(Gamelan music)
These children are in deep trance.
Their bodies are no longer under their control.
They have been taken over and are inhabited by unearthly spirits.
This is the island of Bali.
When the Balinese are in trance, they perform acts that they couldn't repeat
without pain, or indeed repeat at all in a normal state.
And the ability to communicate with the gods through trance
lies at the heart of Balinese religion.
0fficially, Bali is a Hindu country,
and like all Hindus, the Balinese cremate their dead.
But being Bali, they do so with dramatic displays of great splendour.
The corpses are brought to the cremation ground in this magnificent tower.
Then they are transferred to a coffin in the shape of a black bull.
Because the cremation rituals are so complex and demand so many offerings,
they cost a great deal of money.
0ften a man's body may have to lie in a shallow grave for years
before his family can finally save up enough
to provide him with the rich ceremonial that he deserves.
A cremation therefore is not an occasion for grief,
but a time for gaiety, to celebrate the successful accomplishment
of a man's most sacred duty.
(Drumming)
Now, at last, the spirits of the dead are being liberated from their earthly bodies
to ascend to a higher world, where they will dwell
until they are reincarnated once more as better beings.
500 years ago, the whole of Java and Bali was Hindu.
But during the 16th century, Mohammedan fanatics began to invade Java.
Slowly, they fought their way eastwards, converting some princes,
driving others before them.
When they reached the eastern tip of Java, they stopped
and allowed the surviving Hindu Rajas and their courts
to escape across the narrow strait to Bali.
Here, they found sanctuary.
And here, there still stand statues of Ganesha, the Hindu elephant god,
in an island that has never seen an elephant.
The Javanese Rajas brought to Bali much else beside their religion,
for with them into exile travelled their court musicians and their artists.
As a result, Bali became a sanctuary for the cream, the distillation,
of what was, at the time, the most sophisticated culture
in the whole of Southeast Asia,
and here, it has not merely survived, it has burgeoned gloriously.
(Drumming and bells)
This is the Legong, perhaps the most famous of Bali's dances.
It tells the story of a Javanese king who kidnaps a princess
from a rival's kingdom and is eventually killed in battle.
The dancer on the right portrays a court attendant.
But it seems strange indeed that the king and his princess
should be played by two doll... like children dancing in perfect unison
and children moreover who are forbidden to dance the Legong
when they become tainted by adolescence.
The official story may be Javanese.
It seems possible that the dance has origins in Bali itself,
and meanings that lie much deeper than a relatively trivial tale
of foreign chivalry.
To search for those origins, you must go into the mountains of central Bali,
where many of the island's most ancient beliefs and rituals still survive,
beliefs that hark back to a time long before the arrival of the Hindu refugees.
This village priest is holding two wooden dolls.
As he prays, he smokes them with incense
in just the same way as he would smoke real dancers
in order to send them into a trance.
(Congregation singing)
0n either side of him sit two young girls
lavishly dressed with whitened, impassive faces,
girls who have been specially selected by the priest and the villagers
for this particular ceremonial.
0nce again, the priest prays,
calling to the spirits to come down and visit the village.
0nce more, he smokes the dolls.
(Singing continues)
They begin to vibrate, just as a human being vibrates when he's on the verge of a trance.
(Bells jingle)
Now the children hold the sticks that animate the puppets
and the people sing to the gods, entreating them to come down
and animate the bodies of the girls just as the girls are animating the puppets.
Slowly, the children's eyes fall shut.
Slowly, they drift into trance.
"Sanghyang, heavenly spirits come down," the women implore.
(Singing continues)
And now, the girls are in trance.
Now, the Sanghyang, the spirits, are inhabiting their bodies.
Their eyes will remain closed until the trance is over.
They see no one, they speak to no one, except when, on a rare occasion,
they may communicate secretly to each other in a whisper.
More offerings must be made.
The villagers now address the children as Ratu, Your Highness,
as befits a goddess.
The children themselves are acquiring new characters.
They may well become petulant and arrogant and quite unlike their normal selves.
This ritual of the Sanghyang Deling, the puppet spirits, sanctifies the village.
In times of pestilence when disease threatens,
the children may be called upon to be perform every night for weeks.
They must be children, for the heavenly spirits wish to inhabit pure bodies,
uncorrupted by adolescence.
And they must dance like puppets, impassively and in unison,
for they are portraying the puppets of the gods.
And so the very characteristics that seem so meaningless and mystifying in the Legong,
here seem perfectly logical.
What more likely then, that this is the origin of the Legong?
And that the Javanese princes, 400 years ago,
anxious to recreate the sophisticated splendour of their court in Balinese exile,
took the child trance dances of the villages
and used them to recreate a pantomime of their court legends?
But the Sanghyang Deling dancers, though they may have been excelled
in technique and sophistication by the Legong dancers of the lowlands,
can, in their trance, perform feats which no Legong dancer can emulate.
(Drumming, bells and pipes)
With no support from the hands of the men, and with their eyes still firmly shut,
they continue to dance.
(Music intensifies)
(Music stops)
And now the women chant.
"They quickly come, the nymphs," they say.
"Two together they dance, like lilies with pollen in the centre,
"blown by the wind and swaying.
"The water lily seeks the sandat flower,
"they fall, and as they fall,
"the heavenly nymphs bend over backwards. "
(Congregation singing)
Before the gods release the children from their trance,
they must perform one more act.
They must walk barefooted through the embers of a fire made from coconut husks.
(Drumming and pipes)
The main ceremony is over, but the goddesses have not departed.
The children are still in the grip of trance.
(Man singing)
(Congregation singing)
0nce more, the priest must pray,
this time, to bring the girls out of their trance.
With a flower, he sprinkles them with holy water.
The women pray, giving thanks.
(Singing continues)
The gods are leaving them. The trance is over.
0nce more, they are little girls.
0nce more, they have demonstrated that the gods are all around,
invisible, but in direct communication with the people.
The priest, who gives them absolution, is officially a Hindu priest.
But the rites over which he presides have probably existed in Bali
since long before Hinduism arrived.
This ancient religion of the island seems to have been an animistic one,
a belief that all things in creation have individual spirits,
and since this is so, it follows that wherever nature manifests itself
in especially prodigal or spectacular fashion
then there must be a specially holy place.
Monkeys are rare in Bali.
In this forest alone do they exist in large numbers.
In this forest, therefore, shrines have been built to celebrate them
and to give thanks to the spirits of nature.
Here, it's an act of piety to bring food to the monkeys.
In a cave on the east coast of the island, there stands a shrine
in homage of an even more spectacular concentration of animal life.
Bats.
They hang in millions from the roof.
The air in the cave is fetid and unbearably stifling
with the accumulated heat of a million bodies.
As the guardian priestess prays, a steady hail of lice and droppings
falls to the floor of the cave, where it's fed upon voraciously
by a glistening carpet of giant cockroaches.
0n the rocks at the back lives a python,
which feeds on the dead bats that fall from the roof.
A hideous place maybe to many eyes.
To the Balinese, an unquestionable demonstration
of the fecundity of nature and therefore of its holiness.
Since animals have spirits, those spirits may as well possess
the bodies of a man as may the spirit of a goddess.
Even the spirit of the most ordinary creatures may do such a thing.
This man is about to become possessed by the spirit of a pig.
0nly in remote mountain villages do these animal possessions take place.
The people themselves can't explain why these strange ceremonies are held,
yet the men of certain families habitually and deliberately
go into trance to become pigs and become possessed to such a degree
that unless they're cared for, they may injure themselves.
The process of going into trance is achieved again
by being smoked with incense.
These occasions are watched with pleasure by everybody in the village.
These people are familiar with the supernatural.
It's entertainment, sometimes even comedy.
(Crowd singing)
(Rhythmic clapping)
This is no play... acting.
0ne night, a man entranced as a pig broke through the cordon of villagers
and escaped into the surrounding rice fields.
In the darkness of the night, no one could catch him.
The next morning, he was discovered in a mud wallow.
He was ill for days afterwards.
For in his pig incarnation, he had eaten dung, as pigs will.
The villagers taunt and jeer at the entranced dancers.
They jostle them, just as they would jostle a pig.
To an outsider, this seems no more than some extraordinary game,
some pantomime stunt.
It seems so, that is, until the moment comes to bring the men out of their trance,
for a man possessed has superhuman strength.
He must be captured to be exorcised
and he cannot be captured except in the most violent way.
(Men shout)
(Urgent chatter)
He remembers little of what happened.
The song the women sang to him, little more.
But he knows that he's experienced something vaguely delicious
and he feels exhausted to his very soul.
Each village may specialise in a particular kind of trance.
Near the village of the pig trance, there's another where men are habitually
possessed by the spirits of horses.
Drawn by the light of specially lit fires,
they career out of the blackness of the night.
Kicking the hot ashes with their feet and whinnying.
(Crowd singing)
It's not only the spirits of animals which may possess a man,
objects have spirits and even they may do so.
This man is about to become entranced by the spirit of the lid of a pot,
represented by the wooden disc tied to his hand.
(People clapping and singing)
This is comedy, for the spirit of a pot lid will obviously wish to place itself
upon any flat surface.
And being a trance spirit, it will do so with the greatest vigour.
The villagers shriek with laughter.
And yet, beneath it all, lies the knowledge that the man entranced
is uncontrollable and irrational,
that he may become violent,
that none can tell for sure how he will behave,
and that to bring him back to normality will need the strength of many men.
The fact that all things, animate and inanimate, have spirits
means that every natural phenomenon must be watched, considered
and, where appropriate, reverenced.
Bali is a volcanic island and, as so often on the slopes of volcanoes,
warm springs gush from the ground in miraculous fashion.
These are the most spectacular of them at Tampak Siring.
The Balinese are, by nature and habit, fastidious people,
who bathe several times a day anyway if they can.
But they travel the whole length of their island, 100 miles or so,
to bathe in these sacred pools.
This place was once the battleground of the gods.
Not far away, a great demon was killed, and to this day,
the water that bubbles up there may not be used to irrigate rice fields
because if it were, the rice stems, when cut,
would exude blood, they say.
But these springs were specifically created by the great god Indra
as a source of the elixir of immortality,
with which he was able to revive other gods wounded in that battle.
It's important therefore as a site of pilgrimage,
and blessings given by these priests are very valuable and powerful.
Every day, whole communities arrive on foot or by truck,
laden with offerings to place in front of the shrines.
All important places in Bali have their own temples.
But there are six which are particularly holy,
and this is one of them, Luhur, which stands on the southernmost tip of the island
overlooking the sea.
Strangely for an island people, the Balinese fear the sea.
For them, it is not a welcome source of food, or a highway to other places.
Instead, it is the home of demons and monsters
and the source of all that is most evil.
The long, empty beaches of black volcanic sand shimmering in the heat
are the assembly grounds of witches and demons.
There are few fish in the reefs round the island,
and therefore little inducement to the Balinese to become great seamen.
As a result, when they go to sea, they do so tentatively,
and they take good care to protect themselves with the head of a friendly spirit,
half... fish, half... elephant, in the bow of their canoe.
0nly thus can you hope to keep the sea monsters at bay.
The sea gods must indeed be placated,
for evil spirits must be taken account of just as much as good ones.
Among the thousands of ceremonials that are held every year on the island,
there are many to make offerings to the sea.
(Drumming and chanting)
0ften, the guardian spirits of a village near the sea
are brought down in procession
to spend an evening on the frontiers of their kingdom.
(Drumming)
As the depths of the sea are the source of evil,
so the source of all that is good lies on the heights.
The summit of the great mountain Gunung Agung
which forms the heart and centre of the island.
And yet, by a tragic paradox, Gunung Agung is a volcano.
(Rumbling)
0nly a few years ago, the mountain exploded.
Lava poured down its flanks in an irresistible and lethal flood.
The people took flight before it, stunned and mystified
that their god should have turned against them.
In some way, it seemed they must have unknowingly offended.
The lava swept towards them, turning rivers to steam before their eyes.
In spite of all their prayers and offerings, the eruptions continued.
Many people fled.
Many others stayed in their villages, believing that if they had offended
and could not atone with prayers and offerings,
then they had better accept their fate.
2,000 died.
But the spirits that exercise the most power
over the minds of the Balinese are neither remote nor impersonal.
They are, on the contrary, creatures that the people know intimately and personally.
Nor are they some recently imported deities from India, or anywhere else,
but they are gods whose origin lies directly in Bali.
They come out of their special stalls in the temples
and walk the streets in procession
on the occasion of every temple festival.
And the most important and friendly of them all
is a magnificent shaggy creature, the guardian of the village,
the Barong.
He it is who plays one of the main roles in the most spectacular temple rituals.
The Barong takes part in a great drama
in which he does battle with the hideous witch Rangda, the embodiment of evil.
But before the main protagonists emerge from the temple,
masked dancers perform.
These are the Barong's attendants and supporters,
and their dance is the first act in a drama which may last for the rest of the afternoon
and go on late into the night.
(Gamelan music playing)
The Barong awaits in his specially built stall,
oblivious of these preliminaries,
while the gamelan orchestra plays the sacred melodies.
Most of the village is here to watch,
for this performance is, at one and the same time,
an entertainment and a drama, a ritual and an exorcism.
As darkness falls, the Barong begins to dance.
The two men inside his skin animating him have already, to some degree,
been taken over by his spirit.
But it will not be unusual if one or both of them,
before the evening's drama is over,
falls into a deep trance and becomes possessed.
The Barong's first opponent has emerged from the temple.
Horrifying as she may appear with her goggling eyes,
her appalling fangs and her red pendulous tongue,
she's not Rangda the witch, but Rangda's daughter Rarong,
and she's been sent here to try and ensnare the Barong
with a proposal of marriage.
The white cloth she holds is an instrument of her magic.
By waving it, she casts spells.
By placing it over her head, she becomes invisible.
Rarong's mask was cut out of a special tree that grows in the graveyard.
Night after night, it has been hung there in the cemetery to charge it with magic.
Now it is so powerful that even when it's lying in its basket,
it may creak and groan and sometimes even rise in the air,
so the people say.
In the drama, at this moment, Rarong is truly terrifying.
(Yells)
The first skirmish with the Barong is about to begin.
Rarong has placed her magic cloth over her head.
She's invisible to all, except the Barong,
who with his supernatural awareness knows exactly where she is.
(Yelling)
Although this is a ritual, although all the villagers watching so intently
know the plot and the theoretical outcome of the battle,
this conflict is nonetheless a real one.
In a sense, there is a haunting fear
that maybe things will not go as they should.
Maybe this time, the Barong, the guardian of the village,
will not win as he has always won in the past.
Maybe this time, the health and the wellbeing of the village
is in real jeopardy.
There is a momentary pause, a lowering of tension in the play
that has already been going on for an hour or so.
And then suddenly the drama tautens,
for out of the temple for the first time comes Rangda.
(Yells)
Rangda, the haunter of graveyards,
the personification of evil and malevolence.
Her shoulders are hung with dead men's entrails,
flames spring from her tongue
and her fingers are armed with immense claws.
Rarong reports to her mother... the Barong has spurned her.
She must be revenged.
If the drama continues as it usually does,
Rangda will do battle with the Barong, she will appear to get the upper hand
and men in the audience will fall into trance
and rush to the Barong's defence, waving swords.
Rangda will then bewitch them
and make them turn their swords upon themselves.
But the Barong will miraculously prevent the swords
from doing any harm to her supporters.
That is what should happen, but things do not always turn out as expected.
(Man shrieking)
The drama has been too powerful... even before battle has been seriously joined,
men in the crowd are falling into trance and rushing to attack Rangda.
They must be restrained before they injure themselves.
And now Rangda herself goes into trance.
(Man shrieking)
Rangda is no longer in control of herself.
She must be carried forcibly back to the temple
to be brought out of her trance by a priest.
It seems that the play has come to an early and unexpected end
without any of the usual demonstrations with swords and self... stabbings.
The Barong visits each of the entranced villagers
giving her benison to bring them out of trance.
But all is by no means over yet.
(Man shouts and sobs)
These swords are unquestionably sharp.
If a man is not deeply entranced, he may well injure himself severely.
If he is impure, he would be in great danger.
If he had touched a corpse within the last seven days,
the swords would certainly pierce his flesh.
0nce they have endeavoured to stab themselves
to demonstrate devotion to the Barong,
they must be disarmed by the priests and their helpers.
But that must be done swiftly and powerfully,
for none can tell how they will react.
To be brought out of trance, the men must now be sprinkled with holy water.
But when it appears, one of the most powerfully entranced men in his passion
seizes the jar to drink it.
Some are released from trance by wiping their faces
with the shock of human hair that hangs beneath the Barong's chin.
But final exorcism will not happen except inside the temple itself.
Within the courtyard of the temple, the village priest prays
and makes offerings before the shrines.
In front of him stands the Barong and attendants
holding on their heads the baskets which now contain the magic masks
of Rarong and Rangda.
Many men are still entranced and moaning.
Before all can be brought back to this world,
the sacrifice of a chick must be made.
(Droning chants)
(Man chattering wildly)
(Drumming and chanting)
0nce more, the Barong receives the homage of his supporters.
0nce more, evil has been routed,
good has triumphed, and the village has been saved.
0nce more, the gods have demonstrated the continuity
between the natural and the supernatural
by coming down to earth and, for a short time,
inhabiting the bodies of men.