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prove it to me, saying that he had lots of other things equally marvelous he could do, but this would serve as an example. He said he could cure people but only used his powers for his children, for if people knew he could cure they would all come around for treatment, and he wouldn’t be free any more and would have no time for himself. He said his powers came from not eat
ing or sleeping much.
Each of the three elements—medicine, spell, and condition of the per
former—may be used separately. Medicines may be employed in the home with or without the advice of a dukun. Individuals may be cured simply through meditating on their problems and giving them advice to move the toilet, rebury their child’s umbilical cord, or sleep with their head at the other end of the bed, without any spells or medicines at all. People may be massaged and chanted over with no medicines and no particular power of concentration necessary on the part of the masseur. But more commonly all three are em
ployed as interdependent parts of a unitary curing method in which the spell and the medicine are energized by the spiritual abilities of the dukun. The spell the dukun chants reaches God or the guardian twins because the curer’s intense mental concentration drives it into their consciousness, and then they act in response to the spell’s plea back through the dukun as he spits into the medicine to make it really powerful. So each element lends to the others some of its own efficacy, but it is the state of superior spiritual strength in the dukun, a state conceived of in psychological terms, upon which the process as a whole depends.
Curing, Sorcery, and Magic
»96« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A that the reason for his disease is that a sétan has entered him. Rasid considers this unwise from a religious standpoint, for if one tells people sêtans are what are disturbing them, they will start to fear sétans, and the Koran says one is not to fear sétans, only God. People should not pay too much attention to sétans but ignore them. Though he often knows that a sétan is the cause of his patient’s sickness, he doesn’t tell the patient—just cures him . . . Or a dukun will say the reason one is ill is that Pak so-and-so is witching him. Rasid doesn’t do this either—although he often can see that a particular patient has been witched—because it often leads to fights with people. He said he used to practice as a dukun now and then but learned better from bitter experience.
He said once a sick woman came to him and he told her it was her husband who was making her sick. The husband was very angry, and when later he fell sick he blamed Rasid for it, accusing him of sorcery, and it was unpleasant all around. Another difference between dukuns and people like him is that dukuns have other powers than mere curing; for example, they can find lost things. He doesn’t do that—just cures.
And the third most popular dukun (and the most notorious money- grubber) had the same story;
He said he is not a dukun but merely a pitulung (I have never heard this term applied except by a man to himself; for everyone else, this man was a dukun) . I asked him what the difference was, and he said a dukun takes money, but a pitulung doesn’t—just helps people out. He said he can’t always cure people;
sometimes he can and sometimes he can’t. If he could say for certain, “I can cure you,” there would be two gods. As it is, he just supplicates God and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, although he admitted he said spells over three hen’s eggs as one of his techniques (the eggs are then eaten or made into a salve) and that he accepted gifts from satisfied patients.
As these excerpts from my notes indicate, there are several factors cluster
ing around the psychological relationship between the dukun and his patient which seem to account for the ambivalent attitude most people show toward dukuns, for the fact that they regard them both as supportive figures and as threatening ones. The first is the problem of the uncertain outcome of treat
ment, the essential contingency of the curative process involving as it does the possibility that one’s hopes for well-being will be frustrated. The second is the degree to which the dukun may become involved in his patient’s per
sonal life and the necessity from the dukun’s point of view for the careful handling of this problem. And the last is the inherent ambiguity of the dukun1’s power, trafficking as he does both with God and with devils, able to sicken people as well as to cure them, and engaging both in devout supplications to a high God and in dubious contracts with less elevated spirits—ndukuni (“to dukun someone”) means both to cure a person of a disease and to sorcerize a person into having one.
Something of the quality of the relationship between the dukun and his client can be seen from the fact that the major alternative term for dukun is tijang sepuh, which means (in the respectful speech style) “parent” ; that the client is usually said to “beg pardon” (nuwun pangèstu) from the dukun; and that the former is often held to be seeking “advice” and “good counsel” from the latter, “as one does from one’s own parents.”
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I asked her to whom she would go for help if she had some great problem.
She asked me what sort of problem, and I said it was up to her; and she said she would go to someone she “looked upon” as a father, such as the curer in a nearby village. They used to go to one near Bragang, but he’s dead now.
Once when she was very sick, Pak Wirjo went to the Bragang one, “begged forgiveness,” and told him about the sickness. He was given a bit of sugar which the curer had prayed over (illustrated by holding a pinch of sugar be
fore her and closing her eyes for a moment). The dukun directed him to give it to her to eat. This even though they had already gone to the doctor. Also if she is having money troubles—for instance, she once gave a shadow play and borrowed money from a Chinese for this (before the war). The time for repayment came and she didn’t have the money, and the Chinese wouldn’t let her extend the period but insisted on her paying up all at once, so she was very troubled and went to this curer and “begged pardon.”
Dukuns are quite aware, at least peripherally, that much of their power is psychological; and all Javanese seem to hold that there are two main kinds of disease: one kind, with discoverable physical causes, which is amenable to treatment by Western doctors; and a second kind in which there are no medi
cal findings but still the person is ill, the latter type being the kind dukuns are peculiarly competent to cure. Thus Pak Parman said that he was at his best on convulsions and temporary insanity. But if the person with convulsions or the insane man came from parents who were also liable to convulsions or were mentally ill, he very rarely could help them and usually refused even to try. All dukuns emphasize the necessity for absolute trust and belief in the dukun and ascribe many of their failures to the fact that the patient had inner reservations about the curer’s ability. The psychological causation of physical illness is a commonplace.
When Pak Ardjo went to Djakarta to visit his son whose wife had just died, he went by train with the mother of the wife. On the trip he began to feel ill, and by the time he got there he was very sick and spent the entire visit in bed.
He said the reason he got sick . . . was that he was angry (pegel—anger concealed in the heart; unexpressed, secreted anger) toward the woman whose daughter it was who had died because she seemed not to be grieving at all over her daughter’s decease. At every stop almost, she got herself something to eat and ate and ate all the way there (Ardjo did not eat the whole day, he said proudly), and he was angry at her but didn’t show it, and this being held inside him was what made him sick.
The connection between emotional stability and physical health is usually put in more concrete form, especially by abangans. If one is upset, startled, or severely depressed, one becomes confused and disoriented, and one’s soul is then empty and easily entered by the spirits. Sometimes the spirit is held to displace the soul, in which case the curing process is stated in even more metaphorical form :
“When a sêtan enters you, it chases out your own spirit (he said he didn’t know where it went to—just ‘away’) because it struggles with the sétan and loses because your soul is weak, and so you become insane. When you are cured—with the aid of a dukun—the soul comes back, struggles with the Curing, Sorcery, and Magic
»98« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A sé tan; the sétan loses, departs, and you are well again. You have been reor
ganized,” he said.
Among the specialists themselves, particular psychological stresses may be explicitly connected to particular physical symptoms. One dukim, something of a prijaji actually, said he treated two kinds of diseases: specific ones, such as toothaches, broken bones, upset stomach, and dysentery; and general all-over ones, of which latter type there were four main varieties: dirty blood (dcirah kotor), a shortage or lack of blood (kurang dar ah), an empty soul, perhaps entered by spirits but not necessarily (djiwa kotong), and air, “heat,” or some other foreign substance inside the body, sometimes induced there magically through sorcery.
The first, dirty blood, he said could be caused in one of two ways. Eating bad food—spoiled or too peppery, or merely food which one is not used to eating—which “startles” your stomach and so makes you upset in the “heart”
will dirty your blood. Secondly, continual anger, greed resulting in frequent frustration of your wishes, or secreted emotions like envy or jealousy will up
set your “heart” and dirty your blood. The symptoms of dirty blood are general sluggishness, perhaps a rash or boils, alternation between fevers and chills,*1* and a “dark mind”—i.e., confused and suspicious thought, liability to sudden thrusts of passion.
Lack of blood the dukun traced to nagging fear, anxiety, or depression without an obvious cause. This thins out one’s blood, leading to a shortage of it. Symptoms are paleness, weakness, and general lassitude of mind—one just lies around and does nothing all day. Lack of blood may also follow as a second stage after dirty blood.
An empty soul, on the other hand, is due to a lack of spiritual discipline—
a failure to exercise the soul by fasting, staying awake, and meditation—
which leaves one very liable to sudden startle and prey to marauding spirits.
The general symptoms are: if a spirit has entered, intellectual disorientation, delirium, strange behavior—in a word, “insanity” ; and, if no spirit has yet entered, a general inability to persist in an activity, indirection, aimlessness, and so forth—a kind of loss of inward strength quite often ascribed by older Javanese to younger ones of the rising generation.
I talked with Tjipto and the old man who takes care of the graveyard for a few minutes. Both were bemoaning the younger generation. The younger gen
eration, they said, are very clever, but they are not very wise. They have a lot of knowledge but no wisdom; they think they know everything and they really don’t know anything. In the old days people accepted their lot, were always peaceful in their hearts, and one could count on them. If they said they were going north, they went north in fact; they didn’t go south first. Tjipto said that in the old days if he went out of the house and told his wife he was going north and someone invited him to go south, he would refuse because he had said where he was going and his will was set. In those days people did not
* This may also, of course, be due to malaria. Since many Javanese hold that malaria is caused by eating newly harvested rice (a view which is reasonable enough, considering that it is at the harvest time that the irrigation streams are beginning to stagnate and thus the mosquitoes multiply), it too is sometimes seen as a “dirty blood”
disease.
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spend so such time fooling around as they do now. They fasted, slept little, and went in for self-control. They led a much more ordered life. Nowadays people just sit around and talk all the time, stop in at a coffee shop here and a coffee shop there, chit-chat with everyone they meet. They thought this was bad—just following your will of the moment. In the old days people were stronger, and their wills were pure; they were single-minded, and they weren’t drawn here and there by irrelevancies. The younger generation are no longer peaceful either, and the result is they don’t live so long. There used to be people who lived for 150 to 200 years because they were so peaceful; now at sixty they are already old.
Finally, the last variety of general disease is caused either by air entering the body, by heat entering it, or by foreign objects—nails, glass, human hair—
introduced into the stomach by means of sorcery. Air in the body (masuk angin) produces symptoms much like our “cold”— coughing, sneezing, and general aches. Heat in the body (panas mlebu) leads to somewhat more lo
calized pains. The symptoms of a disease due to sorcery are more violent:
vomiting blood, convulsions, and the like. Again, those most liable to sorcery are those who are weak spiritually, but anyone may have air or heat enter merely by sitting in a draft or in wet clothes.
This particular analysis is but one man’s view, and it would be unwise to take it as definitive. However, categories like “dirty blood,” “lack of blood,”
“empty soul” are nearly universal and are given interpretations of the same general order as those presented above, although many would dispute details, and the great mass of people have little theory beyond the terms themselves, which they apply more or less haphazardly. At any rate, this dukun said that there were for a Javanese two things of chief importance in staying well, and on this I think he would get general assent: watching one’s food to make sure it is clean and not too “startling”; exercising one’s soul to gain spiritual strength.
On this basis he went further to argue that no dukun ever cures a general disease (he may, of course, cure specific ones) but just alleviates it, for he does not touch the underlying cause. For example, if one has a rash caused by dirty blood, the iimu of the dukun can make it go away, but the blood will still be dirty, and the rash may later come back, or one may get another symptom to replace it caused by the underlying dirty blood. So it is that one sees people who have a rash cured by a dukun only to develop boils;
the boils go away, and they get headaches; the headaches vanish, and they are laid up with rheumatism. One can’t clean up dirty blood with a spell, he said; only meditation by the patient and a careful diet can do that. However, he admitted rather sadly, some dukuns will promise one anything.
Curing, Sorcery, and Magic
The Possessed Curer: Dukun T iban
if the common dukun is protected against the inevitable ambivalence with which the public views the curer of souls in any culture by the social “nor
»100« T H E R E L I G I O N O F J A V A mality” of his role, by the regularity of the traditionalized procedures he employs, by the strictness of his discipline and the breadth of his learning, by his insistence that he cures only with the aid of God, by his pseudoparental status, and by his own usually sound enough civic reputation—these “bour
geois virtues” balancing off the morally equivocal forces with which he deals and the possibilities for doing evil with which he is presented—the dukun tiban has no such protection. He exchanges the social acceptability of the common dukun’s practice for the greater power possible in a more simple, direct, and uncircumspect approach to the darker powers.
The roles of the dukun bijasa and the clukun tiban differ in almost every particular. Where the power of the former is based on learning plus, some
times, an inherited factor, that of the latter comes suddenly, without any prep
aration on his part, by “divine stroke” (tiban means “fallen,” “fallen as a wonder from the sides” ). Where almost all of the former are men, perhaps a majority of the latter are women. Where the former seem usually to be psychologically stable and economically secure, the latter are said usually to be at least somewhat unbalanced and to come from among the economically depressed. Where the power of the former is continuing and, relatively speak
ing, moderate, the power of the latter disappears as suddenly as it comes (usu
ally within a year, almost always within three) and is of much greater in
tensity while it lasts. Where the former are numerous everywhere, the latter are rare and occur only sporadically (most informants said one seemed to turn up somewhere around Modjokuto about once every five years or so). And where there is at most only a mild skepticism about either the effectiveness or the morality of the practices of the former, there is sharp disagreement con
cerning both the reality and the ethical character of the forces upon which the tiban calls.
The only dukun tiban of any importance to appear in the Modjokuto area for the past five or six years “occurred,” luckily enough, during the period of field study in the village immediately to the north of town. About the first of November in 1953 (and at the beginning of the Javanese year in the month of Sura) a poverty-stricken onion peddler in the town market (her debt-ridden husband owned no land and was reduced to seeking casual farm work wher
ever he could find it) lost a ring. She looked high and low for it for two or three days with no success. Then one night in a dream she saw a great beam of light come down from heaven and strike the floor. The brick where the light had been focused was broken open and found to contain the ring, and she knew—how, I was never quite able to discover—that if she dipped the ring in home-made medicine she would have the power to cure.
Within a week her fame had spread over the entire Modjokuto area and farther (it was said that the first patients came to her, instructed to do so in dreams, from a distance of 50 to 60 miles). Everyone was discussing her—the general opinion was that she had been entered by an evil spirit—and her miraculous cures of the deaf, the halt, and the blind. One man, unable to un
clench his fist for 15 years, could now flex it normally after one treatment.
Another person had been cured of blindness, but later said evil things of the dukun and the blindness returned. The wife of a well-known religious teacher