People/paulstange/voices/2.html

Ancestral Voices in Island Asia

by Paul Stange

chapter 2
THE INDIGENOUS SUBSTRATUM

--ecologies of cores and zones
--patterns of primal spirituality
--the transactive grammar of spirit relations

Though it is not obvious Southeast Asia constitutes a category of societies, sharing features distinguishing it from neighbouring zones, an infrastructure or substratum characterises the region. Temporally the term refers to dispersed megalithic, stone monument and bronze implement, cultures of the early neolithic. Among tribal minorities, least touched by international currents until the advent of tourism, traces of prehistoric patterns extend into the present. Less obviously the substratum is evident in orientations influencing elites and underlying village habits. The impact of industrial capitalism is not to be underestimated, reshaping environments even in remote areas, but modern minorities are concentrated in cities associated with economic, educational and government institutions. Outsiders, likely to interact most with them, are easily misguided about the extent to which other locals remain traditional. Traditional people are not magically different, but as they maintain cultures bound to an animism we have suppressed or marginalised the extent of their "difference" can be invisible even to observers with long experience in the region. Glib impressions, as dangerous as romanticism, must be balanced with critical observation and openness to registering qualities different from our own.

a strategy of cultural archaeology
The substratum of indigenous animism continues in remote pockets and is maintained through syncretism within dominant populations. It provides a gestalt crucial for framing the region's past and present on its own terms. The substratum is not singular, as though "a culture" unique to this region. Some features of it may characterise Southeast Asia in particular, but it is part of a wider culture extending across Asia, Siberia, the Pacific and to the Americas. In Mexico undercurrents of Aztec and Mayan life, long pronounced dead by Hispanic discourses, remain. Resonances of Shinto spirituality help us both grasp the Japanese present and imagine its past. In the British Isles Christian Anglo-Saxon dominance, suppression of magic and industrial culture did not entirely submerge Celtic identities, expunge early beliefs or obscure traces of sacred landscapes relating to them.
In expanding the concept and affirming its relevance my aim is especially to emphasise insights through "cultural archaeology". We may supplement textual evidence through recognition the past is not only that but also embedded within the present; its traces include not only literary texts, monuments, and pottery or bronze artefacts but also everyday practices. Insofar as a living substratum remains cohesive it provides clues to earlier process as, when patterns rooted in prehistory persist, they must have conditioned intervening transitions. If emphasis on the substratum or infrastructure of Southeast Asia has been commonplace it has also been conceived in various ways and often in dispute. History, archaeology, anthropology politics, religion and psychology each offer different avenues for theorisation.

Historians invoke the substratum to facilitate definition of the region, to suggest it contains generic characteristics, and related commitment to locally centred histories constitutes an orthodoxy few challenge. Conceptualisation of autonomous histories and the substratum emerged in tandem with movements of independence, each shifting focus from outside influences to indigenous forces and only later directing attention to everyday life and a broadened sense of culture. Cultural histories are still more likely to give this theme prominence than those focussing on politics or economics. Anthropologists noted early this century that receiving societies condition borrowing, always a two-way process directed by local interests and patterns as well as outside influences. Among historians students of Southeast Asia pioneered this line before it became prominent elsewhere, as for them the substratum counterpoints the ostensibly dependent nature of regional civilisations. In reviewing efforts to formulate autonomous histories Day noted that the concept suggests "...indigenous traditions... are powerful enough to modify the shape of historical developments, even as they are themselves modified and reinvented by influences impinging upon them."
The substratum refers in the first instance to animistic and wet rice cultures throughout monsoon Asia, extending beyond what is now Southeast Asia into Bengal, Assam, Yunnan and southern parts of India and China. Waves of population, primarily from the north, succeeded each other in the region, as the overly static resonances of geological terms like substratum and layer imply. Ethnic overlays have been complex, but we can imagine each wave as displacing, absorbing or marginalising earlier peoples simultaneously, leaving residues in some areas and melding through synthesis in others. Displacement and mixing likely characterised process nearest active channels of trade and in centres conducive to population density; remnants are dispersed in more isolated island, forest or mountain habitats. At the same time, though most of Southeast Asia has been a low pressure zone, populations moved through as well as into it and its maritime orientation has always been profound.
The dispersion of Malayo-Polynesians, across the Indian and Pacific oceans, testifies that in prehistory they were pre-eminent sailors. Polynesians passed through the archipelago in the first millennium BC and natives of Madagascar settled there in the same early centuries which brought Indian and Chinese influences to the region. Southeast Asians were likely active sailors within wider early trade networks and the seaward face of their societies is reflected in water symbolism embedded within early myth, architecture and social organisation. Even the Thai, with relatives in mountainous Yunan, nurture pervasive symbolism centring on water and ships. Even upland Sumatran social structures deploy terms implying shipboard relationships and preserve domestic architecture suggestive of ships. Reid identified a receptive and maritime orientation of the region as an element of its substratum and orientation to the sea certainly helps explain why the region is defined partly by prominence of cultural exchanges within it.
The earliest layers of human habitation in the region are known through fossil sequences including some of the oldest forms of Homo Erectus--Java man dates roughly a million years ago; Solo man several hundred thousand. Those peoples may be ancestral to scattered remnants, Negritos for instance, of previously dominant populations very likely related to the Melanesian and Australian populations who passed through the region into their current habitats up to fifty thousand years ago. This Australoid layer can be considered the earliest substratum of the region and, in the eastern archipelago, there is a visible cline of admixture between it and later Mongoloid populations. However Australoids have been marginal for several millennia and, in this overview, are not especially relevant.
The more meaningful, archaeologically accessible, substratum is to the megalithic and bronze ages. The "Dongson" complex, a bronze culture, was noted first through Vietnamese sites but then widely through the region. Its residues are the Proto-Malay populations, still dispersed through the archipelago and including Mentawians, Bataks, Torajans and Dayaks. Prior to the first millennium BC they likely dominated the region. Wales has noted that these Proto-Malays preserve aspects of bronze age religion. The ancestors of today's dominant peoples are relatives of these bronze age peoples who began to move into the region about three thousand years ago. While distinct groups such as we have noted remain, more characteristically cultural and genetic exchange led to merging in lowland areas. Archaeologists now encourage us to emphasise continuities between neolithic and bronze cultures, an already mature base, and subsequent historical states built by ancestors of ethnic groups we recognise now.
In ethnographic terms the substratum thus refers us first to hunting, gathering, swidden and fishing communities who maintained the lifestyles of their ancestors until recently. However even here we must be cautious; images of "waves of settlement" might imply the Punan, forest gatherers of Kalimantan, and Semang, shifting cultivators of the Malay Peninsula, are "residues" of early population. However ecological constraints or the stimulus of trade may have generated both groups recently. As ethnicities arise or change easily, as demonstrated in the Sulu archipelago for instance, we must bear in mind no society is a static time capsule. Benda warned we could not see the pre-Hispanic Philippines as a laboratory of precolonial society or Bali as a replica of Indic Majapahit. On the other hand pockets of people do maintain modes of subsistence such as predominated earlier and their lifestyles must hint at prehistory. Some, such as the Sakkudei of Siberut, may represent it directly, as they were positioned beyond the reach of wider communications until recently.
The most critical sense of the substratum for our understanding of history is sociological and related to foundational peasant wet rice cultivation in core areas occupied by what are now dominant ethnic groups. Until recently the majority of regional peoples lived in extended kin groups within communities which were partially self-sufficient. Redfield noted that in India and Mexico the "great traditions" of states always interacted with a "lesser tradition" of villagers who maintained autonomous cultures: literacy did not eliminate oral performances even when it brought new legends to merge with local myths, the two traditions remain separately cohesive notwithstanding interplay.
Mus stressed such continuities in Vietnamese society, presenting villages there as autonomous symbolically by virtue of bamboo hedges bounding them and socially insulated by mediation of councils of notables protecting locals from intrusive bureaucracies. Similarly Schrieke argued the infrastructure of Java between 700 and 1700 AD had not changed, that communications in village life and rural economy were virtually unaffected by currents from the trading world or states. Without prejudging the extent of continuities we may observe they have been facilitated in wet rice cores by the sheer mass and nature of village societies.
Recent studies of politics converge with conceptualisation of the substratum. Scott explored the politics of rural Malays to emphasise "tacit and everyday mode of resistance" to impositions. He referred to practices which remain significant even when made to seem non-existent, irrelevant or invisible by repressive regimes, or "discursive hegemonies". Drawing on Bahktin, Bourdieu, Foucault and Gramski he noted constraints on action and thought in everyday sites to demonstrate resistance is maintained as much by non-compliance or indirection as by confrontation; that people may maintain preferred orientations even in frameworks of subservience.
Ongoing rituals, systems of divination, sexual magic, and quest for powers at sacred sites all relate at once to historical cultures and contemporary contests. Many historical interfaces, such as those between animistic, Tantric, Buddhist and Islamic spirituality, still constitute foci of contention between living practitioners. As context has changed issues are reformed, but in the dynamics of dispute between living Muslims and animists we can locate principles which have relevance to grasping interplay in the past. Ethnographic exposure of living practices can go deeper than archival and textual research. Zoetmulder employed this reasoning to apply knowledge of recent Tantrism as a key to decode fragmentary evidence about the politics of Majapahit--suggesting marriage alliances in it may have been efforts to establish magical links related to initiation ceremonies. Similarly, esoteric theories and meditation practices provide a basis for understanding the design and uses of ancient temples-- living systems of practice preserve teachings those temples illustrated. My target in using a strategy of cultural archaeology is not, however, only exegesis, explication of meanings as a footnote on ancient esoteric religion.
Cultural archaeology informs history by the same logic linguists or anthropologists employ. To the extent underlying structures remain pervasive and basic they must be original. Extrapolation from recent practices to projected pasts must be treated as hypotheses, but sometimes grounds for conclusions are firm. When Fox noted that kinship terms of Javanese Indic royalty remained Austronesian, consistent with earlier ethnic structures, he took this as evidence of continuity, revealing the power of local culture and limits of Indianisation. After exploring premodern legal texts, of Indian, Chinese and Islamic derivation, Hooker stressed the extent of their adaptation and suggested in the end local cultures, "determine the definition of law" and that "deeper structural features...may be a clue...to a common sub-structure." Customary law, predominance of bilateral kinship or dispersion of Austronesian languages all imply continuities.
Since underlying structures of local spirituality remain pervasively animistic, however reworked, they cannot but be local and must also represent continuity. While transmission across generations reworks such practices they also preserve intuitive, tacit or unspoken knowledges along with identifiable worldviews and practices. Though beyond domains historians customarily deal in, these spheres are pertinent when exploration extends, as here, toward history of consciousness. Once registered in one context such patterns open insight into transactions elsewhere. Just as anthropologists explore unique cases to constitute theory; I will here employ insights from Java to characterise a wider substratum. Since my aim is to highlight a gestalt, a framework which allows the present to cast light on the past, perspective is crucial.
Unspoken transactions, as evident as life itself, pass unnoticed because we take them entirely for granted, leaving self-evident realities obscure even when profoundly significant. The reconfiguring implied by a gestalt shift means precisely that the components we see are stable, information does not change and is not at issue. However when a perceptual pattern we hold views in changes, obvious new meanings emerge from what was already seen. Throughout this survey the information I rely on is not contentious, most is common knowledge; the target is to reframe what we know so as to highlight its significance in a new way.

Through the cycles of history Sinic, Indic, Islamic, and European forces were eventually superimposed within Southeast Asia. Each worked to claim it, to recast society within borrowed models. Local memories nevertheless preserve senses of primal identity and some continue to assert it. Recently metropolitan super cultures radiate from new national centres, promoting national languages and supra-ethnic identity through new bureaucracy, schools, literature, electronic media, and, not least, militaries. The gestalt provided by the substratum will still allow us to register that locals have appropriated new symbolic, social and economic systems in every historical phase and that these have restructured internal and reordered external relations in a context of increasing integration into global networks.
If traditional societies blended animistic and classical patterns with Islam, Catholicism and Theravada those remained amenable to synthesis, blending with ancestral rituals. The consolidation of a Theravada pattern in mainland societies involved no major break with the also Indic mold of previous classical states. Whether in Islamic, Catholic or Theravada zones the focus of traditional Islamic attention remained participatory, in this reminiscent of animistic or Indic ritual. Ritual repetition, primary in all systems, infused sound with sacral power so it resonated with states of inner being--as much in Arabic, Pali, or Latin as earlier in Sanskrit.
Emphasis on the role of Sufism in conversion of the archipelago drew attention to openness of the line between pre-Islamic and Islamic cultures. Current readings of interplay between Islam and adat, custom, image that as a gradual dialectical redefinition. Disjunction between Islam and the substratum was not so severe as implied in scriptural versions of religion. Though traditional Islam was more mystical than earlier recognised, tensions between custom and orthodoxy nevertheless began early, as 17th century Acehnese and Javanese disputes indicate. Syncretism also predominated within the early Hispanization of the Philippines, where Catholicism was deeply domesticated to Tagalog and other local purposes. Theravada theory fits spirits into a continuum all living beings are placed on; its core scriptures encorporate spirit beliefs. Vietnamese also blended folk beliefs comfortably with Chinese derivatives. When recent migrants brought South Chinese patterns from their home villages, they merely brought their own local syncretic mix of ancestors, Confucianism and Buddhism, all present in their temples throughout Southeast Asia.
In Thailand boundaries of villages were eventually defined in relation to temples; community and religious identities coincided. In Islam emphasis on law and ritual prescribe exclusive commitment and the territory of submission, dar al-islam, is thus defined by profession and ritual which mark off those who do not belong. Traditional Islamic schools drew students from dispersed areas so resulting senses of community correlated with intensity of institutional engagement, with lifestyle rather than geographical community. In Theravada doctrine and a social nexus interweave temples with community, both explaining relatively harmonious relationship between Buddhism and the substratum on the mainland. In the end tensions between orthodoxy and the substratum have characterized the archipelago. Semitic doctrines discourage syncretism and produce intolerance of substratum magic. However generally traditional worlds did not emphasise boundaries, not even in Islam, and community was formed in and focussed on courts, schools or monasteries which drew on popular magic as well as Indic ritual, maintaining an intuitive sense of what religion essentially involves.
Modern scriptural religions foster such distinction through institutions and technologies brought by colonialism. Whether in the Malay, Thai or Vietnamese cases scripturalism defined identities in increasingly exclusive and literal terms, generating religious boundaries as sharp as the geographical limits eventually produced by imperialism. The context of and concern for boundaries produced increasing division between religion and politics, despite insistence of Muslims and Buddhists those remain intrinsically related, as evident in nationalism throughout the region. To put this point properly, many local actors have been consistently unable to imagine these domains as separate; their commitment has often still been to spiritual purposes expressed, only sometimes, through what we call "political process".
All contemporary states aim to link peasant or tribal structures to national centers through "integrative revolution", tying urban structures to the substratum to a previously unimagined extent. National politics thus sometimes mobilized, but more often worked to contain, popular impulses. Peasants are not typically ideological so religious conflicts often underlie even political movements which are framed in secular terms on the surface. In notable cases the force behind uprisings, "communist" in ideological terms at the top, has been closer to animism at base. The PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) effectively represented syncretic Javanese, those closest to the substratum, through becaming a vehicle for abangan interests by forging a linkage for them to politics at the centre.
The notion of a substratum helps us grasp Vietnamese wars of independence. Mus emphasised that French and American protagonists did not "see" the situation or issues in the same terms as Vietnamese, tending to know and pay attention mainly to urban centres, sites colonialism created, and never knowing "the hearts and minds" of villagers. He evoked primal spirituality and court traditions to suggest local perspectives, suggesting that most Vietnamese had concluded in 1945 that the "mandate of heaven" had fallen on Ho Chi Minh. Tragic events such as those of Indochina remind us that enlarging worldviews requires more than translating terms into familiar frameworks. The Vietnam wars testify that societies, insofar as we may speak of collectives, misread each other in the way individuals do. Western powers remained oblivious of both the power in and perspectives of village society. Indonesian and Vietnamese illustrations are but two suggestions of the ways substructures surface through contention in the recent past. Animism is relevant to understanding popular movements and Marcos ideology in Philippine politics and the resonances of revolutionary ideology and earlier religion in Burma are analogous to those noted in Indonesia or Vietnam.
As a communal substructure within Southeast Asia the substratum is certainly breaking down. However at times, as in eastern Europe with the turn of this decade, traumas resurrect forces which have been obscure. Ethnic and state identities long hidden under new umbrellas surfaced with intensity commensurate with preceeding repression. Popular movements such as those in Poland or the Philippines combine with less dramatic instances to remind us that repressed and unspoken forces can be sustained and may burst through powerful hegemonies. Even when peoples have been declared extinct--as some native Australians or Americans have at times been--renewal of identities remains possible and may become, through "reinvention", dynamic sources of inspiration.
Spirit cults and magical practices continue to percolate below the surface. Malay specialists combine shamanism, shaivism and sufism; Javanese conversion has been presented as fulfillment of earlier ideals through Islam; and healing practices transcend boundaries between Buddhism and Islam among Thais and Malays. Structural breaks in practice do occur when burial practices change or with transition from a multiplicity of deities to one God, but continuities may be subtle. If Muslims meditate on graves of saints in search of magical powers we may question, even if they do not, whether their primary spirituality is "Islamic". When Suharto enshrines Sultan Agung as a national hero and goes on to construct his own grave in a style reminiscent of Imogiri, where Mataram rulers are entombed, we may suggest he aims toward dynasty, to become (ironically) "guardian ancestor of modernity", consistent with his title,"Bapak Pembangunan" (Father of Development).
Though the substratum has been a template underlying regional evolution we do not have access to early beliefs in pristine form--even in outlining its logic recourse to syncretic versions of it, spiced with later ideas, is unavoidable. With the rise of kingdoms, new populations inhabited local spirit realms. Where there had been village guardian spirits, kings, queens, princes and armies contended--notions of spirits reflect the idiom of kingdoms above all. Burmese nat beliefs, Thai phi and Vietnam sects like the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hoa all also combine ancestral spirit beliefs with elements of Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism and Christianity; Javanese employ Islamic and Hindu idiom; Malays use Sufi terminology within shamanism. Current movements certainly extensively rework imported ideas; nevertheless local systems seem consistently to hold ancestors at their heart.

primal imagination and environment
Though the term animism is used often it is worth pausing for reflection, without lingering to agonize on semantics. The main elements of animistic belief are well known, but local examples are often presented with emphasis on details of symbolism and the integrity of relations underpinning meaning remain obscure. Descriptive details make sense only when their pattern is visible and, as animistic conceptions seep through practice without being mentally articulated, identification is sometimes problematic. My primary proposition is that to grasp the nature of such beliefs we must note they frame the same realities we know but approach it through practices which prioritise intuitive rather than mental transaction. As systems of practice they are distinguished by direction of attention more than the structure of ideas.
19th century theorists used words such as "primitive" and "savage" as counterpoints to "civilised" while conceding the reality of spirits with a readiness we may not. In his enduring theory of religion Tylor, in Primitive Culture (1873), argued the origins of religion lay in belief in the "soul" and "spirit beings", and termed this "animism". He suggested belief in spirit beings originated in dream experiences, evidence of souls existing independently of the body and life force. Tylor's adherents, known as "intellectualist" interpreters of religion, stress that people construct beliefs to explain the world. Marett on the other hand postulated an underlying more basic stage of "aminatism", involving belief in "mana", a term for "power" or energy derived from Polynesia. He argued rather than believing in spirits or hierarchies of subtle beings in the first instance primitives held merely that there was a charge of life energy in all being, including inanimate objects such as rocks and earth.
Of early works on religion Frazer's The Golden Bough (1911-1915) is the most famous. He surveyed myths, magic and religion to distinguish between the latter, arguing that magic was simpler and historically prior to true religion within an evolutionary sequence leading to science. He drew on mythologies and magical beliefs from around the world to note parallels and one enduring contribution was to establish how widespread early belief in divine kingship was. Later Malinowski argued magical beliefs were practical and pragmatic, "functionally" related to agriculture and trade. He held that like mythology, magic was structurally related to socio-economic spheres. While Tylor saw early religion as a form of primitive philosophy and Frazer assessed it as pre-scientific pseudo-science, Malinowski held that magical practices and mythological beliefs had pragmatic rationale.
Studies of language highlight the depths of conditioning, that every language provides an implicit cognitive map. As Whorf put it:

...every language is a vast pattern-system... in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality...analyses nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomenon, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of consciousness.

In these terms understanding a system of thought requires learning its language and every religion, including animism, contains meanings which dissolve if translated. Ethnoscience, the new ethnography, later responded to this by presenting cultures through categories central within them, an "emic" approach contrasting with "etic" or comparative explanations.
Levi-Strauss borrowed from linguistics to uncover categories of thought hidden within the diversity of mythology and concluded:

The thought we call primitive is founded on this demand for order. This is equally true of all thought but it is through the properties common to all thought that we can most easily begin to understand forms of thought which seem very strange to us.

His structuralism clarified that scientific and magical thought resemble each other and highlighted universality of distinction between nature and culture, but over-intellectualises, construing meaning within the terms of thought in itself. Recent symbolic anthropology moves toward focus on praxis, understanding religion through interactive relations between symbolic beliefs and experiences within the psychological and social domains.
Though dominant theories now repudiate evolutionism, such schemes nevertheless tacitly underlie convictions of researchers. Modern interpretations build on presumption the ontological status of spirits is nil, that scientific views are "more real". Spiro spoke for many, most being less open in this respect, in stating "assumption that supernatural beings have no objective existence" and as "spirits do not exist" his task was to explain "why people continue to believe in them", finding it self-evident he could discount Burmese beliefs. Most social scientists in effect take this view, tending to explain spirit beliefs as psychological or social projections. Geertz was able to profess "non belief" without jeopardising standing as a scientist, as converse claims might have, nor did his non belief detract from marvellous explication of the "mentally articulated" Indic and Islamic domains of Javanese religion, variants sharply formed intellectually in their own terms. However his ethnography did not penetrate the coherence of beliefs in spirits, which he could only catalogue.
Within the milieu of evolutionary theorising, ideas which sanctioned slavery and rationalised imperialism, it was possible to hold "races" had different capacities. Anthropology has generally produced conviction, though marginal debates continue, that cultural differences are conditioned rather than genetic, a lesson so well established it usually remains an unstated premise. Eliade held that the psychic unity of humanity implied all peoples, in any culture or time, have access to the same range of spiritual experiences. In the same vein, Geertz comments that debates between Levy-Bruhl and Malinowski essentially concerned contrast between mystical and pragmatic views as everyone experiences them, not whether the primitive is different from the modern. These lessons of ethnography constitute a crucial ground for assessing the nature of beliefs. Essentially all peoples refer to the same ranges of realities we also inhabit and contrasting experiences relate to valencies, the range of messages, prioritised amongst those we all receive. All people implicitly engage both pragmatic issues of survival and spiritual issues of meaning. Other peoples' beliefs are not weird to them, they carry the same flavour of everyday normalcy our assumptions have for us.
Shamanism refers to spirit specialists within animistic religion. The term originated in Siberia, referring to spirit healers there, but is used generally for healers whose spirit familiars mediate between the living and spirit realms. Eliade argued shamanism is mystical; shaman are neither just believers in a cosmology nor mere manipulators of keys to magic and the occult, they have experiential and practical orientations toward the sacred. In his terms ordinary people in shamanic societies participate in the divine via belief in worlds of earth, sky and underworld. However the shaman "knows the mystery of the breakthrough in plane" and moves between the worlds. Shamanic healers have technical skills, such as those relating to herbal medication or massage, as well as ritual performance, but also venture beyond conditioned consciousness to engage realms of chaos, psychosis, and deity, thus participating literally and thoroughly in initiatory cycles--they experienced liminal transition, to use Turner's term, in its complete sense. Through ecstatic trances they "ascended" through the seven (or nine) abodes of the gods in heaven and descend into subterranean regions inhabited by "the cosmic snake which in the end will destroy the world". Having healed themselves through initiation process they become masters of normative beliefs, those which prop up ordinary awareness and identity within their communities.
Every Asian society contains healers and specialists who could be called shaman: in Java these are dukun, in Malaya bomoh, in Thailand mau, each associated with ancestral cults. World religions arose in Asian contexts from the ground created by these ancestral and guardian spirit cultures and their magical knowledges have a clear place within later local religions. Systems such as Taoism and Hinduism are essentially formalisations growing from perennial philosophy, the timeless wisdom of this substratum. Within this complex engagement with spiritual knowledge does not depend on revelation, as Semitic traditions conceive it. Asian religions have been animistic and shamanic in their origin and at base, in practices of village peoples. Traditional folk religion was everywhere characterised by a multiplicity of cults and practices, a tapestry of shared concepts. Disputes about doctrine or method existed, but most contained similar elements. Emphasis on this starting point balances tendency to imagine that each system we engage should be considered first as though distinct. Overriding common concerns centred on spiritual balance and healing, acquisition of magical power through initiation and apprenticeship, fertility cults, and communal rituals ensuring regeneration of human and plant life.
Within each context shamanic religion remained interwoven with subsequent developments. Japanese Buddhism is built on a Shinto base of rituals and magic. Taoism has not referred principally to the philosophies of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, but to wide ranging magic, geomancy and alchemy, traditions which bubble through the Chinese substratum. Bon shamanism interweaves with Vajrayana Tantric Buddhism in Tibet. Even Hinduism cannot be understood historically or in practice just through Shankara's 9th century formalisation of it, still less from the standpoint of the 19th century Hindu renaissance. Those make it comprehensible as doctrine, but its roots lie in the Vedas and ancient fire sacrifices, it has been a varied family of cultic and ritual practices despite Sanskrit literary interaction with folk traditions.

Key lessons of anthropology and history of religions must be borne in mind as we treat animism and magic; though beliefs take shape through unfamiliar idioms they are interwoven with practices, refer to experiences and work within logics such as we employ to make sense of physical realities. The obstruction to registering this is epistemological, relating to convictions about the cognitive roots of knowledge. In animism awareness comes through the body mediated by feelings which in refined form we call "intuition". Marrett's concept of mana and Levy-Bruhl's of a participation mystique suggest they noticed this priority within it. While animists deploy awareness through feelings registered in the body; later religions construct and relate to spirituality more though thoughts. In any case animism should be treated as an expression of experiential realities.
In speaking of ancestors animists also refer to influences from the past, the same influences we image as maintained through conditioning. Reading ancestral beliefs as languages for what we term culture will allow us to notice their logic and the way it may be transformed and replaced. If hoax, vagrant imaginings, and falsity are common in practices, that is significant only in the same way it is in relation to obfuscation and falsity in academia. The rules of logic are not discounted when we notice they are abused; in shamanism the same applies, principles should be distinguished from their misuse; identifying the grammar or structures of the game is essential if we aim to expose the meaning of practices.

Underlying animistic cosmology is conviction nature is alive, even the realm of minerals--soils, rains, springs, mountains and seas--contain gradations of power. In Southeast Asia these are recognised in objects such as banyan trees, gemstones or the kris, the wavy daggers of the archipelago. Nature spirits are a way of talking about life giving forces of mineral and plant kingdoms; forest demons equate to wild animals; beliefs systematise knowledge of nature and establish basis for human relations with it. Nature spirits,"deva" in India or "gods" in the Mediterranean, inhabit every plant species or natural feature as references to life energy in material reality. For example the rice goddess, Nang Phrakosib in Thailand or Dewi Sri in Java and Bali, is the spirit of the plant, essentially an etheric template. In the botanic domain such spirits are generic, meaning that one spirit/template animates and is present within each species. In contrast within the human realm of ancestral spirits each is individuated.
The intensity of a grower's contact with rice is as important as it is easy to ignore. Knowing hunger, villagers are sensitive because life depends on crops and the year is woven into cycles of labour intensive cultivation. Apart from attending to irrigation and weeding, each stalk of rice is transplanted. It is grown first in small plots near houses then transplanted to mature in irrigated paddies. There water levels are closely regulated and the crop is monitored against pests, which especially encroach as it ripens. Ducks are brought in to eat insects and people stand guard to scare away birds when harvest nears. The aging of rice is described as is the aging of people; it bends down in old age as people do. Until recently it has been harvested with respect, in Java with the ani-ani, a curved knife fitting the palm of the hand, to minimize offense to the goddess.
The lifestyle dictated by rice agriculture inculcates sensitivity to its natural rhythms and relates to social norms. Rice villagers consistently emphasise harmony and consensus, working to effect those through rituals which centre on village relations to natural, guardian, and ancestral spirits. Natural and human realms are linked through complex hierarchy. spirits of founding ancestors, guardian or tutelary spirits, are usually those of founders who entered compacts with natural deities to allow establishment of community through clearing of forests and cultivation of land. Propitiation of such spirits aims to maintain the peaceful relations their compact achieved as a basis for continuing cultivation; the idiom of spirits is thus at least tacitly linked to environmental consciousness, sensitivity to natural vitality within a host ecosystem.

The Burmese speak of guardian spirits as nats, the Thai as tapubaan, and Javanists as danhyang. Experts stress spirits are like people with the exception of lacking a physical body. Important spirits are powerfully charged, but not all are imagined as "superior beings", instead spirits embody the same spectrum of qualities evident in the living and call for attitudes ranging from fear to respect on a similar basis. Otherwise they share in human ranges of thought, memory, feeling and desire; they are human but occupy the spirit realm through "imperfect deaths". In Indic terms death is only complete when there is total dissolution into union with the cosmos (moksa). If there is clinging, if ego remains attached to phenomenal reality, then the spirit will remain in cycles of reincarnation. Most often that means temporary suspension in transitional realms awaiting rebirth.
Desires are the glue linking material and spiritual dimensions, the physical medium is the context in which desires work toward satisfaction. While this in the first instance suggests what spirits are thought to be, it doubles to explain why they remain interested in human affairs: not having the bodies necessary to satisfy still active desires, they seek vicarious gratification through contact with humanity. Ancestral spirits remain interested in the living because unfinished karma means they have needs which can be gratified vicariously and, like living parents and grandparents, they still care for descendants.
Living people form contracts with them as a by product and maintain contact through flower and incense offerings. Individual contracts, toward power, wealth, status or sex, may be reached either through shamanic intercession or directly, through retreat, fasting and prayer at graves or other sacred sites. Magical contracts carry a cost, as those who enter them are themselves bonded into the spirit realms on death. Compacts with deities or ancestors are a basic relationship rooted in aboriginal spirituality and clearly condition later transactions. Differing capacities, degrees of sensitivity or power are recognised in shaman, village heads or rulers. Shaman, in the strict sense meaning only some of the dukun in Java or mao tham in Thailand, have power through familiar spirits who move between planes. Contacting of spirits can be read as "attunement" to vibrations remaining after physical life stops. The term, a literal translation of getaran as used in Java, is neither colloquialism nor obfuscation, but technical in the sense reference to radio waves is. The related idea that people are differentially empowered and have varying access to spirits was amplified later through caste ideology, within which theories of reincarnation and asceticism connected degrees of power to past lives and current statuses.
Belief that human and spirit realms interact and mirror each other is basic. The components of individual, social and natural realms are seen as being the same--elements of earth, air, fire and water are realities at each level and similarly ordered in each. As these different domains or planes exist within the same instant speaking of "gods, ancestors and nature spirits" is no different from reference to "physical, cultural, and social" realities. Local statements that "ancestral kingdoms interact with the living" are not hypothetical so much as a way of talking about the same realities our discourses address. Resistence to this suggestion reveals how our imagined realities are insulated from psychic experience. To question the existence of spirit or imply they only exist in minds as a projection of those who believe in them misses the point. When animists speak of spirits, language is a statement about experience, not hypotheses about what "may exist"; cosmologies are in the first instance lived, not simply "held" as beliefs. Whenever interpreters treat them simply as sets of ideas there is a tacit, and essentially ethnocentric, assumption that cosmology functions everywhere as it does for us--as merest shadow rather than living substance of experience.
There may be a minority of modern Javanese with Western styled skepticism, but debates about spirits in Java centres not so much on whether they exist but on how best to relate to them. The more deeply Islamic portions of the population believe it is best to leave spirits alone, to focus attention exclusively on surrender to God. Few of them, however, deny spirits exist and, indeed, orthodox Islam holds that they do. Others continue to tend graves, prepare flower and incense offerings, and meditate on contact with ancestral spirits. For the latter, contact with spirits serves to enhance spiritual status, through a focus on purification which also aids the spirits; or more often to facilitate acquisition of money, marriage, rank and power. One common motive for spirit contact is to obtain prior access to results in the lottery (nalo).
Just as spirits are conceived in human terms, so dimensions they inhabit are structured by elaborate hierarchy parallelling the social order (or what it is imagined to have been). Just as each village has a village head it has a guardian spirit or founding ancestor. In cases of disruptive possession the standard strategy of shaman is to "report" incidents to the local guardian, just as a robber would be reported to police. The spirit hierarchy leads up to the court level, where rulers are supposed to ensure harmony within the realm by maintaining contact with spirit kingdoms culminating, in Java, with Nyai Loro Kidul, Queen of the South Sea. Interaction between human and spirit realms is most intense at holy places such as royal graves, springs, caves, volcanoes, the ocean, and ancient temple sites. That cult centres coincide with geographically and historically significant places is direct indication of the cosmological device linking current social orders with natural forces through the mediation of ancestors whose potency enabled them to harmonise with natural powers of the cosmos.
No understanding of spirits in Java makes sense apart from the notion macrocosm and microcosm are not simply linked and parallel, but continuous. Javanese explain that in the astral realm spirits have murky substance with only vaguest form; in the mental realm sharper form with less substance. But spirits are also carried in blood, linked to components of inner being, their relationships providing a map of individual consciousness, and finally woven into mythic ethnohistory. For experts, shaman or mystics, sense that spirits are real simultaneously at all these levels is explicit; for layman understanding may be vague, but intuitive awareness of spirit realities remains common. Spirits thus basically suffuse visible reality, the line separating them from society is porous and a variety of connections link dimensions.
Chance meetings often produce stories about an uncle, cousin or neighbour who encountered spirits while moving house, during war, or in routines of life. Stories are as often passed by skeptics as believers, circulate more widely than admissions of experience, but the latter are common. Circulation exaggerates frequency of encounter, but that is less important than the fact stories are taken seriously. In villages rituals (selametan) provide structures directed at harmonising relations with spirit realms. In them immediacy of spirit presence may be absent or unnoticed for participants, but for dukun who preside contact may be directly actualized in the same moment. Mediums (prewangan) enter trance to become a vehicle for possessing spirits and then to transmit messages. Finally there are threatening, less controlled, instances of malevolent possession in which spirits enter unwilling individuals to fulfil an end of their own. Though trancers cultivate possession as a technique for invulnerability (kekebalan) or clairvoyance (kewaskitan), public spiritual sects (aliran kebatinan) usually disapprove of such focus. They stress possession invariably damages the host, not only through possible insanity, but because during possession the spirit of the host is shunted aside, as though depressed to make room for the entering spirit. High brow argument is that despite the skills demonstrable through possession living spirits loose opportunity to fulfill their mission.

Essentially the idiom of ancentral spirits is a vocabulary for the domain we demarcate as "culture", personal ego in the microcosm is equivalent to culture in the social macrocosm. Both are "forms" which karmic bonds take when desires restrict consciousness to exterior levels. People consist of assorted tools, in Buddhist terms "vehicles", including the physical body, senses, memory, thought, minds, emotions, feeling, and desires. Normally awareness is actively located in thought, which registers information through bodily senses and guides action in terms set by desire to achieve gratification, soothing ego. These dimensions, associated with different parts of the body, progress from material to spiritual, from outer to inner, are the layers termed "veils" in Sufism, clouding vision of the divine. The extent to which these bind awareness to materiality is the extent to which karma binds us to the world; liberation is the process of becoming aware of and realising the desires and energies restricting us to lower planes.
Magic is not only an issue of the extraordinary, phenomenon that excite imagination. It builds on a sharpening and development of tools of awareness all people have at their disposal, power involving disciplined manipulation of vibrations. Just as mental activity is disciplined by culture, producing images systematically, inner feeling has to be disciplined and tuned to vibrations to experience the reality of magic. Awareness of interplay among vibrations comes through disciplining of feeling. With that tuning in to another's inner experience is mechanical, a receptivity allowing registration of otherwise subconscious connections. Magicians make spells using a contact point--name, hair or fingernail for instance--to focus, tune in and then direct energy to their target.
Obsessions of ordinary people work the same way, consciously or unconsciously sending vibrations; magic is in this sense an aspect of daily life. The contrast between ceremonial magic, manipulation of vibrations as refined art, and the unconscious magic of daily life is merely of effectiveness and raw power. If the mind is filled with thoughts little power can be infused into any one; stillness of mind focusses intense energy through it, thus purity of consciousness increases power so even trivial actions may have great impact, a principle linked also to the notion that "the higher we are the harder we fall". Magic, black or white, is not just secret in the dark of night; it is also tacit in every moment there is will to manipulate. Health problems, physical or psychic, are still often seen as related to imbalances resulting from spirit affliction, especially to the "four brothers" (sedelur papat; lima pancer), the spirit shadows born born with, connected to waters, placenta, and umbilical cord.
Sacred sites are focal. In the first instance these involve natural sites of power; secondarily they are overlaid by temples and then by graves. However the essential pattern of transation within these sites has remained consistent. Just as shamanic trance mediated access to other realms through contact with spirits, becoming modified through subsequent notions of incarnation and surrender, so in accessing sacred zones through prayer at sites of power transactions are guided by a clear grammar of relationship. In the protestant idioms which define spirituality as etherial other, the proper objects of practice as "other worldly", the worldly purposes of pilgrimage appear as subversion of spirituality. However in dominant idioms of the substratum magical invocations were always directed at pragmatic ends--ensurance of rain, fertility, wealth, harvest. If today people visit sacred sites seeking modern versions of success the structure of the relationship has not necessarily changed.
That animism characterises underlying belief among the rice producing majority in Asia remains a truism. It defines a grammar, rules of transactions, directing attention to sacred sites, underpinning healing practices and still embodied in rituals and trances. As with the subconscious or the submerged portion of an iceberg surface evidence, that which strikes our eye and enters discourse, depends implicitly on what does not appear. We may not recall the first years of life, but we know patterns they imprint inform our paths. If a spiritual substratum is hard to "see" it may be because we have lost our analogues to it and cannot see what we cannot imagine in ourselves. Pursuing the analogy, my aim is not to expose the subconscious, but to reinterpret history of consciousness in relation to it. Internal, or cognitive, frontiers constrain vision and norms condition us. These limits deserve respect, but only in the same relative terms the boundaries of nations or religions do and those, in every instance, require periodic renegotiation.

logics of intuitive and ancestral transaction
We may have the adage that "knowledge is power", but beneath it lies an epistemology implying knowledge is primarily a matter of intellect, of qualities of thought and quantities of information. Closely linked to this is a sense of person conditioned by Enlightenment notions of equality which produces resistence to suggestion there may be qualitatively different orders of consciousness. Yet as Dumont points out, "...it is only in our egalitarian ideology that reality appears on a single plane and as composed of equivalent atoms". Through his work exploring implications of hierarchy and inequality in India, we may become conscious of the degree our thought is shaped by one-dimensional ontology. If we aim to understand the sense or decode the logic connecting mystical consciousness and social power, as conceived within cultures which attend to it, then we need to consider implications of differing epistemologies.
Insofar as social sciences are disciplines of intellect dimensions of life and logic accessible to it are those subjected to analysis. This may seduced us to treat symbolism as an autonomous realm and read relationships between symbols in cerebral terms. But Malinowski's injunctions, underlying ethnography, include emphasis that:

...the foundations of magical belief and practice are not taken from the air, but are due to a number of experiences actually lived through, in which man receives the revelation of his power to attain the desired end.

This axiom points toward praxis: contextualising beliefs by the way they are socially, personally and experientially actualised in lived situations.
In traditional contexts knowledge in its significant form is 'ngelmu'. The Indonesian 'ilmu' approximates our sense of "knowledge" and Javanese distinguish that from "gnosis", spiritual knowledge which is also intuitive--the whole body and all organs within it, not just the mind knows. This sense of knowledge underlies theory not only of consciousness, but also of its relationship, essentially reflexive, to social and political power. 'Rasa' is among other things the cognitive organ which, as Javanese mystics understand it, we use to know the intuitive aspects of reality. It is in Javanese terms through intuitive experience and knowledge that people may sense the 'wahyu', the charismatic glow, of a person of power.
The Javanese idea of power may be unique in particulars, but is part of a wider pattern. Wolters identified notions of 'men of prowess' and of 'unequal souls' as underlying patterns in Southeast Asia. Errington argued in the Malay world the concept of semangat is linked to mystical senses of power. There is resonance between these ideas and 'mana', which Codrington identified in Melanesia. Anderson has given definitive exposition of the theory which in Javanese terms links political power to magical and mystical cosmology. But in stressing beliefs his terms allow us to consider those notions as simply "another ideological formulation".
Anderson's essay extends on Weber's work in that he has clarified both the systematic coherence of the political theory implicit within Javanese tradition and the substantive differences between the underlying conceptions of power in traditional Java and the contemporary West. Weber himself had already highlighted the essential logic of charismatic modes of authority:

The holder of charisma seizes the task that is adequate for him and demands obedience and a following by virtue of his mission. His success determines whether he finds them. His charismatic claim breaks down if.... his mission is not recognised by those to whom he feels he has been sent. If they recognise him, he is their master --so long as he knows how to maintain recognition through 'proving' himself.

Weber's formulation, based in part on Chinese theory of the mandate of heaven, draws attention to a circularity of logic underlying supernaturally bestowed power, also to the fact it reflects linkage between leaders and followings which, in the ideal, are felt on both sides. "Charisma" has since entered popular vocabulary and has been criticised, in some quarters discounted, for lacking explanation of the mechanism which links leader to follower.
Javanists theorise'rasa' as not only a term for sensory experiences relevant to aesthetics, but also as a cognitive organ or tool, used actively in mystical practices. Though arguing the logic of rasa underlies central patterns of ideology and experience, this is not to say rasa "explains" culture. Important as it may be within the complex of a culture, it remains only an element. Given the resonance of intuition with cliches and romanticism of a spiritual East a number of caveats are required. This does not demand a particular ontological position, it is explication of significance observed in practice and statements. It is crucial to distinguish orientations from conclusions about practices: to argue a culture highlights intuition is to point to orientation, not to conclude about the degree intuitive sensitivity informs everyday practice.
The concept of rasa is potent due to the spectrum of meanings attached to it. Because it links physical sense of 'taste' and 'touch' to emotions, refined feeling of the heart and deepest apprehension of the ultimate it provides a continuum. Through it surface meanings anyone can relate to connect to inner levels of experience which normally, in our context, appear discontinuous. It is central to mystical theory and related to perceptions of society and politics. Gonda commented that Javanese combined Sanskrit meanings associated with rasa, (taste, flavour, essence, enjoyment, sentiment, disposition, meaning, etc.') and rahasya (secret, mystery) within their use of the term. Their interpretation differs from that in Sanskrit, where rasa is primarily aesthetic rather than psychological. Nevertheless there is remarkable continuity extending from Sanskrit through Kawi into Javanese. This combines with the resonance of rasa in Javanese language and thought to provide a measure of the degree to which locals interiorised Indian thought. Gonda clarifies the varieties of usage and depth of meanings associated with it:

...it is not easy exactly to say what connotations were meant by these mystics when resorting to the favourite term rasa. It often served to translate the Arabic sirr secret, mystery', which refers to the most subtle and most hidden and latent elements in the human heart in which God is said to reside, the 'spot' where God and the soul are in contact ... In Javanese mystic texts this divine principle is also called rasa, but not the ordinary rasa, it is not the rasa (feeling) which we feel in our bodies, but the rasa which is felt in the heart. The clear and pure heart receives the supreme rasa, which is pure and without any defect ...(and)... On the one hand suksma and rasa are regarded as related, but not identical principles, on the other hand they may be interchanged or suksma is called the true rasa, the rasa of the body.

He goes on to point out that in Java there has been a special emphasis on the heart, associated with rasa and with Sufi stress on the qalb (Javanese: kalbu).
We can relate emphasis on the heart, and with it rasa, to the importance of Vishnu, as represented by the inclination of rulers such as Airlangga to be associated with him. Paths of the heart, whether in the form of Vishnu cults or Sufism, have not developed to the exclusion of others in Java, there have been many competing emphases within mystical practice. Each cult emphasises particular occult centers of perception, as understood within Tantrism and Sufism, but each also maintains awareness that the center it emphasises is but part of a complex system. While we may identify a variety, even the full range, of possible emphases among Javanese spiritual paths, arguably, both historically, as reflected in texts such as the Dharmasunya, and in contemporary spiritual practice, emphasis on the heart, as the esoteric locus of Vishnu, as kalbu, or as the locus of true rasa, is characteristic in Javanese spirituality.
This emphasis, and association with the same senses of rasa detailed above, are represented in teachings and practices of contemporary mystics. Scholars dealing with the subject have not neglected it. One large sect is called Rasa Sejati, or the absolute "pure inner feeling". Hardjanta, a Hindu teacher in Surakarta, confirmed emphasis on the heart as characteristic in Java. In the teachings of Sapta Darma the radiance of God in man is called rasa or spirit and its understanding of the network of inner pyschic centers is called tali rasa, "the rope of feeling". In Bratakesawa's teachings the rasa djati is the organ unique to man through which he can contact his essence. Within Pangestu, as Hadiwijono puts it:

Rahsa Djati is not something organical, it is a definite sphere in the psychological life. It is also indicated as the essence of the emotional life. It is the entrance or the threshold to the immaterial possibility of being...

In his report Weiss says the "feeling of the heart" is called rasa khodim and places it on the gradiant of rasa leading to rasa sejati. His informant Dwidjo linked rasa to ngelmu rasa, the science of intuition, and saw this was coterminus with kebatinan, or Javanese mysticism as a whole. At the same time he theorized that psychic powers are extensions of rasa sejati, that if rasa is developed there is no need to rely on tools of divination such as the primbon.
In their interpretations of the Javanese world view, Geertz and Mulder point to the significance of rasa within it. As Mulder puts it in a variety of places:

The Javanese high road to insight in reality is the trained and sensitive rasa (intuitive inner feeling). In mysticism, the essence of reality is grasped by the rasa and revealed in the quiet batin... It is only by training the rasa that man can bridge the distance to God' .

Mulder relates Javanese emphasis on rasa to principles of harmony, oneness, and coincidence. In a similar vein, Geertz gives a useful outline of the uses and permutations of rasa, stressing dual meaning: as feeling and meaning and noting its association with the heart. Although he provides an excellent statement, emphasis on meaning within it is at the expense of the more appropriate "essence" and "intuition" is unfortunately absent from his vocabulary. His contribution was to clarify that:

The three major foci of prijaji 'religious' life are etiquette, art, and mystical practice ... these factors are so fused as to make their separate consideration nearly meaningless ... The connecting link between all three, the common element in them all which ties them together and makes them but different modes of the same reality, is what the Javanese ... call rasa ... By taking rasa to mean both 'feeling' and 'meaning', the prijaji has been able to develop a phenomenological analysis of subjective experience to which everything else can be tied .

He further points out the concept links subjective experience and objective truth and explain that through emphasis on "feeling" there is a direct link between rasa, ultimate spiritual knowledge, and halus or extremely refined feelings cultivated through etiquette. Geertz accurately pinpoints centrality of rasa in cosmology, is sensitive to its permutations in mysticism and etiquette, but does not grasp how rasa connects these. The logic of rasa is the mechanism linking complexes of ideas relating to the nature, manifestations and practices of power (kasekten) in politics and occupies a key place within local maps of consciousness. There is no need to catalogue thought related to rasa, my aim is just to identify its logic.
Village societies emphasize harmony, balance and consensus. Van der Kroef spoke of a "stasis-seeking mechanism" as virtually an obsession in Java, one balanced by prevalence of millenarianism. Geertz identifies the selametan, communal feast, along with associated offerings to spirits as Java's basic ritual. The word selamet means peace or safety and is closely paired with rukun or harmonious, another ideal in villages. These concepts are reflected in emphasis on smoothness in relations, cooperation in enterprise and consensus in decision making. Individual behavior is guided by an imperative to harmonise and collective decisions are meant to reflect a corporate union of wills articulated, brought to the surface, by a village head. Despite the degree to which these may be merely ideals, even in stark contrast with behavior, there can be no doubting they are widely held and invoked.
We need to pay attention to cognitive and psychological differences between cultures. If reading cultural systems as different glosses on the same reality we only note part of the matter. Cultures do involve glosses, ideological formations which condition perception and behavior. At the same time they direct attention and awareness to different cognitive functions, to differing aspects or dimensions of discourse. While specialised development of intuitive awareness may be an expertise of the few in any context, some cultures as a whole emphasise intuitive dimensions of knowing and interaction.

The cases of possession and psychosis outlined here are stark sketches; description compresses so only muted suggestion touches powerful emotive substance of experience. Common Javanese terms for these cases include kesurupan (to enter) and ndadi (to "trance" or just "to happen"). These instances did not lend themselves to the straight-forward resolution traditional ritual procedures were supposed to provide and the ineffectiveness of established therapy was linked to ambiguity, presence of several rather than dominance of one conceptual framework. The cases incidentally illustrate a Javanese maxim, that "insanity is mysticism without discipline" (ngelmu). Since those possessed revealed special insight into rather than lack of consciousness of "reality", their experiences cannot be viewed primarily as delusional or hallucinatory. In these cases, trance meant disjunctive intersection with socialized reality, as the audiences were unwilling to acknowledge profound insights offered. These cracks in ritual routine illustrate the nature of transaction with "spirits" in a way normative focus on "traditional beliefs" fails to.
The first case is one of ritual possession in a village context within which everyone shared a relatively clear and homogeneous set of assumptions: that the ritual functioned to propitiate potentially dangerous spirits which might otherwise disrupt communal harmony. Islamic elements notwithstanding, including the moment celebrated, the cultural framework was Javanist (kejawen), of animism rooted in cults of guardian and ancestral spirits. In the second case Westerners echoed an earlier experience which had been termed psychosis, but within an Indic-Javanese framework of spiritual quest.
The cases of possession become meaningful against backdrop provided so far. For those tending toward the animistic rather than Islamic pole of Java, society and the spirit realms are different points on a continuum uniting microcosm and macrocosm and neither harmonious social relations in general nor balanced personal development occurs without healthy spirit contacts. Traditionally rituals functioned socially and mystical quest personally to establish or maintain that balance. Possession, whether ritually constructed or individually sought, was the most immediate form of contact. Within its intensity lies potential for backfire as, if rituals fail or individuals lack guidance and strength, the powers invoked devastate rather than harmonise. As times change, as cultural worlds becomes confused by competing ontologies, potential for misfire mounts. In these cases the strain of contemporary quest and workings of possession are opened as in each structures failed, opened cracks revealling inner domains.

The intense drama of the Balinese struggle between Rangda and Barong is well known to both scholars and tourists as a classic trance situation. Javanese equivalents seem poor cousins by comparison, but nonetheless a form of trance dancing is common and readily identifiable as a genre. The genre includes wide variations in style and substance, including reog, jatilan, prajuritan, and jaran kepang. In some troupes dancers specialise in eating glass and peeling coconut husks with their teeth, more commonly they eat unhusked paddy, flowers, and bananas (skin and all). In almost all variants the dance employs a plaited bamboo hobby horse and trance is induced with the aid of distinctive rhythms from a simple percussion orchestra. Under most circumstances only troupe members are susceptible to trance, but they have been known to enter it even by hearing the rhythms by chance over the radio. Usually trance is facilitated by the physical release which follows dancing to near exhaustion, at which point the normal psychological defenses weaken and possession occurs.
I saw performances of Javanese trance dances about half a dozen times and of almost as many styles, but by far the most revealing was one performance in which, from the ritual standpoint, things did not go smoothly. This particular prajuritan performance was an all day affair which took place near Salatiga on the slopes of Mount Merbabu in late 1971. It was held in the village (desa) of Tegalwaton, near the ancient ruins at the spring called Senjaya. The group of two dozen dancers and musicians collected a fee of 4,500 rupiah (about US$15 at the time) for the day long affair. The ceremony was sponsored by a village matriarch, among whose seventy-two descendents was one young boy who had been circumcised the night before. As explained by those present, the purpose of the ceremony was to exorcise any lingering malicious spirits who might have disrupted village harmony in general and the newly circumcised boy's sensitive spiritual state in particular.
The day began with a small ceremony at about nine in the morning. As is usually the case in syncretic Javanese practice, it opened with an Islamic prayer, then the matriarch distributed small amounts of money to each of her great grandchildren. Most of them immediately spent the money on the ice sticks being sold outside the house compound by the peddlers who collect around such village rituals. Then the extended family, the prajuritan troupe, and interested villagers formed a procession which wound its way slowly to Senjaya, about a mile from the village. At the springs almost everyone bathed and all along the circuit of hamlets we passed the troupe paused for brief previews of the performance to come. Returning to the matriarch's home, the musicians set themselves up on the verandah along with invited guests and a large crowd of onlookers formed a dense circle at the periphery of the compound. Despite the fact that the afternoon and evening sessions lasted four hours each and were punctuated by rain and drizzle, the crowd remained large. Even these casual bystanders also performed a function, preventing escape whenever a dancer threatened to break out of the circle.
Dances progressed in intensity as the day wore on. Though within a framework of skits, comic interludes, and mythic battles overall there was no comprehensive plot and narrative never became focal. Increasing intensity of trances correlated to increasing age of the dancers. All the dancers were young men, the youngest barely adolescent and the oldest in their twenties. The younger dancers who performed earlier moved more easily into and out of trance than older ones, suggesting a link between trance and socialisation. A number of dukun (shaman) supervised exorcism. As each dancer reached a limit, four or five troupe members would grab and hold him while the dukun offered water, fruit, or raw rice, whispered in his ear, and finally blew on his forehead. In several of the most severe trances, dukuns in attendance failed and runners were sent to neighbouring villages to summon assistance. Had all gone normally, in each case of possession the dancer would have acted as a vehicle for the spirit for a time, remained within the formal structure of the dancing, and returned through exorcism to a normal state (however exhausted physically and psychically). On this occasion the process was not smooth. Several dancers broke the basic structure and failed to respond to exorcising routines. One remained for some time vocally hostile to other members of the troupe; there were bad vibes and two trancers spoke while possessed, something I did not experience on other occasions.
One case of rough re-entry occurred late in the afternoon. Two dancers were ceremonially fighting with wooden swords astride their bamboo horses. Concentration was intense and two others were already in trance within the ring. One of the dancers began to lunge ferociously, with eyes bulging. At the end of a lunge his body froze and he was immediately grabbed by helpers. Instead of submitting he refused their grip, threw down the horse, and raced madly around in huge kicking jumps. He fought and danced so hard he was rushed off the ring as soon as enough helpers could get him in hand. Once inside the house four friends pinned him to the floor and he began speaking in anguished conflict within himself. In Indonesian rather than Javanese, itself a hint at the reasons for his difficulty in entering fully into the trance, he repeated he had only come with the desire to help increase selamet (harmony), to add to performance not to ruin it. He seemed convinced he had done something wrong, but the friends who held him did not seem concerned, humouring him until he calmed down.
The evening brought both increasing intensity and disharmony, culminating toward midnight. A skit was in progress with a man and woman talking. Another actor, in a red mask, began circling the two in a threatening manner, then snapped abruptly into a trance. He was rushed into the house as it was obvious he could not be dealt with normally. He spoke incessantly, sounding very much in pain and repeatedly crying "get out!" (mari keluar). Finally he turned on the others insisting he was all right and they should let him join the crowd. When they released him he resumed a circling pattern, obviously still in a trance. One helper grabbed him from behind and thus provoked intense outrage. He turned in fury on his fellow troupe members and began a tirade in front of the crowd, demanding to know why he had been unfairly restrained and insisting he was normal. Shifting his line of argument, he turned on the troupe manager and announced the performance had been a flop and everyone should go home, insisting he was going to because he could not tolerate the bumbling performance.
He blamed the troupe manager for troubles. Upset, the manager pleaded apologies and begged forgiveness on the grounds he had only been on the job for several months. Everyone watched awkwardly. Finally another troupe member began to mediate by seeming to agree with the accuser, but arguing leniency. He suggested the dancer ought to go home and offered to go along. They both sat down and the atmosphere began to settle. Performance had not properly propitiated the spirits; villagers intending to cleanse tensions found them complicated rather than harmonised, disturbing an atmosphere it was designed to stabilise.

Seekers are warned to follow guidance, loners are thought to be courting madness and the young are admonished to wait until age has muted desires before engaging quest intensely. The path is balanced by warnings that without discipline sanity may be lost and those cultivating occult powers are especially at risk, as in awakening those danger of overload multiplies and boundaries between mysticism and insanity becomes shadowy. These dangers were present in the experience of an American couple, Gay and John (pseydonyms), who had travelled the overland route for a decade from Africa via India and Nepal to Java, experimenting with mysticism along the way. They became associated with a number of teachers in the court city of Solo (Surakarta) and, although peripherally involved with several groups, came focussed on a Javanist variant of Hindu yoga. Taking bits of instruction, they failed to submit to the guidance of a guru, mixing techniques while living at a Buddhist retreat near Semarang on the coast, leading an isolated lifestyle of meditation, batiking, and visits to Solo.
After several periods of retreat, fasting and meditation, concentrating practice at the temples such as Dieng and Gedongsongo. They also practiced, kungkum (meditation in the waters of springs or at the meeting of rivers). Their aims included awakening of clairvoyance and invulnerability against knives and they got results. Gay began experiencing altered states and associated difficulty relating to society, with visions becaming intense after a ten day fast and meditation at a tantric temple, Ceto, on the northern slopes of Mount Lawu. Returning to Solo Gay entered into a convoluted visionary conflict with her guru, alternately worshipping and despising him as the centre of a nexus of evil. She explained she had not only contacted, but become possessed by a spirit of Ceto and there was no doubt of significant change. She interfered with her guru's routines, lodged herself in his residence, stole one of his pusaka, a kris, and entered occult battle with him.
At this point the mundane intruded, their visas expired and John was forced to go to Jakarta for renewal, leaving Gay in the care of others in Solo. Most spiritually oriented Westerners there at the time were involved in Sumarah and planned to visit the Ponorogo branch of that organisation. Rather than leaving her unattended they took her along, arriving at the home where they were received and explaining her unstable condition. In the midst of explanation Gay entered the room naked. Westerners reacted with excruciating embarrassment; Javanese remained cool, chuckling at demonstration foreigners were capable of sharing so fully in dangers as well as benefits of spiritual life. Gay's behaviour was so consistent with statement of her situation they experienced no anxiety about what would normally have been unthinkable.
Later similar experiences were repeated in Solo and Yogya. Gay and John went to Yogya to find a batik artist they knew, convinced he held the key to their difficulties. On arrival they were told he was in Bali but, unbelieving, they moved in, disrupted routines, and refused to budge. A number of dukun were called to expel the possessing spirits but failed. When the police were called it took eight policemen to restrain John and before they had him in hand he smashed through glass doors, gashing himself to the bone in four places. Finally they took them to a psychiatric hospital for restraint and then contacted the Solo group for help. Both police and psychiatrists in Yogya wanted only to wash their hands of the affair, arguing the couple were only marginally in their sphere of competence. Police were unconcerned, as the artist made no move to press charges. Both authorities advised us to find spiritual guidance, a dukun or guru, as the couple were victims of possession they were exempt from prosecution. Eventually they were persuaded to follow the prescription of their guru, who advised them to undertake a one week retreat at Sendang Semanggi, a sacred spring near Yogya. Instructions were to bathe nightly at midnight after making the proper offerings to strengthen the nervous system so it could cope with the occult power which had been tapped. Their guru's intention was to do increase stability as long as it did not jeopardise the powers which had been activated, as he valued those. The instructions given were only loosely followed and therapy had at best marginal results.
Their experiences generated tales of power--breaking locks, passing through doors, tremendous strength, not needing medication for severe wounds, etc. The Tolkienesque tales which abounded by no means overshadowed the often more disturbing directness of their comments on those around. The most impressive alteration in consciousness came through extremely acute perceptions of others. Unfiltered by social nicety, their words struck at the hearts and fears of everyone they interacted with. Gay saw "ownership" as meaningless, refused to acknowledge personal space, took everything as her own and stressed that ultimately no one owns anything. In this and numerous other statements she took "raw truths" and imposed them with disregard for norms. In most cases the kernel of truth and nakedness of expression was powerful. What made the behaviour unpalatable was not the fantasy or hallucination some might see in it, but insistence on truth regardless of consequence, especially of the capacity of those receiving to accept it. Yet the dominant interpretation of their experience was "spirit possession".
As a witness I was most struck by the incisive insights demonstrated by those possessed. Elements of delusion, hallucination or fantasy could be identified, but did not define their awareness. What did was insights not available to the consciousness of those around, suggesting the defining feature of possession lay in disjunctive relation with society; that if possession is "malevolent" it may not be so much because it destroys stability for those affected directly, but as it threatens to radically destabilize the deceptions upon which routine social life depends. The stated purpose of propitiation of spirits or, at the individual level, spiritual realisation is precisely to "harmonize"; these instances of failure demonstrate what is at issue.
The meaning of spirit beliefs raises special difficulties for interpreters who dichotomise subjective and objective, leading them to take it as self-evident there are no such thing as "spirits". Indigenous explanations indicate the presence of spirits within charged atmosphere, they do not postulating a non-existent or hypothetical reality, but provide interpretation of experience. Reference to spirits directs attention simultaneously to microcosm and macrocosm, not simply to an "outer" dimension. Laypeople may objectify, but experts see reference as at once to the cosmos and psychic forces in the individual, and those as aspects of each other. Tense feelings, unsettled vibes, personal anxieties, and social pressures are not alternatives but complementary. Psychological, cultural, and social explanations do not negate the substance of indigenous interpretation of possession, but highlight what indigenous people may see as the visible expressions of spirit influence.
Village trancers on the one hand and Americans on the other had different senses of purpose and frames for their experiences. The images they employed are essential to understanding features of experience and available channels for resolution; therapy was undercut when ambiguities arose from competing images. In the first case ambiguity was minimal--use of Indonesian indicated only the obvious: villages are part of a nation, perhaps accounting for added strain on ritual procedure, but merely a marginal undercurrent in the event. In Gay's case complexity was multiplied by the relevance of western psychiatric, traditional Javanist, Sumarah and Yogic schemes. She did not fit any definitively and resulting therapies were weakened by that; making sense of the common stress on consistently following "one guru", as through mixing practices the effectiveness of each may be undercut. Without implying that a shared image guarantees success it is worth noting that having common ground appears to be as important to the potential success of therapy as it is to ordinary social communication.
Containment rather than explanation, insulating experiential dimensions from society, may be the prime function of labels. Rituals provide space within which suspended reality of timeless, uncultured experience, is touched, preserving stability in the face of anarchy for the collective. Dangerous energy may be released and the feelings of people unsettled, but boundary between social and spirit realms is clear. Concepts ease the minds of those confronted, having a neat category for wild experiences, they may sit comfortably, not having to examine the relevance revelations may have had within themselves. Those possessed express not just inane babble, but often powerful truth, something which, in raw unrefinement, contrasts with and treatens everyday realities. Javanese say "insanity is mysticism without dsicipline"; it may reveal truth but without discipline results in imbalance, lack of harmony. Thus those possessed are taught to forget or learn discipline; for those observing concepts serve not so much to explain as to defend a fragile sanity.

put in qualifier and ref to Benda

As Random's (1987) suggestive approach shows

A different dimension of movement toward local perspective is evident in Anderson's (1972) exposition which illustrated shaping of practices guided by local constructions of purpose. Emmerson (1980 pp 57-9) noted that interpretations tend to move toward local emphasis to the extent that culture is at issue, conversely to shift away from it when economy is prioritised.

OW Wolters (1982)

Associated with the works of van Leur (1967) Smail (1961) Benda (1962), Hall (1968), Coedes (1968), Wales (1974), Mus (1975), Wolters (1982), O'Connor (1983), Reid (1988), and Jumsai (1988). In Emmerson's (1980) review of approaches to Southeast Asian history his term for this line of approach is "microdynamism".

(1986 p 27)

As C MacKnight (1986) warns.

S Jumsai (1988); P Manguin (1986), A Reid (1988 pp 3-10)

As Bellwood allows (1985 pp 49, 70)

According to Q Wales, "The religion of the East Torajas of Celebes and many of the peoples of Borneo preserves ... practices brought to this region by Dongson influences ... of the Bronze Age." (1957 p 65).

RB Smith & W Watson (1979 p vi)

C Hoffman (1988) & T Rambo (1988)

JF Warren (1981)

H Benda (1962 p 110)

D McAlister & P Mus (1970)

H Benda (1962 p 118) identified this as "an excessive fascination with the longevity of the Southeast Asian infrastructure" in the works of van Leur (1957 p 95) Schrieke (1957 p 4)

J Scott (1985) and elaborate extensively on his sources

As noted in collaborative exploration of Taiwanese religion (Jordan & Overmyer 1986)

Zoetmulder (1965)

As is demonstrated repeatedly in works on early architecture (Snodgrass 1985; Gomez & Woodward 1981)

J Fox (1986 p 325)

MB Hooker (1986)(extract in The Indian Ocean Review, V 2 N 2, June 1989 p 17)

P Stange (1984)

(Tambiah 1970 p 195)

Johns (1961)

Abdullah's (1966), as do recent studies (1983)Mature grasp of Islam, as in Woodward (1988)

al Attas (1966; Johns (1965)

Phelan (1959) Ileto (1979)

Lester (1973 pp 45, 135)

Geertz (1971)

von der Mehden (1963)

Geertz (1973 ch 10)

Mortimer (1974)

Drawing attention to cultural miscommunication as an aspect of the Vietnamese wars does not imply it is the only element worth considering. ref to Mus

Even when motives are positive, as in the failure of aid programs, incapacity to register the pragmatic realities of local circumstances is a profound inhibitor..

Sarkisyanz (1965) McCoy (1982) linked them to the same wider patterns I note

geertz Isl Ob; etc; doc

The title of Winstead's early study, The Malay Magician: being Shaman Saiva and Sufi , is suggestive. He highlights both syncretism and links between functions. 'Shaman' is a term for the spiritual specialists in purely animistic cultures; 'shivaite' refers to one form of Hinduism; 'sufis' are Muslim mystics.

For a recent review of the concept see R Keesing, "Rethinking Mana" Journal of Anthropological Research V 40 N 1

J Frazer

B Malinowski (1954)

B Whorf (1969)

M Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory; M Rosaldo (1980) Rosaldo organised description of Ilongot society on the basis of conceptions which are central within it.

C Levi-Strauss (1962 p 10)

M Spiro (1967 p 64)

C Geertz (1971 p 99; 1976), the same applies in works by J Siegel (1986) and W Keeler (1987) more recently.

Levy-Bruhl

M Eliade (1964 pp 2,59).

Ibid. (p 268)

For Java see C Geertz (1976); for Malay society see R Windstedt (1951) for Thailand see SJ Tambiah (1970); for a more recent study L Golomb (1985); for the Philippines R Lieban (1967); for China D Jordan, Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors (Berkeley, U California P, 1975); for Japan, R Smith, Ancestor Worship in Contemporary Japan (Stanford, Stanford UP, 1974).

The modern Indian saint Sri Aurobindo commented on the continuity within his own tradition in The Foundations of Indian Culture (Pondicherry, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1959)

The term "Perennial Philosophy" was made current by Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (London, Chatto & Windus, 1947).

One modern cult deriving from this underlayer in Japan has been Mahikari. See Winston Davis, Dojo: Magic and Exorcism in Modern Japan (Stanford, Stanford UP, 1980).

One recent study of Taoist magic is Michael Saso, The Teachings of Taoist Master Chuang (New Have, Yale UP, 1978)

relate this to 'intuitive East' etc and guard comment

As L Golomb's (1985) grasp of Thai and Malay healing practices shows

(Aung 1962 pp 83-109) (Tambiah 1970 p 280)

Implicitly I am limiting discussion to ancestral spirits, leaving out the less immediately relevant devic, demonic, and other types.

Perhaps, for example, underpinning the claims recent Christian converts make when they witness to the transformations in their fortune upon 'taking Christ into their life'.

My point is linked with Geertz's point that ... For those who hold them, religious beliefs are not inductive, they are paradigmatic: the world ...provides not evidences for their truth, but illustrations of it' (1971, p.98).

For the standard description of Javanese religious categories see Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java (1976).

For a description of this preoccupation see Niels Mulder, (1975, pp.80-87).

See Soemarsaid Moertono, (1968, p.64) for the traditional logic of this connection.

This terminology is borrowed in many cases from the Theosophical Society, which had considerable impact on urban mystics during the colonial era.

Disapproval is hardly unanimous. It is forced by regulations against klenik (black magic), and by Islamic purism. There is still a large element within kebatinan, the traditionalist, which is explicitly and strongly directed toward spirit relations.

Pemberton (1994)

Dumont (1970).

Malinowski, (1954, p 82).

For a discussion of the new practice' orientation within anthropology see Ortner, (1984, pp 144-157). The sense of praxis' which underlies my approach here is at a tangent from those discussed by Ortner, but remains related - in both contexts emphasis is shifted to what people do'.

Wolters, (1982, pp 6-7). & Kirsch

Errington, (1983); on the centrality of the notion of semangat' within Malay thought Endicott, (1970). Also closely aligned to this school' of thought is Rosaldo, (1980). In her discussion of Ilongot society she speak of the sense her informants had that liget energy experienced in the heart, fluctuates through experience and constitutes a major focus of attention within the culture.

In Holt et. al. eds., Culture and Politics in Indonesia (1972).

In Gerth and Mills, (1946, p 246).

Gonda, (1973, p. 256).

On the Dharmasunya I am drawing from Forrester, (1968). This is a basis on which we could construct a useful comparative mysticism. While there is within Sufism an emphasis on the heart; within Zen or Taoism the stress falls on the navel. Different centers, within the body are given different emphasis by variant practices.

Based on discussions with Hardjanta in Surakarta. He is the leader of a Javanese based association called Sadhar Mapan, and was previously a regional leader within the national structure of Hinduism. Details of his career are treated in Howell, (1977).

The quote is from Hadiwijono (1967, p.165), but for the rest I am relying on instructions about the practice from Ibu Sri Pawenang in Yogyakarta (1972 and 1973).

Hadiwijono (1967, p.194).

Hadiwijono (1967, p 213).

Weiss, (1977, pp.278 and 285-289).

Mulder, (1976, pp.15 and 30).

Geertz, (1976, pp.238-239).

For instance see Wolf, (1965) or Redfield, (1956).

Javanese Messianic Expectations', Comparative Studies in Society and History V I (1958-59).

Geertz, (1976, part one) on the abangan'; and on forms of village co-operation Koentjaraningrat, (1961).

Here I am thinking of suggestions such as that of Ornstein, in (1975) that traditional Asian cultures give more emphasis to the intuitive mode' of awareness - a suggestion clearly convergent with mine.

Presence of trance dancing is a fair index correlating to the most solidly Javanist regions. It is emphatically an abangan art. For an inventory of troops in the Yogya area see Soedarsono, (1976). For a thorough treatment of one variant see Kartomi, (1976).

On the special significance of this site within Javanese dynastic history see Schrieke, (1957, pp.305-307).

Soedarsono (1976, p.10) suggests that jatilan is the oldest form of Javanese dancing and that traditionally it was performed by young men. Age grade and initiation ceremonies underlie performances.

Given the thoroughly Javanist roots of the drama, the use of Indonesian reflects the intrusion of the non-Javanese thought world.

This point was in contention among those interacting with Gay and John. To many involved it seemed that their guru's posture revealed an unwillingness to take responsibility, an unwillingness which complicated efforts at therapy. Despite wavering on the couple's part, their guru was the only person with substantial influence. His satisfaction with the powers demonstrated in their behaviour was both a reflection of the initial problem and a limit to its potential resolution.

Here my point comes close to that of Laing, (1967, pp.124-129, 137). In arguing the link between some schizophrenic experiences and the experience of transcendence underlying religion, Laing lays a basis on which my point can be built; a basis consistent with the Javanese notions of a link between insanity and mysticism.

For an illustration of this assumption see Spiro, (1967, p.64). The Burmesetradition Spiro deals with is similar to the Javanese in many respects and his handling of it is in many respects exemplary. On this point I take issue, as he states that our immediate task - on the assumption that supernatural beings have no objective existence - is to examine the bases for their putative existence'.

This draws on Victor Turner's notion of the liminal' (1967, pp.93-111). The broader point about containment conforms to Douglas (1966).

---

New: 26 October, 2021 | Now: 26 October, 2021

Freotopia

This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally hosted at freotopia.org/people/paulstange/voices/2.html, and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.