very superstitious

As some of you may have heard, Indonesia has a few volcanoes. Sometimes, when mingled with Gods gone crazy you sometimes end up with a precarious cocktail. At press time, three volcanoes are stirring: one in Sulawesi, Kracatau—the super volcano between Sumatra and Jawa that supposedly produced the loudest sound ever heard on earth when it erupted in the 1800s,—and one in East Jawa, Mt. Kelud—the most impending of the group.

I got to thinking about volcanoes for a few reasons. The first is that I want to let it be known that I live no where near any of these volcanoes. If one of them erupts in the near future, please do not worry. True, there is a volcano about 30km from where I live, however it is the type of volcano that behaves more like your garden variety baking soda and vinegar science project volcano than the volcanoes you see on the History Channel. If something happens, either there or farther a field, my present residence is metaphorically quite far from the kitchen floor.

Secondly, I saw an interesting article in the Jakarta Post last week covering local soothsayers’ predictions for the eruption of Kelud. Basically, vulcanologists could not narrow down a date and so the paper consulted the people who live near the volcano and communicate with it by bringing it rice and chickens and whatnot. I mention this because the piece was not, as it might be in the Western media, a weekend edition type fluff piece.

This case—of an ostensibly western media outlet reporting on a very traditional but very mainstream belief—illuminates the dissonance that comes with living in Indonesia. On the one hand, Indonesian life bears many of the offspring of modernity, and yet it is a culture that is widely influenced by what a westerner would call ‘superstition.’ People are aware of and understand, in a word, science but, where important and immovable things are concerned, believe that bringing a cauldron of molten earth rice in exchange for its secrets is not only a perfectly reasonable, but most likely better, method.

Indonesians keep up a near constant cohabitation with spirits (the soothsayers, by the way, agreed on the verdict of within a week). Part of the reason I find it so strange that radical Islam has gained even its meager foothold here is because Indonesians of all stripes believe in a vague and pervasive mysticism that can overpower human beings. From time to time you hear about robberies of wealthy homes where the housekeeper claims that someone came to the gate and cast a spell that compelled them to open the house. Most people accept this as an unexplainable but completely reasonable occurrence. Many Indonesians would never dream of going out at night alone for fear of being waylaid by a ambling spirit.

A few evenings ago I met, as I often do, one of the employees (and one of my closest Indonesian friends) from my losmen on the street. He exhorted me to join him for tea at a roadside cart, as he loves practicing his English with me (he really is quite the street corner philosopher) and I, with nowhere to go and Indonesian to practice, sat down. We wandered onto the topic of violence in Indonesia and began talking about the Madurese people.

The Madurese, depending on how you look at it, either incite or happen to be on the victimized end of most intra-ethnic conflicts in Indonesia. Hailing from the island of Madura off the East Coast of Jawa, Madurese are nearly universally noted for, among other things, their sate and pugilism.

Anyhow, my friend mentioned how the Madurese never bother Javanese people because they know from sampling their blood what they are up against. Now, there actually have been well documented cases of Madurese people (and Dayak, an ethnicity from Borneo) drinking the blood of adversaries that they have killed. However, that you can divine the soul of a people and therein sense them whenever you meet them thereafter by developing an ethnically diversified palate for blood, struck me as far more powerful. At this point my friend, someone who is fairly modern, city bred, and not outwardly cowed by any sort of mysticism, basically told me, you may not think so, but this is completely true. And as the cart’s gas lantern whispered to no one in particular except the glowing charcoal beneath the kettles, it was plain that he truly believed it.