The Barong Is Considered a Protector of the Village. Of

Barong

Barong ket is the reigning hero in Balinese mythology, religion, and sacred dances. As Rucina Ballinger points out in her chapter on “Dance and Drama” in the Periplus Bali: Indonesia (edited by Eric Otey), Barong Ket, a combination lion and bear, is the most sacred incarnation of Barong but others exist, such as Barong Makan (tiger), Barong Bankal (wild boar), Barong Celeng (pig), and Barong Gajah (elephant). As she explains (1999:63):

The Barong is considered a protector of the village. Of

demonic origin, the people have made a beast in his image and

transformed him into a playful, benevolent creature. Upon entering,

he prances about, clacking his jaws. He is often followed by the

telek and jauk, two masked groups of men of depicting deities and

demons, respectively. They fight, but no one wins (a common

theme in Balinese performances). Their role is simply to help restore

and maintain balance.

The Barong is similar in nature to Chinese dragons in that it takes two dancers to play Baron—one in the front, who clacks Baron’s teeth and prances around, and a second person in the back, who plays the hind parts of Barong. It takes a great deal of coordination for the two dancers to play Barong, who is a grotesque figure, with bulging eyes, fangs, long hair, fur and gilded leather and mirrors for decorations.

The epic and never-resolved battle between Barong and Ranga, the widow-witch (who will be discussed in the next chapter) is probably the central organizing myth in Balinese culture. Large temples have their Barongs, which they display in processions and religious ceremonies. And what is interesting is that Barong never defeats Rangda and Rangda never defeats Barong. So their battle continues on, endlessly, through time. And Barong seems to have very abrupt mood changes. At times he is playful and friendly and at other times somewhat menacing and very serious about his battle with the forces of evil, as represented by Rangda and her followers.

While westerners see the dance with Barong and Rangda as a performance, Balinese see it as a religious event, an evocation of the battle between good and evil and the characters in the dance are real to them, not merely dancers. Sometimes, Balinese dancers get carried away with their roles, with results that can be dangerous. Thus, there is a part of the Barong dance when his helpers attack Rangda, who puts them in a trance and then they turn their kris daggers on themselves, sometimes actually injuring themselves. At the performance I saw, the stage was littered with bodies of helpers of Barong who had supposedly stabbed themselves with their kris daggers. It was obvious that they were pretending to do so, just going through the motions, but sometimes dancers, who get carried away, actually do stab themselves. Also, there are times when the Barong dancers fall into a trance and at the end of the dance race of into the villages where the dances are being held, having become caught up in their roles.

Psychiatrists Gordon D. Jensen and Luh Ketut Suryani deal with Barong in their book The Balinese People: A Reinvestigation of Character. Indeed, there is a picture of Barong on the cover of their book. In the photo Baron has reddish hair, the standard large, bulging eyes, and four small tusks.

The authors discuss Margaret Mead’s theory that Barong is really an incarnation of the Balinese father (1992:84) “as gentle, unconditionally loving and reassuring,” and disagree with it, pointing out that Barong is considered to be spiritually powerful and is held in great awe by the Balinese people.

They also discuss the Balinese attitudes towards the supernatural, in general, and write (1992:85):

To a Balinese, Bali is filled with gods. It is primarily the supernatural

phenomena that are at the core of many activities of daily life, ceremonies, rituals, dances, plays, trance, physical and mental illnesses, and healing. These include demons, witchcraft, black magic, and leak or spirits.

They add that there are numerous rituals and religious ceremonies in Bali that Balinese culture has created to deal with the dangers the Balinese face from supernatural forces, so things balance out.

And balance seems to be a central element in Balinese culture. Whereas westerners, generally speaking, believe that supernatural forces are figments of the imagination, the Balinese are animists who believe that these forces really exist and have incredible power. One of our guides, during our trip to Bali, informed me that his father died because of a curse put on him by an evil neightbor.

But for every evil witch like Rangda, there is a tutelary hero like Barong, so neither evil nor goodness ever triumphs. This means life is truly exciting, and that the Balinese must continually do what they can to fend off the forces of evil and support the forces of goodness. In Western societies, many people believe in the existence of Satan, but he is considered to have been vanquished and thus is not a threat. This is not the case in Bali, where the relationship between the forces of evil and good are unresolved—just like in the Barong dance.

It is like being caught up in a drama, where one must be always on guard. That explains the seemingly endless numbers of religious celebrations that one finds in Bali and the daily offerings the Balinese make to the forces of good and evil. Life, for the Balinese, is a never-ending battle with demons, witches and the forces of evil, and this is symbolized by the rituals in which Barong contends with Rangda. In western societies, there are people who are generally described as having a kind of neurosis, hypervigilance. In Bali, to be hypervigilant is necessary to survive, psychologically, emotionally, physically and spiritually. What is interesting is that this religious hypervigilance doesn’t turn the Balinese into neurotics because they have compartmentalized it. My experience with them is that they are very cordial, warm, and friendly people.

As an example of this compartmentalization, one of our guides told us, once, as we were returning from a tour, “I can change myself into a car.” The interesting thing is that he wasn’t joking. And our driver, sitting next to him, corroborated his statement, adding, “generally he does that in the middle of the night.”

Rangda

The battle between Barong and its nemesis Rangda actually has historical sources, Ballinger writes. Rucina Ballinger explains that in the Eleventh century, a Balinese king, Udayana, married an east Javanese princess Mahendratta. When he discovered that she was practicing black magic, he sent her to live in the forest. In addition, nobody would dare to marry her daughter, who was very beautiful, because they were afraid of Mahendratta’s black magic. She became Rangda and takes revenge on the Balinese by spreading pestilence throughout the country.

Rangda masks are sold in all the tourist areas of Bali. Rangda, in the dance I saw, had long, stringy hair that fell down to her ankles. She wore a gaudy shirt and pants of black and red stripes, and carried her “all powerful” white cloth. She has, like Barong, bulging eye and tusks, and has a long tongue, that hangs out of her mouth. She also has long fingernails.

The dance featuring Barong and Rangda is described in the chapter, “Sacred Dance,” in the Insight Guide to Bali (200?:95):

When the Barong appears, he is snapping his huge jaws and swishing his tail. He has come to protect the audience and the village. Then Rangda enters with her long claw-like fingers, her flaming tongue, and a necklace of human entrails that hang down over her pendulous breasts. She waves a white cloth, which wafts her evil magic as she stalks the Barong. A group of men with their keris sit nearby, representing the community. They see the threatened Barong and rush to attack Rangda. She casts a spell on them so that instead of stabbing her, they turn their keris upon themselves.

But the power of the Barong prevents their keris from piercing their skin. The dancers are in trance, and they are not play-acting when they turn the blades upon themselves.

Eventually, the Barong and Rangda fight to a draw, which means they both live to battle one another again. The dancers I saw were not in a trance and it was quite obvious that they were pretending to stab themselves, though sometimes dancers do fall into a trance and attempt to harm themselves.

The handout that was presented to English speaking tourists at the Batubalan version of the Barong and Kris Dance reads as follows (I have made minor editorial changes and corrections to the English):

THE BARON AND KRIS DANCE

The Barong-Play represents an eternal fight between good and evil spirits. Barong (a mythological animal) represents a good spirit and Rangda (a mythological monster) represents an evil one.

THE DANCES START WITH MUSIC OVER TONE

Followed by his friend the monkey, the tiger [the Barong] comes up. Three masked dancers appear, representing men making palmwine in the forest, whose child is killed by the Barong. The three men get angry and attack the Barong, which is helped by the monkey. During the fight the nose of one of the men is bitten off.

FIRST ACT

Two girl-dancers appear, representing the servants of the Ranga, looing for the servants of Dewi Kunti who are on the way to meet their Patih (Prime Minister).

SECOND ACT

The servants of Dewi Kunti come. One of the servants of the Rangda changes into witch and enters into both servants to make them angry. They meet their Patih and go together to Dewi Kunti.

THIRD ACT

Duwi Kunti and her son, Sadewa, come up. Dewi Kunti has promised the Rangda to sacrifice Sadewa. A witch appears and enters Dewi Kunti. She becomes angry and orders the Patih to bring Sadewa into the forest. The Patih is also entered by a witch so he does not have pity on Sadewa. Sadewa is then taken into a forest and tied up to a tree.

FOURTH ACT

Unknown by Rangda, the God Siwa appears and gives Sadewa immortality. The Rangda appears, ready to kill Sadewa and eat him up but Sadewa remains alive. She then surrenders and ask him to redeem himself. Sadewa agrees and kills the Rangda. The Rangda goes to heaven.

FIFTH ACT

One of the serfvants of the Rangda named Kalika comes before Sadewa and asks to be redeemed. Sadewa refuses. Kalika gets angry and changes herself into a boar and fights Sadewa. He defeats the board. Kalika changes herself into a bird but is also defeated. Finally, she changes herself into a Rangda, but Sadewa cannot kill her. Sadewa then changes himself int a Barong. Followers of the Barong appear and help him fight the Rangda. She is too powerful and the find ends in a draw.

What’s interesting about this dance is that we find negative things about the Barong. He has eaten a child before appearing on the state. And Rangda, after being killed, goes to heaven—which is not to be expected. Finally, the battle ends in a stalemate, which means the forces of good and evil are evenly balanced and are locked in an eternal battle.

The question arises as to the meaning of Rangda. The psychiatrists Gordon D. Jensen and Luh Ketut Suryani (who is a Balinese woman) dispute Margaret Mead’s contention that Rangda is a “reconstituted mother” who displays fear to her child and instills fear in him. Mead had suggested that Balinese mothers are “teasing, powerful, unsatisfying” women who arouse emotions in their children but do not do anything to satisfy them. The authors disagree with Mead’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Rangda as a mother figure since, they point out, she is held in awe by Balinese and represents the evil power of demons and witches. The opposite of Rangda, for Mead, was the Barong, the father figure, who supplied love to children and made up for deficiencies and problems generated by unresponsive, and as Mead put it, “murderous” mothers.

They point out that masks of Rangda are kept in village temples, along with those of Barong, to protect villagers from evil. Thus, Rangda is seen in an ambivalent way, just as Barong is seen as having a capacity for evil. He at a child in the forest before he appeared on stage. The dance also suggests that it is evil spirits that “enter” people and make them act the way they do, when they act in self-destructive or anti-social ways. These evil spirits are commanded by the numerous leak (also spelled leyan, lejak) witch-like spirits which are transformations or real people, who practice black magic and have the power to harm people. In actuality, as Bateson and Mead admit, the impact of these leak figures on social life in Bali is not very great.

For many westerners, the fact that the Balinese people treat Rangda and the Barong as sacred figures, endowed with great powers, seems remarkable. Yet, in the West we have a considerable number of demons of one sort or another, such as Satanl, vampires, Frankensteins, and death-dealing aliens, though, with the exception Satan, we regard these creatures as figments of the human imagination (and some regard Satan as such, as well).

Does the fact that Rangda is a widow suggest anything about Balinese attitudes toward older women? The description of Rangda as having a long tongue and pendulous breasts suggests a caricature of an elderly woman. Do the Balinese harbor unconscious fears about elderly woman and believe that once women lose their husbands, they transform their sexual desires and needs into destructive impulses and thus they become witches? Is Mahendratta a paradigmatic figure for elderly women in Bali? On the surface, elderly women, grandmother figures, are esteemed in Bali, where people live in large household with many generations. But in their unconscious, might the Balinese harbor fears and anxieties about these women? This is not unusual, for attitudes about very old women in parts of the Western world are similar in nature to that of the Balinese. This unconscious fear and anxiety is something to keep in mind when one sees a Rangda mask or a dance with Rangda battling the Barong. And what about Sadewa, who was willing to sacrifice her son Sadewa to Rangda. What does this tell us about relations between mothers (in this case a “murderous” one) and their children?

For Jensen and Suryani, the Balinese see good and bad sides to everything. As they explain (1992:80):

All things in the Balinese world, e.g., the sun, cars, palm wine, and food, have two sides (rua bineda): the good and the bad. Which effect each has depends on the individual’s use of them.

So nothing is simple and Bali and everything depends on a multitude of factors that determine whether something is harmful or beneficial. This sensibility is reflects, I would suggest, in their two complimentary opposing figures, Rangda and the Barong.

Cock Fights (Sabungan)

William Ingram begins his superb memoir of his experiences living with a Balinese family, A Little Bit of One O’Clock, describing the sounds of cocks crowing. He writes (1998:13):

I woke to the sound of roosters. There were hundreds of them. The

nearest was right beside my room on the waist-high compound wall. Others scrabbled and crowed in a neighboring bamboo grove. The calls from across the whole village blended into a constant wailing.

The crowing of roosters is one of the basic sounds of Bali. You hear them all the time, making their presence felt by their seemingly endless crowing.

You also see them at various sites, in the cages that the Balinese have devised for them, waiting patiently for their brief moment of glory and inevitable death in cockfights, which are now limited to being held at temple ceremonies, odalans. There are special arenas for the cockfights, in pits next to temples. The one I saw took place in a kalagan, a squared area about fifteen or twenty feet on each side, with tiered rows of benches, where people with cocks, people interested in gambling on the fights, or those who are simply spectators watch the fights.

Before they fight, you can see the owners of the roosters gently stroking and caressing them. They seem to display deep affection for their birds, which have been trained to fight. People make bets on the outcomes of the fights—money that is supposedly for the temple where the fights are held. At the fight I witnessed, the owners of the contending cocks spent a few minutes attaching a razor sharp blade, perhaps four inches in length, to one of the legs of their birds. A smallish dirty white cock was matched against a somewhat larger red and black cock. Before they fought, their owners held them near one another, face to face, as if to show them who they would be fighting.