indonesia; for instance, a beer-crate manufacturer gave a slametan in honor of his new diesel wood-sawing machine just imported from Western Germany.
The Moslem year has 354 days (355 in leap years) and is divided into twelve lunar months. In the following list of the months, the Arabic names are given, with the popular Javanese names in parentheses: Muharram (Sura), Safar (Sapar), Rabi’u-lawal (Mulud), Rabi’ulachir (Bakdamulud), Djumadilawal (Djumadilawal), Djumadila-chir (Djumadilakir), Radjab (Redjeb), Sja’ban (Ruwah), Ramadan (Pasa), Sjawal (Sawal), Dzulka’idah (Sela), Dzulhidjah (Besar).
The word pasa means “fasting” in general. Pasa is also the popular name for the month of Ramadan, during which it is forbidden to eat, drink, or smoke between sunrise and sunset.