Chapter 3 The Slametan Cycles

The M eaning of Spirit Beliefs

Chapter 3 Chapter 3 The Slametan Cycles

Slametans fall into four main types: (1) those centering around the crises of life—birth, circumcision, marriage, and death; (2) those associated with the Moslem ceremonial calendar—the birth of the Prophet, the ending of the Fast, the Day of Sacrifice, and the like; (3) that concerned with the social integration of the village, the bersih désa (literally: “the cleansing of the village”— i.e., of evil spirits); and (4) those intermittent slametans held at irregular intervals and depending upon unusual occurrences—departing for a long trip, changing one’s place of residence, taking a new personal name, illness, sorcery, and so forth.

Before considering these several types in detail, some mention must be made of two factors common to all: first, the underlying principle of timing slametans and, second, their economic significance.

Pètungan: The Javanese Num erological System

birth slametans are fixed in time by the accident of birth, and death slametans by the accident of death; but the Javanese remove both these events from the realm of chance by ascribing them to the will of God, which fixes precisely the span of each man’s life. When Brataséna, the wajang hero, appears in heaven after having died on purpose in the story mentioned earlier, B atara Guru, king of all the gods, admonishes him for his presumptuousness in dying before the time divinely set for him and sends him packing back into the world of men. Circumcision and marriage ceremonies—as well as residence changes and the like—would seem necessarily to be set by the will of men, but here too the purely adventitious is avoided and a wider ontological order invoked by means of a system of numerological divination called pètungan or “counting.”

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At the base of this often quite involved system lies one of the most funda­

mental Javanese metaphysical concepts: tjot jog. To tjotjog means to fit, as a key does in a lock, as an efficacious medicine does a disease, as a solution does an arithmetic problem, as a man does to the woman he married (if he doesn’t, they get divorced). If your opinion agrees with mine, we tjotjog; if the clothes I wear are proper for my class standing, they tjotjog; if the meaning of my name fits my character (and if it brings me good luck), it is said to be tjotjog.

Tasty food, comfortable surroundings, gratifying outcomes are all tjotjog. In the broadest and most abstract sense two separate items tjotjog when their coincidence forms an aesthetic pattern. It implies a contrapuntal view of the universe in which what is important is what natural relationship the separate elements—space, time, and human motivation—have to one another, how they must be arranged in order to strike a chord and avoid a dissonance.

As in harmony, the ultimately correct relations are fixed, determinate, and knowable, and so religion, like harmony, is ultimately a science, no matter how much of an art its actual practice may be. The pétungan system provides a way of stating these relationships and thus of tuning one’s own actions to them, of avoiding the kind of disharmony with the general order of nature which can only bring misfortune.

Suppose one wishes to change his residence. He can’t just up and move;

he must first take into account two important variables: the direction in which he will be moving and the day on which he wishes to move. The direction is usually one of the cardinal directions, for Javanese villages and towns tend to be laid out, as are the individual houses, streets, and rice fields within them (except on mountain sides where it is not possible), more or less in alignment with the major compass points. Space is square, and one moves through it rectangularly: people tell you to move your chair a little to the west or to pass the peppers to the man on your east. After two hours on a bus winding along a mountain road, I was requested to exit by the north door. Javanese dread to be mixed up about directions, and a person confused or dizzy or slightly off is said to be someone who does not know where north is.

Time, on the other hand, is, as has been mentioned, pulsative: a given period of time is a result of the coincidence of days in the five- and seven- day cycles, and, in the more elaborate pétungan systems, of these days with one of the thirty seven-day wukuh weeks, one of the twelve Moslem lunar months, and one of the eight windu years. In moving, then, one tjotjogs the direction of movement with numbers attached to the days.

I then asked Ardjo [my landlord] how he had decided what day would be a good one for us to move in on. He said each day has a number (neptu) : Monday 4, Sunday 5, Tuesday 3, Wednesday 7, Thursday 8, Friday 6, Satur­

day 9; Legi 5, Paing 9, Pon 7, Wagê 4, Kliwon 8. You add these. Thus we came on Saptu-Wagé, which is 9 for Saturday, plus 4 for Wagé, giving 13.

Then, whether this number is good is dependent upon the direction in which you are moving. We were moving south to north, so it was all right. He finds out which numbers are good for which directions by consulting records in­

herited from his parents. He said he had “half memorized” them but still always checked, for if he made a mistake the troubles which followed would The

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»32« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A be his fault. He said that moving is the thing of very first importance for the Javanese, “number one.” Not so for the Dutch, though— they don’t believe in it. When Ardjo’s father was transferred here from Tebing (he was, like Ardjo, a railroad worker), his Dutch superior was transferred too. Ardjo’s father figured out the correct day to move but the Dutch boss, being haughty, felt it would be beneath his dignity to go on the same day as his Javanese in­

ferior and so waited for two more days. Ardjo’s father told him that that was a bad day to go south and something terrible would happen to him, but the Dutchman said that was just “empty talk,” and then six months after he moved he died.

For the more reflective of the prijajis these number systems for the days are empirical descriptions of the ultimate order of nature. They are said to have come out of the inner consciousness of some famous mystic and to have been handed down generation to generation, often secretly, from teacher to chosen pupil. But for the abangans they tend to be explained once more in terms of a spirit, the so-called naga dina or “snake of the day.”* Someone moving the wrong way on the wrong day is said to be either bitten by the snake of the day or eaten by him.

There are also snakes of the week, month, and year. For example, here is a chart of the directions permitted by the naga wulan, the snake of the Moslem lunar months :

North: Sawal Sela Besar

West: Redjeb East: Sura

Ruwah Sapar

Pasa Mulud

South: Bakdamulud Djumadilawal Djumadilakir

Thus, in Sawal, Sela, and Besar, one should move north or go on an im­

portant trip in that direction; in Redjeb, Ruwah, and Pasa one should go west;

and so on. One uses naga wulan for more serious occasions—a long trip, say, to Djakarta or Surabaja—while naga dina are mostly used for movements within the town. Naga taun, the snake of the year, is concerned with really momentous journeys, such as trips outside Java.

The naga dina are naturally the least powerful and can sometimes be de­

ceived. For example, if one wishes to go south on the wrong day for it, he can start off north, throwing the naga off his trail, turn west and then south, circling his destination and finally coming in, apparently correctly, northward.

Few people would venture this for the months, however, and even with the

* Here too, however, excessively literal interpretations are to be avoided. When I asked an old woman who had told me that I had fallen sick because I had entered Modjo- kuto originally on the wrong day and so had been “eaten by the snake of the day,” what such a snake looked like and how one came into contact with them, she said: “Don’t be silly—you can’t see Wednesday, can you?”

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days it is risky, for the snake may see through your tricks. The father of one of my informants finally died after having been desperately ill with tuberculosis for several years, and the informant attributed his death to his having moved west on the wrong day even though the evasion method had been applied and he had started off to the east. When I protested that his father had been nearly moribund for over a year, he said, “Sure, but he was sick for three years and he didn’t die; we moved house and immediately he died.”

A rather more complicated system in use by some people in Modjokuto employs a diagram such as this:

Here we have a somewhat more general system, in that it can tell one whether anything he intends to do is likely to be a good idea or not. First one figures the number of the day on which he is doing the divination—e.g., in the system quoted earlier, by far the most widespread in Modjokuto, Saptu-Wagé was 13. So he takes 13 com kernels and drops them one by one on each day in order (beginning with Monday). When he has run out of all 13, he picks up all the kernels lying on the day on which he has just dropped the last kernel and continues until he comes to rest on another day, and so forth. Eventually he will land with a final kernel on a day on which no kernels remain. This day is the one on which it would be the most unwise to carry out the contemplated action, while the day on which the greatest number of kernels lies when the process has been completed is the most propitious one. Another system merely lists the months and gives the days and dates which are propitious and those which are not: in Sawal, Friday is a good day for almost anything, and the second of the month is too; on the ninth and twentieth one is better off sitting at home. One man I knew had a chart with days, months, and wukuh weeks all interlaced with various other variables to produce a quite refined predictive instrument.

Systems of this complexity are usually the property of a specialist; the average person will usually go to a dukun when he wishes to divine something.

Before the war, it is claimed, this was even truer than now. Such systems are said to have been very secret then, handed down from teacher to pupil with much care; it is only lately that they have been diffused among the common people. I rather doubt this, but the possession of a pétungan system somewhat different from those of one’s neighbors and accounted superior to them even today gives one an edge over others in the business of living, and one’s private system is often guarded with great care. Such people, who tend often to be curers as well, are consulted about all kinds of personal problems and for just a general prognosis:

»34« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A Pak Tjipto (a dukun, one of the best-known curers in Modjokuto) asked me when I was bora (the days; he was not interested in the month or year), and so I said Rebo-Pon and (my wife) Djumuwat-Legi and that we were married on Sapîu-Wagê. Well, he said, Rebo is 7, Pon is 7, and that makes 14. Djumu- wat is 6, Legi 5, which makes 11. Eleven plus 14 is 25. Sapin is 9. Wage 4 or 13. Thirteen and 25 are 38. Subtract 3 times 10 or 30 and you get 8. Sub­

tract 3 more for 5 and then 3 more giving 2. This is good. If you get 1 or 0 it is not good and people fight and often get divorced...He said Djumu­

wat-Legi, my wife’s birthday, was better than mine, Rebo-Pon, so I should follow her decisions and not she mine. If I did things “according to my own will,” I would certainly go wrong, and she should be the head in the family.

Pétungan systems are used to decide in which direction to enter a house when one wishes to rob it without being discovered, to pick the side of a cock­

ring on which to sit in order to win all one’s bets, to predict whether one will succeed or not in trade on a given day, to choose the correct medicine for a disease, to analyze someone’s character, to determine the proper day for circumcisions and weddings (usually down to the very hour at which the ceremony ought to occur), and to decide whether a prospective marriage is likely to work out. For this last, the birthday of the bride and groom are added up, almost always by a dukun, to see if they tjotjog; if they do not, the wedding does not occur, at least in traditional circles where this belief is still quite strong. In some cases there may be a conflict when the bride’s and groom’s families or their dukuns use different systems, and I know of such a case in which the wedding—after months of argument—did not take place; but usually this sort of problem is avoided by deferment to the system employed by the bride’s family. Also, people are not above using pétungan as a way out of a difficult situation, as in the case of the woman who told a suitor for her daughter’s hand whom she found unacceptable generally that his date was not tjotjog when in fact it was.

I know of at least one case in which a couple were finally allowed to marry over the protests of their parents despite incompatible birthdates; and some people just marry and hope for the best, blaming whatever misfortune occurs on die lack of fit. In general, however, even fairly urbanized families often still hold firmly to the system—as can be seen in the following case, where the problem was one of the timing of the wedding ceremony rather than incom­

patible birthdates:

Rahman told me about his cousin, Mutallip, who was supposed to get married to a girl in Bragang (a small city not far from Modjokuto) last week. He has known this girl for years, and they were school friends, and they have been engaged for nearly three years. The girl already works somewhere, and they have been waiting for Mutallip to get some steady job in Djakarta, where he now lives. . . . He finally found one as a secretary of a former cabinet minister, and this made it possible for him to get married. The date was set by the father-in-law and everything was made ready. The day of the wedding, last Saturday, came and the bridegroom didn’t arrive from Djakarta until late in the day. He said after he arrived that he had been going from person to person in Djakarta, the cabinet minister included, to borrow money for his fare here. This excuse was taken as reasonable by his aunt, Bu Merto. But

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the trouble was that the wedding was set for 11:00 a.m. at the latest and he arrived at 11:15. The father-in-law said that it was too late, the propitious moment had passed, and any wedding after that time would not be right.

Mutallip and his father, Pak Rijadi, seemed to think the fifteen minutes or half-hour weren’t very important, but the father-in-law was steadfast. Mutal­

lip didn’t talk to the father-in-law directly, but just to his father and fiancée.

He was quite angry and said that unless they were married this week he would not have the money to come all the way from Djakarta again for a long time, probably a year. This meant marry now or wait a year. The father-in-law didn’t give in, and Mutallip went back to Djakarta.

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Costs of Slametans

the giving of slametans, of course, costs money, but it is difficult to make an estimate of how much, not only because people do not keep records of such expenditures but also because figures giving amounts of money in a foreign currency are often quite meaningless or misleading even if one knows the exchange rate. This is true not merely because the official rate (about 11.3 rupiahs to the dollar in Indonesia) may be unrealistic, but also because even the free rate (about 30 to 1 in 1953) reflects the differences not between the buying power of the two currencies as the average man perceives them but between the wealth of the two countries taken as a whole. Thus, no matter how enlightening it may be for the analysis of world income distribution,, to take the 30 to 1 ratio and say that a man who in Indonesia makes 600 rupiahs a month is comparable to a man making $20 a month in the United States is sociologically preposterous, for the 600-rupiah man is actually moderately well off so far as standard of living within the Javanese context is concerned.

To estimate the economic significance of their religious celebrations from the point of view of the Javanese themselves, in order to giye a valid notion to the Western reader of the actual sums of Javanese wealth involved, demands what might be called a comparative phenomenology of currency. One must find a divisor for Indonesian currency which gives a result which reflects, even if only very roughly, some realistic notion of what rupiah notations of wealth mean in terms of buying experience, social status, and relative well-being as we are familiar with them—a divisor which translates Indonesian economic perceptions into American ones, insofar as that is at all possible.

In attempting to find such a divisor it must not be forgotten that the dis­

tribution of available wealth within the two countries among the various social groups and classes is quite remarkably different: many fewer people are

“moderately well-off” there than here. Moreover, there is a great difference in the over-all total of available wealth, with the result that, for example, be­

cause of the lack of large-scale domestic industrial production, many goods accessible to even relatively poor Americans—automobiles, for example—

are very much less accessible to even fairly well-off Indonesians.

»36« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A In this context, then, I think, mainly on the basis of a common-sense com­

parison of my own experiences in the United States and in Modjokuto, that a divisor of three is a realistic one. Thus the man who earns 600 rupiahs can be compared to a man who earns $200 here in general terms of the view both he himself and others around him hold of his economic and social position;

and a soft drink that sells for 30 cents in Indonesia could probably be had for a dime in the United States. Therefore, when I say a fairly simple slametan in Modjokuto will cost about 30 rupiahs, it would be highly incorrect to con­

clude that this is comparable in any phenomenological sense to an expenditure of one dollar in the United States; ten dollars would give more of the feel of the thing.

Preliminaries completed, the following gives some figures on the cost of different slcimetans actually given while I was in Modjokuto (figures marked with an astèrisk are estimates) :

Typo of Slametan Cost {Rp)

"D ream " shmetan (urban laborer; as It was the end of the month, no rice included) 3

Megengan (policeman) 5

Name-changing 15

Pasaran for baby (policeman) 20

Moving 30

Megengan 40

Malemon 75

Moving 90

Maloman (policeman) 100*

Tlngkeban (a wholly rural peasant; includes two goats at Rp 160; the return from

buwufis was Rp 250) 600*

Wedding (urban laborer; buwufis totaled Rp 1,000*) 700*

Funeral (mediumly well-off town family) 1,345*

Wedding (railroad conductor) 1,500*

Circumcision (urban laborer) 1,500*

Wedding (very well-to-do) (The fa/uban— in which the participants contribute money before each turn with the dancer and the gin glass— at this wedding brought in Rp 1,475. In addition there were many expensive gifts from both Indonesians—

one group of 36 officials gave a present worth Rp 700— and Chinese) 5,000

In the case of the funeral in the list above, which cost an estimated Rp 1,345, an itemization of the expenses is available. The expenditure for the funeral proper were as follows (Rp) :

Coins given out to mourners 40

Muslin winding sheet 40

Grave marker (bought ready-made from a Chinese; this would never be done in a

village) 45

Rental of litter 5

Planks (the wood was bought) 30

Flowers 15

Food (in addition to that brought by the guests) 60*

Cigarettes for guests (this is an item in all sfamefans) 45

TOTAL for the funeral proper Rp 280*