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midwife, a status reserved to women.* Some types—dukun temanièn, for example—are not true specialties, usually being taken on rather casually for the particular occasion by any older person who commands the necessary knowledge of tradition. A man who is able in several of these specialties at once is called a dukun bijasa—“common dukun”— or just dukun without a qualifier, and it is he who is the most important. He is the general magical specialist in the traditional society, useful for all that ails one physically or psychologically, predicter of future events, finder of lost objects, insurer of good fortune, and usually not unwilling to practice a little sorcery if that is what one desires.
This type of practitioner is in the typical case the son of a similar practi
tioner. To be a dukun is thought to be dangerous to the individual, for the extraordinary power with which he traffics can destroy him if he is not spiritually strong. Since madness is a typical outcome for people who attempt too much along these lines, it is a help to be a descendant of a man with proven ability to support such power, for then one is also likely to have the necessary spiritual resources. But this is not necessarily so. One dukun I inter
viewed said that his father had originally tried to teach his specialty to each of the informant’s two older brothers, but both of them fell ill, showing that they were not strong enough for it; and so he, the third brother, got his chance to become a dukun.
Further, although the capacity to be a dukun is at least in part inherited, the actual ability is not; it is a learned skill. Just what is learned varies some
what from dukun to dukun. Prijaji dukims tend to emphasize ascetic disci
pline—extended fasts and long periods of wakeful meditation—and to claim that their power is entirely spiritual. Santris usually employ chanted passages from the Koran interpreted mystically, or magic bits of carefully drawn Arabic script chewed up and swallowed, or die like; and some santris claim that what
ever curing “real Moslems” do is based on scientific medical knowledge in
cluded in the Koran hundreds of years before it was “discovered” in the West.
Abangan dukims, finally, tend more to emphasize specific techniques, amulets, spells, herbs, and the like. Admittedly, however, these lines blur; most dukims employ something of all these techniques, and some sort of spiritual prepara
tion is necessary in any case.
He said that when he started being a dukun he fasted for a hundred days, eating no rice, only leaves off trees, and such things. Another time he did this for a year, for this is the way he gets his power. He said now he just fasts on Monday and Thursday of every week; the rest of the time he can eat as much as he wants. On Monday and Thursday he doesn’t eat or drink any
thing from daybreak to sunset as in the Fast. I asked him why fasting gave him power, and he said, “When you fast your spirit (he didn’t use a word, just pointed to his head) goes directly to God. If you don’t, it is much more likely to get distracted to the side somewhere.”
“'Women sometimes, perhaps typically, become dukun liban and dukun préwangan, and quite commonly dukun pidjel or dukun temanièn, but almost never any of the others.
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»88« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A Whatever it is that the practitioner learns, he learns from another dukun, who is thus his guru (teacher); and whatever he learns he and others call his ilmu (science), llmu is generally considered to be a Idnd of abstract knowl
edge or supernormal skill, but by the more concrete-minded and “old-fash
ioned” it is sometimes viewed as a kind of substantive magical power, in which case its transmission may be more direct than through teaching.
On Sunday morning we stopped at the house of Abdul’s sister, who had dropped in at our house the day before on her way out to (a nearby village), where their father has been dying for the past ten days. . . . She said what was holding things up was that the breath (which the Javanese regard as the seat of life) was still inside of him and hadn’t yet come out. She felt that it was probably trying to come out, trying to come out, and trying to come out, but hadn’t yet been able to make it. She felt that it probably had left the stomach and that it was now in the throat and struggling to get free and when it finally did, when it finally came out, he would be dead. . . . Then someone who could bear it and was watching at the right time would at
tempt to swallow it in order to take over the ilmu of the old hadji. What one does is wait for the final expulsion of the breath (known by the appear
ance of saliva at the lips, but the ilmu itself has no shape and can’t be seen) and then put one’s lips to those of the dying man and catch his magical knowl
edge (kepinteran—literally “cleverness”) in one’s mouth and swallow it. The old man evidently has lots of ilmu, as one can tell by how rich he is. He got the power in the first place from a kijaji (Koran scholar and teacher) up by the north coast. He went to this kijaji’s school when he was but a boy, and the kijaji taught him the ilmu, which involved secret meanings for Koranic pas
sages. The kijaji would write down passages and explicate them to the young man and tell him to commit the knowledge to memory and never, ever, to write it down again. This went on for some time, evidently, and then the hadji came home and became rich, lived a long time and the like—all due to this ilmu. That is why it would be a great loss if it merely escaped into the air and got away and why Abdul, her brother, has been at the bedside more or less continually for the past two or three days.
What a man can do with his ilmu more or less depends upon what kind it is. Some ilmu is quite specific. There is ilmu for causing people in a house one is robbing to sleep soundly, for finding lost objects (some ilmu enables one to tell where the object is exactly, other ilmu just tells one in which direction it lies), for getting rich, for seeing what is going on in other places, and for becoming invulnerable. This latter ilmu was very popular during the revolu
tion. At the time of the battle against the British in Surabaja about a hundred young men setting off to fight were first each given a small glass of tea over which one of Modjokuto’s leading dukuns had chanted a spell which was supposed to render them invulnerable. There is also ilmu for telling where to drill a well so the water will not be foul, where to build a house so the occupants will not sicken, for attracting the affections of someone else’s spouse. There is even ilmu for predicting world events. One seer gave out that World War III would begin within a year or two, that Russia would occupy almost all of Asia including Indonesia but would be finally defeated by the United States, and that then the United States, England, and Indonesia
would be the three major world powers. This man is said to have predicted both the triumph and the downfall of the Japanese in Indonesia.
Other ilmu is quite general and consequently rarer, enabling one to do almost anything—fly, disappear, turn into a tiger—but somehow the really powerful practitioners of tihis sort seem always to have existed in the past, there being a rather general belief that so far as ilmu is concerned people are not so skilled as they once were.
I talked to Djojo on the corner the other night about his marvelous grand
father. . . . He said his grandfather was able to disappear magically. Also he could go great distances in a short time. He would walk out of the house and announce to his wife that he was going to Semarang [three or four hun
dred miles away] and in fifteen minutes he would walle back in, saying he had just come back from Semarang. He had pupils to whom he taught this ilmu, but none of them are left now, and the ilmu is lost. No one can do these things any more now, said Djojo. . . . His grandfather was arrested once by the Dutch and taken to Bragang and put into jail because of his ilmu— all his pupils walking along behind as he was led in. When they returned home, they found him there in the house ready to teach, and it turned out later that he was in both places at once: in jail and in his house teaching. He evidently applied his magical powers in the jail toward freeing prisoners, and so the Dutch thought perhaps it would be better if they just let him go. But now he was stubborn and wouldn’t leave. “You sentenced me to seven years,” he said, “so I’ll stay here seven years. . . . ” I asked Djojo whether his grand
father could cure people, and he said, yes, he could. He said that now there are plenty of people who say they can cure people, but they really can’t, they are just swindlers deceiving people. I asked Pale Parman (the village’s best known dukun), and he said, “Oh, he is just a stupid man; he can’t do anything and just cheats people out of their money. There was a man out in Sumber- sari who could really cure, but he died a few years back and now there is no one.”
Today the leading dukuns in Modjokuto are all at least middle aged, but none is really old. Of the really well-known ones, three are abangans; one is a santri; and one, the subdistrict officer, a prijaji. All but the subdistrict officer are sons of dukuns, and all but him are also small landholders (from one-half to about two acres) who either rent their land to sharecroppers in order to be free to cure or (in one case) work it themselves. Thus no one in Modjokuto makes a living entirely from being a dukun; it is at best a part-time specializa
tion. None of the leading dukuns is extremely poor, and none, again excepting the subdistrict officer,* is particularly well off. All are members of that peculiar economic category the Javanese call tjukupan—they “have enough.”
As to personality, nothing seems to set the leading dukuns off from their neighbors. They show no unusual character traits and no obvious neurotic behaviors, nor are they considered peculiar by others. With one possible ex
ception there is little sign that these dukuns chose their vocations because of frustrated prestige or power drives, for they are not the type of men to whom
♦The subdistrict officer came to Modjokuto in 1952, and so has no roots there. He practices only among his friends, the upper status people among the prijajis, a rather limited group in number; but among them he has a high reputation.
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»90« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A the normal channels to power and prestige are closed; and, in fact, the dukun role, although it carries some prestige, also tends to draw suspicion, for some people always suspect the d ukun of either fakery or sorcery. All in all, it is hard to escape the impression that within the abangan context the dukun role is a fairly straightforward one which people adopt for fairly understandable reasons: it brings a certain monetary reward, although seemingly not an ex
tremely great one; it carries some prestige, although this is ambivalent at best;
and they believe in their own skills and enjoy practicing them successfully.
The impression of “normality” in the dukun’s role is strengthened by the consideration that, in addition to the five fairly well-known dukuns, there are literally dozens much less well-known—mostly abangans—whose powers are considered much less but who nevertheless draw part of their income from curing, seeking lost objects, practicing sorcery, and the like. In each neighbor
hood there always seems to be some man, usually a little older and somewhat more intelligent than the rest, to whom people look for help in the event of illness, theft, and so on, turning to the better known dukuns only rarely and in more serious cases. In fact, since almost every adult male knows at least a few spells and may be called upon to try his hand at curing a neighbor, finding a lost ring, or attracting a girl’s affections, the role of the dukun, although a professional specialty, shades off at the edges into an irregular amateurish practice. If one stays in Modjokuto long enough one will hear just about every man in town referred to as a dukun at one time or another, although it will be clear that only certain people are really considered to be very good as dukuns and spend very much time at this practice.
Another peculiarity of the dukun role is that the reputation of a first-class dukun is almost always greater outside of his home region than in it. Really good dukuns draw a great part of their clientele from a distance; and it is said that they are more effective with people who are not otherwise acquainted with them, although exactly why this is so no one really seems to know. Many Modjokuto people go off to dukuns in other parts of East Java. My landlord went to a man near Malang, some 60 miles to the east, to get some sorcery practiced against a thief; and one old man who had been ill for some time went a hundred miles on the back of a truck to see a dukun he had heard about only vaguely, the trip in itself almost killing him. Similarly, the leading dukuns in Modjokuto drew many of their patients from as far away as Sura
baja, 100 miles to the north, even though they were often thought to be frauds by their closest neighbors. Just how people at this distance know about curers in Modjokuto I never was quite able to discover. Whenever I asked this ques
tion of a dukun, he assured me that it was God who brought his patients to him.
Finally, there is the problem of the belief in dukuns. A partial skepticism about dukuns and their ability to do the things they claim to do is nearly uni
versal. Nearly everyone with whom I spoke about the matter in Modjokuto believed in dukuns in general, in their possibility; but opinions about the powers of any one given dukun living in the area varied tremendously. I heard opinions expressed about each of the leading dukuns which ranged from abso
lute belief to outright accusation of fraud, but I never heard a denial that at least some dukuns were good, honest, and miraculously powerful.
Also, the concept of tjotjog—fittingness—which is so important in nu
merical divination plays a crucial role here too. A particular dukun may be very powerful and very clever, but he still may not tjotjog with one. There may be no question of his skill—for example, in a case of illness, he may have cured far more difficult cases but if the patient and he do not tjotjog, there will be nothing he can do and the patient will remain sick. So, when a man is ill, he tries one dukun after another until one cures him, never concerning himself about the reasons for their failure, and not necessarily holding it against them that they were unable to help him. It is just the same with Western-trained doctors. People would say earnestly to me: “Sometimes they tjotjog and cure you and sometimes they do not. The only difference is that you have to pay a doctor even if you die in his hands, while a good dukun expects payment only if he succeeds.”
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