Tropical Shamans of Malaysia and Indonesia
In parts of the Pacific islands and southeast Asia, where spirit mediumship is widely practiced, the ecstatic quest for transcendence has likewise flourished. In the isolated, unusually democratic Polynesian island of Niue, the taula-atua might be possessed by gods or ghosts, but could also send his own gods to recover a sick person's lost soul (Loeb 1924, 393–97)—a triumph characteristic not of the medium as instrument of the spirits but of the shaman as their master. In several Melanesian societies, a professional dreamer was thought to visit the dead in sleep and bring back the soul of a sick infant held by a deceased relative (Codrington, 208–09).[3] And in New Caledonia a Kanaka tribesman may climb up
[3] On an extremely general level, the flying witches of Melanesia (and of Africa or Europe) can be compared to shamans, as Layard has done in paralleling "flying tricksters" of the New Hebrides to Siberian shamans; common traits include, in his view, initiatory death and resurrection, metamorphosis into animal form, flight through the air, epileptic symptoms: and homosexuality. But shamans differ fundamentally, as Layard notes, from witches in their vocation of healing and fighting against demonic forces and death. One might speculate that witchcraft has been especially prominent in regions like Melanesia, Africa, Europe, and the Pueblo and Navajo Southwest where ecstatic transcendence, denied the communally sanctioned expression of shamanism, has taken illicit forms.
to a platform of his house where he seeks visions in a deliberate quest for transcendent knowledge (Leenhardt, 28).
But it is in the Malay peninsula and Indonesian archipelago that the prevalent spirit mediumship of these regions most strikingly intermingles with practices similar to those of northern Eurasia. The Malay belian actively combats his spiritual foes. If not quite a master of spirits (since the possessing tiger-spirit is thought to act through him), he is far more than a "telephone exchange" for their messages, and although his familiar spirit is inherited, he may establish communication with it through tuntut (Endicott 1970, 16), a vision quest involving solitary vigil beside an open grave or in the dark forest.
Possession by a tiger may not be indigenous to the Malay belian but borrowed from the shamanistic Negrito or Senoi (Endicott 1970, 22; cf. 81). The Negritos belong to a stock thought to have been among the first inhabitants of southeast Asia but confined in recent centuries to the Andaman Islands and pockets of peninsular Malaysia and the Philippines; like the Australians, they are mainly hunters and gatherers. The Andamanese, when first observed by E. H. Man in the late nineteenth and by Radcliffe-Brown in the early twentieth century, were among the most primitive peoples on earth, lacking not only agriculture and domestic animals (even the dog until 1858) but knowledge of making fire. The shamanism of their medicine man is visionary rather than ecstatic; through dreams he communicates with spirits of the dead and performs cures (Radcliffe-Brown 1922, 177).
Among the less isolated Negritos or Semang of the Malay peninsula, the crystal-gazing hala is in some respects, like his Andamanese counterpart, a visionary shaman; in others, he more nearly resembles ecstatic shamans elsewhere. The word hala signifies transformation into a tiger (Schebesta, 121); ability to change into so potent a spirit betokens mastery of extraordinary spiritual power. At nocturnal ceremonies he ascends on incense to the sky while singing songs in voices ascribed to celestial chenoi spirits (136–40); here he gains power to transform himself into spirit beings without loss of his own identity. Shamans of neighboring tribes were able to free a person's soul carried off by disease, sending familiar spirits to retrieve it from captivity (Evans, 219–20); thus they performed the supreme shamanic task of penetrating and returning from the world of the dead.
Ecstatic ascent to the heavens is especially prominent in Batek Negrito shamanism. The Batek, Endicott writes (1979, 91–96), believe that a personal shadow-soul can leave the body to make contact with the spirits in dreams. But the most effective communication with the hala' asal ("original superhuman beings") is trancing by a shaman, whose shadowsoul can fly anywhere in the universe (145), guided by songs to its destination. It may also make earthly journeys in its tiger-body in search of information from the spirits. At a session held several times a year (154–55), a Batek shaman sinks into trance after singing with eyes shut how his shadow-soul journeys to the sky or through deep pools to the underworld, where it visits the hala' asal and the dead. "It also just travels about, marvelling at the wonderful sights." Unlike the dreamer (or medium of other cultures), the shaman determines what hala ' to visit and chooses the topic of discussion as his soul ranges in quest of transcendent knowledge.
Chinese mediums of Singapore find a shamanic counterpart in the female "soul-raiser" (Elliott, 137–39) who calls up the shen Kuan Yin to help her seek out the souls of the dead. Trembling violently and speaking alternately in her own voice, the sing-song chant of Kuan Yin, and the "horrible growl" of the dead, she reports the goddess's progress through the gruesome underworld and the ghosts' responses to questions from relatives, engaging in dialogue with her familiar spirit. But it is in the Indonesian archipelago above all that the juxtaposition of shamanism (both visionary and ecstatic) and spirit mediumship reveals the multiplicity of its forms. The seer of the Mentawei islands off Sumatra ascends in a boat (the communal house) to the sky, borne by eagles to the spirits who are the sole source of visionary knowledge (Loeb 1929, 78). But the most striking instances of shamanism in this great island chain are found not in prevalently Muslim Sumatra or Java,[4] but in tribal Borneo (Indonesian Kalimantan and Malaysian Sarawak and Sabah) and Sulawesi (Celebes).
In the myths of the Bare'e-speaking Toradja of Sulawesi studied by Adriani and Kruyt, people could visit the gods when heaven and earth were close together (Downs, 10), and even now the upperworld is sometimes accessible by a coconut palm or other means. Along with elaborate agricultural rituals and initiatory head hunting, ecstatic shamanism was central to Toradja religion, and was open to all women (and men who dressed and acted as women) with talent for it, even an occasional slave
[4] In the village religions of east central Java described by Geertz (1960, 19–21), malignant spirits may answer a curer's questions through the possessed victim's mouth and agree to depart in return for food and drink, but neither spirit mediumship nor shamanism appears in highly developed forms comparable to those of other islands, including nearby Bali.
(47).[5] Shamans, whose chief function here as elsewhere was to retrieve souls of the sick captured by spirits, could journey in search of advice from celestial deities; their excursions, described in "litanies" composed in a nearly incomprehensible shamanic language (48), became common property of the tribe. The Wana of Sulawesi, also visited by Kruyt and recently studied by Atkinson, dress in rags to search for forest spirits, since power originates in the wilderness. Their shaman sees in controlled waking states what others see only in dreams; in the elaborate mabolong ceremony he and his spirit familiars "travel to distant realms in pursuit of lost aspects of a patient's being" (Atkinson, 123), although journeys to a celestial "Owner," Atkinson surmises, may be a recent development influenced by Christianity and Islam (159, 197).
In Borneo spirit possession and ecstatic shamanism continually intermingle. Even where the former predominates, the medium, far from passively awaiting the spirit, may boldly set out to seek it in worlds remote from her own. Especially in the northwestern state of Sarawak, shamanism is highly developed. For the Berawan (Metcalf, 58–62), illness results from loss of the soul, which the shaman must recover. To the strumming of a stringed instrument the shaman enters a trance in which her soul "makes astral journeys to locate the soul of the sick person and to wrest it away from whatever has seized it." Other shamans operate without soul flight (260–61), but their skills derive from personal inspiration, and what they teach of spirit worlds is not fixed dogma or invariant ritual but inquiry into what can never, in a world of intrinsic uncertainty, be finally known.
Among the Sea Dayaks or Iban of Sarawak, Erik Jensen writes (55), religion is almost synonymous with divinely sanctioned ritual order (adat ). But the Iban, as Geddes describes them (3) in contrast to the Land Dayaks (or to conservative peoples like the Zuñi, Tallensi, and Aranda), are "restless innovators for gain, prestige, or sheer enjoyment of change." This restlessly searching aspect of their experience finds religious expression in a shamanism based on divine revelation communicated by a mobile soul (semengat ) wandering to the spirit world during sleep (D. Freeman 1967, 316); for dreams, as a basis for religious belief, produce, as Freeman observes (1975, 285), "not 'ordered pattern,' but innovation and change."
Such revelations may be spontaneously communicated, but when the soul is captured by a malignant spirit, the services of a shaman (manang ) are required. Shamans, both male and (less commonly) female, fall into three classes (Freeman 1967, 316, 320): novice, fully initiated shaman,
[5] Downs notes (48n.) that Adriani and Kruyt termed those whom he calls shamans "priestesses." Cf. Wales, 63.
and transvestite shaman. The shaman's position may be passed from father to son, but no one becomes a shaman without being "summoned in a dream which is said to involve experiencing himself in a new way, commonly the dress of the opposite sex. . . . The spirit calling the Iban," Jensen writes (144), "remains his familiar spirit, his contact, his guide, and helper in the spirit world." In the last century manangs ranked second to village chiefs, and might be chiefs themselves (Ling Roth, 1: 265), but their recent social standing is more equivocal. Most suffer from a physical handicap such as blindness and are stigmatized as failures in terms of normal Iban values. Skepticism toward them is common, yet the most prestigious manangs are highly respected members of the community.
The manang's treatment of disease takes various forms, of which the ecstatic journey to recover a patient's departed soul is the most potent. During the pelian ritual, held in the longhouse at night, the manang journeys over water to the land of the dead in search of an errant soul, which he retrieves in trance and restores to the sick person's head. When all else fails, a victim of serious illness may seek a personal encounter with spirits to whom, in the vision-quest known as nampok, he offers food and sacrifices a cock on a solitary hillside or in a graveyard. He beats out on his drum a summons for the spirit, who rewards him, if he stands his ground, with a charm to guide him through life (Jensen, 124). In this way not only the shaman but the ordinary Iban could acquire divine power through possession of a guardian spirit or personal totem.
Nor was recovery from illness the only goal of the vision quest. "A man who was fired with ambition to shine in deeds of strength and bravery, or one who desired to attain the position of chief, or to be cured of an obstinate disease, would, in olden times," Ling Roth observes (1: 185), "spend a night or nights by himself on a mountain, hoping to meet a benevolent spirit who would give him what he desired. To be alone was a primary condition of the expected apparition," for society's laws and conventions had to be left far behind in order to achieve this communion with the cosmic order on which all things human depend. Here the restless need for continual innovation permeating Iban culture (if not indeed human nature) culminates in a deliberate personal quest for transcendence of the individual self through solitary encounter with a kindred if ultimately unknowable other.