Behind the Scene in Bali

Some ironies are sweeter than others: When the pemangku blew into my face—a transfer of his protection and a long, slow, steady release of air as though he was deflating—his breath must have carried the cold virus to which I succumbed at the end of the week.       

A pemangku is a lower rank of Hindu priest who, along with other traditional healers called balians, is as customarily consulted on the Indonesian island of Bali in times of illness and injury as a medical doctor is in the West. Balians also address problems beyond the scope of science. They locate stolen objects or identify their thieves; they lift spells, predict weather, channel spirits, and produce potions and charms. They even paint pictures of the new car you desire most, as a means of acquiring it. There are as many kinds of balians as there are specific needs and situations. The pemangku I went to see was popular with women who wanted minute particles of gold inserted under their facial skin, talismans that rendered them irresistible, whether for the purposes of finding a spouse or an investor for their business aspirations. Such enhancement was, I admit, an attractive prospect, but the three days of prayer and meditation that were required for the pemangku to activate his gold “needles” was too long for me to wait. I had enough time—just under an hour—for him to empower a banana, which he had me eat, and his breath. Only the latter had any effect of which I was certain.         

Throughout Southeast Asia there survives the belief in a sentient nature and man’s reciprocal relationship with it. The pemangku’s choice of banana as his mystically charged object was an example of this exchange, an animate product of the earth (and not coincidentally an important regional food crop) that is used ritually. Shamans—known as balians, bomohs or dukuns in the Indonesian archipelago—are the intermediaries with the resident spirits of plants and animals, rivers, mountains and weather. They occupy a place apart and unseen that the Balinese call the niskala, which is of equal importance to the sekala, the visible world. The niskala isn’t necessarily malevolent, but it can be capricious, and so it and the balians who converse with it, are treated reverentially and with more than a little fear. The beautifully crafted tiny trays of palm leaves, flower petals, fruit, rice and incense left early morning and late afternoon on sidewalks, outside doorways, on altars, and dashboards of vehicles, are the gestures the Balinese make to the niskala spirits to ensure with them a peaceful coexistence. Any number and manner of life’s hurdles—accidents, agricultural crises, business failures, or disease—are indicators of something wrong. The intervention of balians is then required whose treatment plans are often less cures than they are appropriate methods of atonement.
To someone like me who dislikes shopping, buyers and sellers of Balinese handicrafts are the niskala in tangible form. Their proliferation contributed to my neglect of Bali: my last visit had been years ago. Yet even first-timers to Bali today depart transformed. I wondered if there wasn’t some basis of truth to the idea of Bali as a spiritual sanctuary, just as the popular (and lucrative) concept of Bali as a paradise has its roots in the pretty landscape; and Bali as a place of enchantment reflects the magic that is actually practiced there by its balians. I had social obligations to friends living in Bali and decided to fulfill them while seeking out as many healers as my one week visit allowed.

It was easier to meet balians if I approached them as a patient, and considering what they claimed to be able to do, it wasn’t too difficult to think of some area in my life where mystical intervention couldn’t hurt. I wasn’t restricted to seeking the aid of only the Balinese. The island’s esoteric cosmology attracts and tolerates the international set of alternative therapy practitioners who now operate from there. These transplanted healers are easily drawn into discussion, less bound culturally to guard their beliefs and practices. Healing is to them part of a larger process of spiritual development, both personally and socially. (Arguably, many of them have time and the financial security to devote to such pursuits.) I also needed to talk frankly with Western healers. Balians don’t question their island’s significance in a greater spiritual scheme, while those who have adopted Bali are convinced of it. There is an evocative word in the Malay-Indonesian language, explained a foreign healer, with which Bali shares its name: Kem-bali. It means to return. Whether we are travellers or healers, perhaps none of us actually goes to Bali as much as we come home. 
David, who came to Bali from Australia twenty years ago, has a theory that he shared with me over dinner in the serene setting of his moonlit garden. A stone sculpture of the Hindu god Ganesh was tucked away in an alcove in a perimeter wall, a Buddha in another, while in the middle of the yard were concentric circles of evenly spaced, enormous stones. David practices dowsing—a divination of earth energies—when he isn’t designing golf courses or playing on one. The strange configuration of stones marked a “power-point,” or where dowsers believe that two kinds of energy lines intersect. According to David, Bali has some of the world’s greatest number of these synergetic centres, places of exceptionally pure energy brought about by ideal conditions and capable of altering human consciousness and promoting enlightenment. He believes that early temple builders in Bali were aware of “power-points”, and chose not only to raise their buildings on them, but to construct them in alignment with others as well. 

There was more to David’s idea of earth energies and Bali. The human body has an incorporeal mate, in which, stretching from the tailbone to the top of the head, are seven whirling vortices. The ancient Hindus called them chakras. Through these rapidly revolving wheels ethereal energy circulates and acts as a conduit to the universe, activating as it does our spiritual nature. The planet, a living form, has chakras too. Bali is one of them. 
Another long-term Australian resident of Bali, and self-professed shaman, Anne believes that Bali is the earthly twin of the “power” chakra located in our solar plexus which governs physical and psychic energy, the emotions, and the metabolism of such organs as the liver and spleen. Yellow, the colour associated with the power chakra, figures prominently in Balinese rituals (before I could receive the pemangku’s magical breath, I tied a yellow scarf around my waist); and the geographical shape of Bali, Anne proposes, even looks like a human liver. There might be some resemblance, but it is also difficult to dispute an elder’s opinion. Anne claims to be a two-million-year-old entity.  
Philosopher-ecologist-magician David Abrams, whose book The Spell of theSensuous was my guidebook of choice on this trip, contends that New Age shamans like Anne cannot duplicate the function of indigenous healers, which is to cure disease that is necessarily a manifestation of a grievance between a place-centred culture and their environment. Problems are therefore shifted but never solved. But Anne is optimistic, convinced in the interdependence of all existences where even the smallest acts of healing and compassion have an accumulative effect. That the polar ice caps are melting, she said with a seriousness that I enjoyed—and an implication that the north and south poles are the planet’s base and crown chakras—is not a harbinger of doom, but an indication of increasing amounts of energy they receive as the human race works towards spiritual evolution.

Anne surprised me with her stories of the people who come to Bali only to pursue tutoring in the black arts, which is the subverted application of white, or good, magic. After my appointment with the pemangku of gold dust fame, I learned that he invoked Ratu Gede, a deity with a frightening biography and the favoured patron of black sorcerers. Ratu Gede had a temple dedicated to him on Nusa Penida, an island a short distance off Bali’s eastern coast, and considered by the Balinese as angker, or excessively full of evil. Sanur, David’s and Anne’s neighbourhood and popular beach resort, has a reputation as where black magicians practice. The proximity of the two places may be a factor: Nusa Penida is visible from Sanur on a clear day; David thought an energy line might connect them. Another theory associates Sanur’s angker with painful historical events. It was the first settlement of Dutch colonizers, as well as where the Japanese first invaded Bali in World War II. This doesn’t explain, however, why Sanur had remained uninhabited prior to the Europeans arrival, considered haunted by the local population even then.

To an elderly healer who was born and raised by her magician grandfather in Sanur, definitive reasons to fear Sanur weren’t as important as it was prudent to accept it. Her grandfather used to walk across the sea from Sanur to Penida to meditate at Ratu Gede’s temple. However, like the pemangku, her grandfather was not a black magician. To what end Ratu Gede’s dangerous powers, or other spirits like him, are utilized depends entirely upon the balian. White magic isn’t necessarily stronger than black because it is good. Nor can the most potent black magic fully overcome white for there are protective countermeasures that can be taken. In a sense, each exists only to stop the domination of the other, a relationship of diametrical but balanced opposites, like the sekala and niskala, and a potent symbol in the black-and-white checked sacred cloth that adorns Balinese deities.
I was introduced to Ibu “Mother” Marlena, the granddaughter of the magician who walked on water, in the town of Ubud, where I spent a few days after leaving Sanur. A grandmother in her sixties, she was the only balian willing to talk about black magic, a difficult person to find in Bali where the belief is such that even the subject’s passing mention can attract the attention of a less than well-meaning sorcerer. In exchange for her disclosure, Ibu asked that I take her treatment, which meant that I stripped, lay flat, and accepted her often painful massage.
When Ibu’s mother carried her, a village seer told the family that the baby would be special. As a youngster, Ibu’s neighbours came to her to ease their aches and pains; when her mother had a headache, she would place Ibu’s tiny hands against her forehead. Those therapeutic instruments now worked my flesh, unblocking the obstacles in the series of pathways that the Balinese believe extend throughout the body, conveying blood, life fluids and forces. Some are accepted by science, like veins, tendons and nerves, while others are unknown to biology and their existence is accepted as a matter of faith. A legion of accomplished women ply the massage trade along Bali’s beaches, but Ibu’s difference lies in the fact that her hands are endorsed by niskala-based powers, harnessed through prayer, meditation and offerings.

A note was delivered to me where I sat in the garden of my Ubud guesthouse, Ibu’s oils still sticky upon my skin. Arthur was sending his maid Ketut, and her husband Wayan, to take me to a balian tulang or a setter of broken bones. “I’m sure that you will have an edifying experience,” wrote Arthur. “He performed a miracle on me.” A year ago, Arthur had suffered a car accident. Many bones were so badly damaged that Western medical practitioners despaired of his total recovery.

The healer lived in a village at the foot of Mount Agung, Bali’s highest and holiest mountain at 3142 metres, home to all her gods. His clinic, nothing more than an exposed platform outside his house, was close to Besakih, one of Bali’s most sacred temples, visited by hundreds of pilgrims every day. It was a one-and-a-half hour drive from Ubud, covered in the chilled comfort of Wayan’s new sports utility vehicle and through a late afternoon suffused with yellow light. 
 We went first to the balian’s altar to leave our offerings and to light incense. A container of water, blessed by temple priests, was placed there among the fresh and wilting flowers and fruits. Ketut scooped up a few inches in a jar in which she dipped a flower. Holding the blossom elegantly between two fingers, she sprinkled us each three times. She then dribbled water into my cupped hands and motioned for me to drink it. In final preparation, we inserted a blossom behind our right ears as evidence of our purity. When the balian emerged from his house, he also went first to his altar and took from there a glass bottle filled with a thick, black substance, a massage oil of natural ingredients that he collects from the holy mountain and imbues by magical incantations. He was a handsome, middle-aged man with a serious smile. He offered no information about himself other than that his father and grandfather had been bone healers. His brother was one too. A father came with a young son who had broken his arm several weeks earlier falling out of a coconut tree. The balian rubbed his oil into the limb, which looked to be mending well.  
It was then that a truck appeared and five family members carefully lifted from its open bed a man in obvious pain. There was no blood or sign of trauma from his motorcycle accident that morning, but someone held up an X-ray to the light. The thighbone had separated; its severed ends lay neatly side by side. The balian studied the film at length and held a quiet discussion with patient and family before kneeling by the injured leg.
The Balinese do go to hospitals and clinics, and use their technologies, as the X-ray attested. The family may have lacked the financial means for a leg cast for their son;   the clinic may have been busy and the wait long. Perhaps harried doctors do not, and cannot, inspire the same confidence of which traditional healers are capable. They have, after all, more powerful connections. The balian would realign this broken bone, but cushion it in no other protective device than a crudely built box. His patient would then be transported up and down the mountain to him for frequent monitoring and applications of the special ointment, sessions always preceded by prayer and small acts of appeasement to the mystical forces whose involvement and continued involvement could not be discounted in the unfortunate event.

The balian grasped the leg and manipulated it, while the man’s brothers held the patient down, his face twisted and pale. I heard an unfamiliar grating noise. The balian raised the leg again, and although the sound of moving, parted bones was less strange it was no less terrible. If ritual for their son’s injury dispelled this family’s fears, it raised the darkest of mine.

There had occurred an awkward moment, when, at the end of Ibu’s massage, I was reluctant to enthusiastically endorse the transformations that she believed that I had undergone. The problem was mine. Ibu had an outer room full of people wanting to see her, who presented her with faith as well as symptoms. I brought and gave nothing of the “immense belief” that Arthur credits for his remarkable recovery from his car accident. The diplomatic Balinese absolve healer or client of blame if the healing process fails, attributing the cause to an incompatibility between them, but my retribution as an unbeliever may have come in the from of the pemangku’s cold, the beginnings of which I could feel in my throat and chest.

To my great embarrassment, I felt faint and sank to my knees. An anxious Ketut took my elbow and escorted me slowly to the car. The balian never looked away from his patient. As we descended the mountain in silence, the outline of Nusa Penida Island shimmered in the distance.