A Sacred Mountain of Java

Gunung Penanggungan, East Java

Originally published in Bali and Beyond Magazine, April 2010

http://www.baliandbeyond.co.id/beyond_bali.html

In the deep green forest on the slopes of the Penanggungan volcano the cool air is filled with the sound of running water and the scent of incense. At the end of a steep, potholed road, surrounded by a thicket of tall trees and tangled creepers, stands Candi Jolotundo. This Hindu water temple is over a thousand years old, but even today, long since most of Java converted to Islam, it is still attracting a steady stream of pilgrims. In the damp niches, people place Balinese-style offerings of leaves and petals; on the temple's central platform of carved basalt, men sit cross-legged in meditation. And in the bathing tanks on either side — women to the left, men to the right — people stand in the cool, clear water, bowing their heads beneath the rivulets in search of blessing and the energy of this sacred place. There are Balinese migrants, Chinese Indonesians, and a few local Christians amongst the visitors, but most of the pilgrims here are Javanese Muslims. This temple, and the steep mountain from which its eternal water supply is drawn, is still seen as a place of power today, as it has been throughout Java's history.

On a clear day you can see Gunung Penanggungan from the center of Surabaya. This 1,653-metre mountain stands like a sentinel at the edge of the volcanic hinterland that is just an hour and a half away by road from the crowded East Java capital.

For hundreds of years, Penanggungan was one of Java's most sacred mountains. According to legend, when Hinduism first arrived in Indonesia, Mount Meru the mythical home of the gods was shifted to Java. But the peak suffered some damage in transit: the base broke away to form Mount Semeru in the Bromo-Tengger Massif, while the smooth summit tumbled some 60 kilometers to the north to form Penanggungan.

It's easy to see why this peak had such a grip on the imagination of ancient Java. Rising steeply from the hot yellow coastal plain in a perfect cone and flanked by a series of smaller attendant summits, it dominates the local landscape. Under successive Hindu dynasties it was a pilgrimage destination and the focus of intensive temple building. Today the remains of some 81 temples dot the forested slopes.

Oldest is the sacred bathing place at Jolotundo on the western slope of the mountain. A facade of dark, carved basalt set into the steep hillside, it dates from the time of Sanjaya, the dynasty also responsible for Java's biggest Hindu monument at Prambanan. Built around 977 AD, Sanskrit inscriptions connect the place to Udayana, the king of the old unified kingdom of Bali who was married to a Sanjaya princess. The natural spring here, fed by pure mountain mineral water, was probably considered sacred long before the temple was built, and of all Penanggungan's temples it is the one still most venerated today.

Visit at any time and you will see people who have driven up from the nearby cities to bathe and to fill bottles with the water said by locals to be second in quality only to that from the Zam-Zam well in Mecca. In fact, you'll probably be encouraged to take a dip yourself - and you should! Mystical powers aside, the cool and clean water is incredibly refreshing. But for those serious about accessing Jolotundo's power, locals say it is necessary to visit after dark, between midnight and 2 am. Every night but especially when the moon is full this remote place deep in the forest is busy with visitors.

There is another sacred Sanjaya-era bathing place on the eastern side of Penanggungan. Follow a rising, narrowing lane off the roaring Surabaya-Malang Highway and you'll reach Candi Belahan, known locally by its more racy name, Candi Tetek, the Breasts Temple, for the obvious reasons; the supply of sacred spring-water here emerges from the ample bosom of a statue of the goddess Laksmi. This place is said to be the memorial for Udayana's son Airlangga, the last and greatest of the Sanjaya kings. Pilgrims still come here today also, and local villagers use the shallow pool that stands before the temple's brick facade as a public bath.

After Airlangga's death in 1049, Sanjaya split into two warring kingdoms, and East Java was not unified again until two centuries later under the Singosari realm, based not far from Gunung Penanggungan near the modern town of Malang.

Singosari made its own additions to the sacred geography of Penanggungan, the most striking of which is Candi Jawi, which stands southeast of the mountain in the village of Prigen. A tall tower of carved limestone; it is nonetheless overshadowed by the mountain that inspired it.

But it was under Singosari's successor, the mighty 15th century Majapahit Empire, that temple building on the sacred slopes of Penanggungan reached its zenith. The mountain's enigmatic purple cone, rising from the coastal haze, would have been visible from the Majapahit capital some 30 kilometers to the west at Trowulan. As pilgrims made their way up ancient pathways towards the sacred summit, masons carved cubes of rough basalt into plinths and statues and set them on laboriously leveled terraces all around the slopes of the mountain.

The Majapahit rule lasted less than 200 years, and in 1543 Gunung Penanggungan was captured by the nascent Islamic state of Demak. No more temples were built on the steep slopes and the more remote of the Majapahit constructions were reclaimed by the forest, only to be rediscovered by archaeologists in the 1930s. But the mystical draw of the mountain and its bathing places has endured — and continues to do so today.

Modern pilgrims can find places to stay in the nearby hill resorts of Trawas or Tretes, small towns with fine views looking out across the shining green rice terraces and stands of thick forest towards Penanggungan. But the closest accommodation to the mountain is a kilometer downhill from the Jolotundo temple at PPLH, an environmental education center deep in the forest that also has some neat little bungalows for visitors.

And this is the place to start from if you want to make your own way up to the home of the gods, the very summit of the sacred mountain. Though it's a tough and sweaty climb, Penanggungan is one of Java's most accessible peaks — a day hike rather than an expedition. After seeking blessings with a bath at the Jolotundo temple, hikers can follow a path through the steamy silence of the forest before emerging eventually in the thick scrub between the main mountain and its attendant peak of Mount Bekel. Here the trail, winding through stands of tall yellow grass, leads to a succession of small Majapahit temples before rising sharply for the final sweaty slog up the bare stony slopes to the summit.

The hard work is worth it. From the rim of the shallow crater, the view opens over the green landscape of East Java. To the north the cities of Sidoarjo and Surabaya can sometimes be made out beneath their blankets of yellow haze; the lower slopes of the mountain are cloaked with a dense green forest that gives way to the shining terraces and red-roofed villages of the farmland. And to the south the great bulk of the Welirang volcano massif towers over Trawas and Tretes. It's easy to understand why the people of old Java saw this place as the home of the gods.

© Tim Hannigan 2010

Catholics Flock to Flores’ Larantuka for 500th Easter Parade

The Traditional Easter Celebrations in Eastern Flores,

Originally published in the Bali Times, 09/04/10

http://www.thebalitimes.com/2010/04/12/catholics-flock-to-flores%E2%80%99-larantuka-for-500th-easter-parade/

Nuns in grey habits stand squinting in the sunlight beneath the banana plants. Offshore, white boats, overloaded with spectators, jostle and try to hold their position in the furious current that flows north through the narrow strait. From the seashore chapel of Tuan Maninu mournful lamentations in OldPortuguese rise into the air, and the blustery tropical wind snaps at the black flags of the Catholic brotherhoods. It is midday on Easter Friday in Larantuka at the far eastern end of Flores, East Nusa Tenggara, and the little town’s famed Easter procession is about to begin.

Larantuka is the one of the oldest centres of Catholicism in Indonesia. The Portuguese first visited Flores – and gave it its name, meaning “Flowers” – in the early 16th Century, and enthusiastic missionaries soon followed. By the end of their first century in the island they claimed to have converted around 100,000 locals.

But by the 17th Century the Portuguese were already in decline as a naval power, and when in 1613 a Dutch frigate arrived near Larantuka and bombarded the fort on the small neighbouring island of Solor, then the main Portuguese settlement, the occupants quickly conceded defeat and many of the soldiers retreated to the Malay Peninsula port of Melaka. The priests, however, were left behind in Larantuka.

At midday the congregation emerges from the little chapel, old women in black blouses carrying candles and rosaries. The focus of the procession is a black-draped casket containing the centuries-old statue of Christ, known here as Tuan Maninu, one of a pair of devotional objects that are at the heart of Larantuka’s Catholic identity. The casket is carried to a waiting outrigger fishing boat, and then, pursued by a swarm of black canoes, and watched from the flotilla of overloaded ferries offshore, it is paddled south against the current to the heart of Larantuka town. There it is brought ashore near the former Raja’s residence, and paraded to the Cathedral, where it is placed beside Larantuka’s other votive object, a life-size statue of the Virgin Mary, known here as Tuan Ma. Tuan Ma is the focus of intense worship in Larantuka and the surrounding small islands.

Though Flores remained a Portuguese possession until the 19th Century, it was largely forgotten as Lisbon’s fortunes continued to decline. The pocket of Catholicism at the far end of the island became isolated and fossilised. Prayers were still said in Portuguese and Latin, the mixed-race descendents of early settlers who married local women kept some kind of Iberian identity alive, and the statues of Tuan Maninu and Tuan Ma became the object of a cult that mixed Catholicism with local lore.

When Portugal finally ceded Flores to the Dutch in 1859, on condition that it remained Catholic territory, the new missionaries were dismayed to discover what they called “an island of baptised heathens.” But in Larantuka, at the far end of the island, a strangely old-fashioned Catholicism remained strong. In 1887 the whole town was consecrated to the Virgin Mary.

At the end of the first procession the faithful flock into Larantuka’s grand cathedral, the overspill seeking shade in the gardens outside and listening to Bishop Franciscus Kopong Kung’s sermon through crackling loudspeakers. As a heavy tropical dusk descends on the town the casket of Tuan Maninu and the tall, velvet draped statue of Tuan Ma are carried out of the building to follow a candlelit processional route through the town, stopping along the way at chapels dedicated to each of Larantuka’s main clans. The statue bearers wear the tall, pointed hoods still used today by penitents in Easter processions in Spain and Portugal (a mode of dress given unfortunate connotations when it was misappropriated by the Ku Klux Klan), and the murmuring of prayer rises from the crowd.

This year’s Easter celebrations in Larantuka were bigger than usual, for according to local tradition 2010 marks the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Catholicism, and of the statues of Tuan Ma and Tuan Maninu, in the town. According to one local myth the statues were miraculously washed ashore from a shipwreck and were made the object of devotion by the ancestor-worshiping locals. There are, however, records of the arrival of Portuguese missionaries – with devotional idols in tow – in the very early years of the 16th Century.

According to local officials some 15,000 pilgrims from throughout Flores and beyond visited Larantuka during the celebrations. The procession was also joined by the Portuguese ambassador to Indonesia, Carlos Manuel Leitao Frota, and by Indonesian Defence Minister Purnomo Yusgiantoro. Extra ferries to Kupang were laid on to carry returning pilgrims home.

The procession goes on long into the night and a strange atmosphere of mournful calm descends on Larantuka. Soft candlelight flickers and across the channel the hills of Solor and Adonara are dark silhouettes against a starlit sky. As the vast crowd slowly circuits the town, the statue of Tuan Ma borne along in the flow, prayers and hymns shift back and forth and the soft shuffling of feet rises to an insistent whisper.

It is long after midnight when the procession finally makes its way back to the cathedral. Pilgrims walk home along empty streets, greasy with melted candle wax, and the statues are returned to their respective chapels and locked away out of sight – until next year.

© Tim Hannigan 2010

Light of the Gods on Bali's Peaks

The Lempuyung Temple and Mount Seraya, Eastern Bali

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 31/04/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/culture/light-of-the-gods-on-balis-peaks/366857

The chain of steps, cutting a narrow band through the damp green forest, rose above me. Sweat dripped from the tip of my nose; rustling and chattering in the undergrowth hinted at unseen monkeys, and a cool, cloying mist rose from the rice terraces below. It was not long after dawn, and I was picking my way up the pilgrimage route to the highest station of the complex of temples known as Pura Lempuyang that stud the green flanks of the fractured volcano standing sentinel on Bali’s eastern promontory. Somewhere ahead of me, on the very pinnacle of the peak, was the Puru Lempuyang Luhur, 1060 meters above sea level and the eastern directional anchor of the Balinese compass. Some 1700 steps lead to the summit, but I had long since lost count of how many I had still to climb.

My first view of the mountain had come in the lavender light of the previous evening. Traveling north by motorbike from Amlapura, administrative capital of Karangasem, Bali’s most easterly regency, Gunung Lempuyang and Gunung Seraya, two cleaved halves of the same upwelling of basalt, rose like bruised knuckles above a rumpled rug of rice fields.
Bali’s overdeveloped south might leave many newcomers wondering just whether the luscious tropical island of myth really exists, but in this wilder eastern region I found no lack of green vistas and volcanic views. The area is dominated by the mighty cone of Gunung Agung, the 3142 meter lynchpin of Bali. But this evening Agung was lost in cloud and I was more interested in its smaller neighbor, Lempuyang-Seraya, the double peak that once overshadowed Bali’s most powerful Hindu kingdom. Karangasem today is one of Bali’s poorest regions, with drought-plagued agriculture and little tourism income. But in the 19th Century this terraced, volcanic territory was the seat of a mighty dynasty.

My first stop north of Amlapura was a pleasure garden laid out by the last king of Karangasem in 1947. Tirtagangga – the name means “Water of the Ganges” – was a place of clear pools and stepping stones. A mildewed pantomime of statues – gurning demons, bug-eyed warriors, belching boars and writhing royal nagas – spilled rivulets from artfully hidden spouts.
After spending the night in a guesthouse a stone’s throw from the gardens I woke at first light, and thirty minutes later was standing at the foot of that interminable flight of steps, bending their way out of sight towards the summit of Lempuyang.
The scattering of temples that make up the Lempuyang complex comprise one of Bali’s Kayangan Jagat, the nine directional temples which give the island its own unique set of cardinal points. Lempuyang is synonymous with the east in the Balinese scheme.
The rest of Bali seemed to fall away behind me as I climbed and when I finally reached the little temple compound at the summit it was drifting alone in the cloud. There were damp ceremonial umbrellas and altars wrapped in checked cloth. Shaggy palm trees rustled in the breeze. The temple was not totally deserted though; a local man, Pak Arya, had spent the night meditating at the temple. He told me that the name of this place – Lempuyang – was a contraction of two old Balinese words, Lempu and Hyang. It meant “the Light of the Gods”. As a mob of olive-colored monkeys emerged from the bushes and began a swaggering circuit of the temple, Pak Arya spun me a tall but tempting tale. When American astronauts on the first mission to the moon looked back on the Earth behind them they saw an unexplained light shining from one spot – Lempuyang.
“The Light of the Gods!” said Pak Arya with a grin, warding off a monkey.
Light of the Gods aside, there was one brief glimpse of the light of day as I descended, passing white-clad pilgrims struggling up the steps: for mere seconds the cloud cleared and Lempuyang’s giant neighbor, Mount Agung, loomed to the west in a deluge of bright sunlight.

At the foot of the steps I climbed back into the saddle and took a back road, skirting the northern flanks of the mountain. Agung appeared again against a pearly sky as I threaded my way through the fishing villages and low-key dive resorts around Amed. The sea was dotted with bone-white fishing boats under triangular blue sails. In Bunutan village I stopped to watch a crowd of men betting over cockfights in a shaded pavilion. The air was thick with the smell of clove smoke and feathers and tattered wads of money passed hands after each bloody bout.
The road led on, bucking over promontories and dipping into shallow bays. To my right the twin peaks of Seraya and Lempuyang loomed in the cloud, while offshore the dark hills of Lombok rose.
At the height of their powers in the 18th Century the Karangasem kings crossed that strait and annexed Lombok, placing its Muslim subjects under Hindu rule. So it remained until the end of the 19th Century when the Dutch appeared on the scene and wrested Lombok away, and then, not long after, conquered Karangasem itself.
Admiring the view as I rode I took a wrong turn and ended up in a little hamlet of yellow dogs and fighting cocks. A man called Gede called me over, and before setting back on the right road he plied me with roasted corn and sweet coffee. The blue waters of the Lombok Strait lay below us. Gede was a farmer, though in this hard, eastern landscape there is not enough water to grow rice. All that grows here, he said, is the corn on which I was chewing. The people here had little cash, and life was hard, so when foreign investors came sniffing out bargain plots for future villa developments, as they had recently begun to do, they took interest. But they were also wary, Gede said, and were doubtful about the merits of the kind of intense development seen in other parts of Bali. There are no luxury villas on this coastline – yet.

Bidding goodbye to Gede I continued on my journey. To the right the mountain emerged from the cloud again – it was Seraya that I was looking at here, 100 meters taller than its temple-topped twin. The mountain stayed in view all the way to Ujung, the final point on my circuit of Bali’s easternmost peaks. This was another water palace, built in 1919 by I Gusti Bagus Jelantik, the second-last king of Karangasem.
The sun was slanting away to the west now, with soft light shimmering on the water of the pool and on the white marble of the central pavilion, a private chamber where the royals had once retreated from the eyes of the world. Today there were no more fluttering princesses, only locals from nearby Amlapura, out for an afternoon jog around the pool.
I climbed a flight of steps to a skeletal folly of relief-covered marble. The water palace lay below me, white walls, Dutch shutters and Balinese friezes in a mass of green trees. And beyond, propping up a slab of milky cloud, stood the two-peaked massif that had been the fulcrum of my journey, Lempuyang-Seraya.

© Tim Hannigan 2010

A Fanciful Take on Artist Spies

Book review of "Island of Demons" by Nigel Barley

Originally published in the Jakarta Globe, 26/03/10

http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/artsandentertainment/a-fanciful-take-on-artist-spies/365986


The artist Walter Spies was not shy about taking liberties himself, so he would probably be amused to know that more than a few liberties have been taken with the facts of his own life story in the interests of turning it into rollicking historical fiction.

More than 60 years since Spies’ death, writer and anthropologist Nigel Barley has raided the archives and made him the subject of his latest novel, “Island of Demons.” Spies was German, but he will forever be associated with his adopted home, Bali, and this book is about the man and the island.

Spies first came to Bali in the 1920s, and was foremost among the shifting community of European bohemians who lived there in the last decades of Dutch colonial rule. His story is well known — accidental founding father of touristic Ubud, more important for his influence on both local artists and on the world’s ideas about Bali than for his own paintings, arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Dutch for homosexuality, jailed again at the start of World War II as a German and killed when his prisoner-of-war ship was torpedoed.

Barley reportedly had intended to use all this detail for a biography, but then decided it would be more fun — for both writer and reader — to turn to fiction instead.

And fun it is. The book is narrated by another real-life foreign figure from Bali’s artistic past, Spies’ contemporary, the Dutch painter Rudolf Bonnet. Opening as an aged Bonnet (the real one died in 1978) begins to tell his tale to a young American, the book then turns into the saga of Bonnet’s formative years, his arrival in Bali and his falling in with — and falling for — Spies.

There’s plenty of sparky dialogue and some genuinely laugh-out-loud comic moments. The characterizations of the key foreign players in the early years of modern Bali — Miguel Covarrubias, Margaret Mead and others — are sharp and at times deliciously cruel. The most effective character in the book is not Spies himself, but Bonnet. His gawkiness, the faint sense that he is an outsider to the pretentious Ubud set and the way he manages to be both prudish and debauched at the same time — with furtive nighttime excursions to Denpasar in search of beautiful young men in contrast to Spies’ overt homosexuality — builds subtly and endearingly without the reader noticing.

But there are problems with this book. Barley gleefully states in his introduction that he has played fast and loose with chronology and time in the interests of narrative. But having made the decision to write fiction instead of history, he has failed to go one step further and make a plot — generally a prerequisite of a novel.

As a consequence, “Island of Demons” sags in the middle, turning into little more than a series of well-written and very funny vignettes as historical figure after historical figure is shoehorned in and caricatured. What is needed is a sense of building tension, of the threat of the dour Dutch authorities bearing down on Spies and his carefree clique as the book progresses. But it is absent, and when Spies is arrested for homosexuality 320 pages in, only prior knowledge has given the reader warning.

The other flaw is the failure to address what could be called “the case against” Walter Spies. While he was clearly not the slavering pedophile of colonialist propaganda, the idea that his relationships with young Balinese men could have been predatory and exploitative should have been given more than the brief touch it receives. And his role in the creation of the carefully constructed and enduring myth of uniquely paradisiacal and artistic Bali — one that manages both to glorify and to patronize at the same time — could have done with a sterner appraisal.

But despite these flaws, and despite the book’s flabby midriff, “Island of Demons” does remain a highly amusing read. Barley’s style, which somehow manages to be as light as air while bandying about words like “pandiculate,” is a delight, as is his comic coining of new terms — “co-varrubious” for the overly affectionate Miguel and Rosa Covarrubius, for example.

The scene setting, the rich color of Bali’s landscapes and the rhythms of its dance performances are very well done, and the last chapters — detailing the war, the Japanese occupation of the East Indies and its aftermath — are suddenly and unexpectedly poignant, adding a final weight to a book that had otherwise been only pleasurably frivolous.

“Island of Demons,” although not entirely successful, is ultimately rather like Spies himself: though flawed and at times frustrating, in the end it is hard not to be charmed.


© Tim Hannigan 2010