Jailangkung: Indonesian Spirit-Basket Divination

I was astonished by my first encounter with a jailangkung (also jelangkung, spirit basket).¹ This was at a temple in Jam Thang [盐汀] village on the outskirts of Singkawang, West Kalimantan, where I was watching a spirit medium dance with a fan on the evening of February 9, 2008. The languid performance lulled me, so I was unprepared when two men suddenly barged past me in a flurry of activity. They appeared to be wrestling with a “wild beast” that they were hanging onto with sashes. The “beast” pulled the men up and down the temple hall and into the crowd so that spectators had to scramble to get out of the way. After the séance, the “beast” lay lifeless on the main altar table. It was a rattan basket dressed in a little red and yellow Ming-style soldier’s tunic (Figure 1).

My childhood in Singapore of the 1950s was a social milieu of temple ceremonies for my Hokkien father’s family practiced Chinese popular religion, which is why I chose to research Chinese spirit possession. I also investigate Indonesian spiritualism for at home I was immersed in the Sino-Malay cultural world of my Peranakan² mother. This included the everyday belief in djinns and hantus.³ Notwithstanding my familiarity with temple rituals and Malay magic, a spirit-possessed basket, endearingly dressed in a little shirt, was a discovery. I pressed my informants for answers, only to be met with nonchalance. Apparently, jailangkung is commonplace in Indonesia.

This information made me even more determined to learn about spirit-basket possession, and my research included fieldtrips to Java and West Kalimantan from 2008 to 2010. I learned that the jailangkung originated in fifth-century Chinese spirit-basket divination. The method had traveled throughout the Chinese diaspora but disappeared by the 1950s. Spirit-basket divination thrives only in Indonesia, and jailangkung is living testimony of cultural connections between China and Southeast Asia. This essay focusses on jailangkung in Java and West Kalimantan. I discovered Nini Thowong, a jailangkung involution,⁴ and from Indonesian scholarship l learned about lukah gilo (mad fish-trap) in Sumatra⁵ and Riau. ⁶ The lukah is a rattan fish-trap that can be as tall as a man. When spirit possessed, the basket has the strength to drag teams of men about an arena.⁷

Jailangkung can be described as a game inasmuch as there is an objective and rules of play. In 1880, Edward Tylor made a “special argument” for games as anthropological evidence. Tylor proposed that if geographically separate communities have similar games that are “peculiar or complex enough to bar the supposition of their having sprung up independently,” then this would be proof of cultural connections between the groups.

Despite the cogency of the argument and the eminence of the proposer in the field of cultural anthropology, the study of the international distribution of games never quite took off as research method.⁸ Perhaps the fact of cultural diffusion needs no explication, or the origins of traditional games can never by proven, but Tylor’s theory combined with an archaeology of the everyday enables a critical examination of how host societies cope with alien traditions through time. This study shows how jailangkung naturally assimilated into Indonesian animism to foster involution, but how a newer import, Middle-Eastern Islamic ideas, have necessitated new coping strategies.

The Chinese origin of jailangkung is published by the name, which is a homophonic rendition of the Chinese cai lan gong [菜篮公, vegetable basket deity]. The Indonesian practice rehearses spirit-basket rituals of the Chinese Goddess of the Latrine and the Seven Star Sisters.⁹ The basket is anthropomorphized by the shirt draped upon it. According to Chinese folklore, an image made in human likeness, such as a temple idol or a scarecrow, provides a doorway for spirits to enter the mortal world.¹⁰ The basket as human effigy distinguishes jailangkung from Western coscinomancy, where a sieve is balanced on shears, and from African divinations, where tokens are shaken out a basket.¹¹

The everyday may seem banal, but Overholtzer and Robin propose that an archaeology into the materiality of the everyday offers insight into changing politics, commerce, and cosmology in a community over time.¹² A similar argument informs the Museum of London investigation into the ubiquitous willow-pattern ceramics of Victorian England. The discovery of pottery shards in archaeological digs all over London enabled a conclusion on the aspirations of the poor to the material culture of the rich.¹³

A typical jailangkung uses a household basket, about 30 centimeters wide and as tall, draped over with a shirt (Figure 2). The assemblage may feature head and arms, and decorations such as flags, but these embellishments are optional. The garment is de rigueur. When spirit possessed, the basket self-automates to write using a pen protruding from the reeds. One or two bunches of keys may be hung upon the cross-sticks.

Two players grasp the jailangkung in their hands, or they hold the basket between them using sashes. One man is the medium, who channels the spirit through his right hand into the basket. The second man merely supports the jailangkung.¹⁴ A mantra invites a spirit to possess the basket, and the ritual aspect of the performance is emphasized with offerings of incense, candles, fruit, and sweets. The mantras informants shared with me were formulaic instructions for the spirit to possess the basket but to leave when so ordered. From a Bangka Belitung (islands south of Sumatra) website I found a mantra particularly rich in cultural information. The spirit, named “Pig Dung Aunty,” directly links this jailangkung with the Chinese Goddess of the Latrine (see earlier references):¹⁵

The term jailangkung has entered Indonesian vocabulary.¹⁷ Every Indonesian informant, and I do mean every person, I spoke to about jailangkung knew the game. Ardian Cangianto, my Indonesian guide in Singkawang in 2008 and in Jogjakarta in 2009, told me he had once communicated with Bruce Lee, the late martial movie star by spirit basket.¹⁸ Hedy (not her real name), who had taken me to see children play jailangkung in Singkawang on July 3, 2009, shared how as a schoolgirl in Semarang she had witnessed a séance. The possessing spirit was the soul of a convict who had died in the local prison. The spirit basket had asked Hedy to draw closer to be admired. Frightened, she ran away. I continue Hedy’s story later. Over January 30 and 31, 2017, I polled twelve members of SMUKI (Singapore Management University Komunitas Indonesia), a student Indonesian cultural club. Everyone knew of jailangkung; six had witnessed séances; one had played jailangkung.

However, the imprimatur of jailangkung as a part of everyday Indonesian culture is the acceptance of jailangkung as local hantu, alongside kuntilanak (a vampire who is the soul of pregnant woman), and pocong (a wandering ghost dressed in burial shroud).¹⁹ Social media reports tell of hauntings and mass hysteria among schoolgirls on account of possession by jailangkung,²⁰ and jailangkung stars in popular horror movies.”²¹

Contradicting, or so it would seem, the place of jailangkung in the Indonesian everyday is the paucity of research on the subject. There is local scholarship on Nini Thowong and the mad fish-trap of Sumatra, but not on jailangkung.

Jailangkung was mentioned in recollections by Indonesian writer Hersri Setiawan of life in Salemba prison, Jakarta, where he was imprisoned in 1969 under the New Order. Hersri recounted how inmates killed time by playing jailangkung.²² He connected jailangkung with Javanese Nini Thowong, “[b]ut for some reason, when this game re-appeared like a plague in urban areas at the beginning of the 1950s, it was more Chinese than Javanese in form.” Hersri reasoned that while only female spirits possessed Nini Thowong, jailangkung summoned male and female spirits. The jailangkung was the more powerful, wrote Hersri without irony, just as prison life had the tradition “of the dominant position of the Chinese male, or that of the ruler and ruled.”²³

I will return to the discussion of the dearth of scholarship on jailangkung at the conclusion of this paper.

Raden Sudibyo lives in a storehouse in the Pracimosono area of Jogjakarta palace. The locals told me he used to play jailangkung just about every night in the palace in the 1970s. Sudibyo confirmed the reports and told me that the Jogjakartan ghoul Sumilah was the spirit that regularly possessed his jailangkung. Sumilah often obliged with lucky lottery numbers.

Sudibyo explained that he had become bored with jailangkung, but he was eager to play spirit basket for me. I had to bring a man to support the basket because women may not hold a jailangkung. Cangianto, who had communicated with Bruce Lee through jailangkung, was happy to oblige. On the evening of June 29, 2009, we gathered at the palace storehouse. Sudibyo produced a household basket and put over it one of his shirts turned inside out. He explained that the cloth in contact with the basket must not have been touched by the human body. Sudibyo set out a glass of water, a glass of tea, small cakes, and cut pieces of newspaper. The latter substituted for Chinese spirit money that Sudibyo said he had no time to buy. I worried out loud that the spirit would not accept this offering, but Sudibyo was confident that the spirits would make do. He tied a key with string to the basket to make a channel for the jailangkung to imbibe the essence of the offerings, and last, he lit an incense stick and inserted it into the basket.

Sudibyo and Cangianto took up the basket. A few minutes later, the basket moved to make little scrawls on a book held up to its pen. Nothing further happened. During the muezzin call to evening prayers, Sudibyo insisted that the session had to be paused. Then the men again picked up the basket, but it stubbornly would not write anymore. We gave up eventually. Sudibyo seemed much deflated that he had failed before an important interviewer. Explaining the lethargy of our jailangkung, Sudibyo said that the spirit was the soul of an ancient batik painter. Apparently, the scrawls were old Jawi writing. Cangianto and I took Sudibyo’s word for this.

On the evening of July 3, 2009, I watched the guileless play of Singkawang youths. I discuss Singkawang as a research site in the following section but here recall the fun I shared with twelve boys, perhaps aged between nine to fifteen years old. They formed a gang that gathered most evenings to play jailangkung in a vacant lot off Harmonis street. That night, the boys had two baskets that they took turns holding with sashes. Every time, even when the players switched, the jailangkungs would bob so fast as to make the sound of fluttering birdwing. At one point the boys tied a jailangkung to a lamppost so that only one handler held the basket. Still the jailangkung bobbed so fast as to become a blur.

When the boys asked the jailangkungs to reveal their identities, the baskets wrote answers into exercise books. One jailangkung pressed so hard it broke the pen in its reeds. One spirit announced itself as Suster Ngesot, a vampire of popular movie fame.²⁴ The other announced itself as polong, an evil sprite sent by black magicians to do harm. The boys laughed to learn they were communicating with hantus. During their play, a tiger spirit apparently possessed one boy for he crept about us on all fours roaring loudly. This must have been a common occurrence for the boys continued with their play unperturbed.

Hedy, who had taken me to meet the boys, said her brother had become possessed while playing with jailangkung and is now prone to fits. Several Singkawang spirit mediums I interviewed said they had first become spirit possessed during jailangkung sessions. It appears that playing jailangkung is a common prelude to bodily possession by a spirit.²⁵

My main research site for jailangkung is Singkawang, the second largest town (after Pontianak) in the province of West Kalimantan. Singkawang is populated by a Chinese majority who are descendants of eighteenth-century Hakka goldminers.²⁶ Singkawang stages an annual Cap Goh Meh [十五暝, fifteenth of the first moon] parade featuring some five hundred spirit mediums borne down the main streets on palanquins set with knives and nails.²⁷  Jailangkungs dance wildly among them.²⁸ Chet Ket Khiong (蔡国强), the head of Majelis Tao (MTI), an association claiming to represent all spirit mediums and jailangkung groups in Singkawang, told me that there are some seven hundred spirit mediums and seventeen jailangkung groups on his register.²⁹

In 2008 and 2009, I interviewed leaders of Singkawang’s religious community: Bong Wui Khong [皇威康], head of the TriDharma [Daoism-Confucianism-Buddhism] Association, and Zheng Zhen Fu [郑振福], head of the Majelis Konghucu Indonesia (Makin Confucian Association of Indonesia) group. I interviewed the oldest spirit medium in the town, ninety-year-old Cung Nyiong Hin (钟杨兴), who became a spirit medium at the age of eighteen. Three of the many spirit mediums I interviewed were in their eighties. All recalled seeing children play jailangkung from as far back as they could remember and concurred that spirit-basket divination only entered temple practice around the late 1960s to 1970s.³⁰ All of them named the earliest jailangkungs known to them as Nyian Sai and Khim Sin.³¹ Both jailangkungs are no longer in use. I saw a faded photograph of Khim Sin, but I found the original Nyian Sai basket in an abandoned temple on Pulau Belitung road.

I interviewed Lai Fo Bao [赖佛保], who had supported Nyian Sai jailangkung from 1981 to 1994.³² He said that the basket was first possessed in 1965. Its medium, Zhu Miao Jin [朱妙金], built the temple in 1974. After Zhu died in 1999, the spirit of the basket refused to perform with any other medium.

Chin Miau Fuk [陈妙福], head of the Singkawang Cap Go Meh parade committee in 2008 and 2009, had supported the Khim Sin jailangkung from 1971 to 1980.³³ Fung Ji (no Chinese characters) was the medium. According to Chin, Fung had amused himself playing jailangkung from the early 1960s. One day in 1968, the possessing spirit announced that it was a saint. Evil spirits do possess jailangkung in the profane world, but only saints perform in temple divinations.³⁴ Fung consulted Fan Ren Shou [范仁寿], then the “pope” of spirit mediums. Fan gave Fung a talisman, and with this in his pocket, Fung summoned the spirit to the jailangkung. The spirit took possession of the basket in the presence of Fan’s talisman, testifying irrefutably to its saintliness.

Chin recalled how in 1975 a spirit medium, proclaiming himself a god incarnate, said that a ghost possessed Khim Sin. The spirit medium attacked Khim Sin with a machete, but the spirit basket knocked the upstart to the ground.

In Singkawang, the spirit mediums and jailangkungs I met were possessed by Malay, Dayak, and Chinese tutelary deities (datoks), the cultivated souls of ancient Singkawang ascetics.³⁵ All the Chinese jailangkungs “told” me they were souls of immigrants who had come to Indonesia before the Dutch. I witnessed many jailangkung séances, but space constraints allow me to describe only one performance at some length.

The jailangkung of Malay Datok Pak Gani is the oldest ongoing practice in Singkawang. Pak Gani’s original medium/channeler, Lie Teck Poh [李德保] was in his sixties when I met him on July 4, 2009. Old Lie had suffered a stroke that left him with a helpless left arm and incoherent speech. His son, Lie Jiu Chuan [李求权], a drink and cake vendor, has taken his place. A relative, Lie Chun Hooi [李春辉], who had supported the jailangkung for Old Lie, continues this duty for Young Lie.

Datok Pak Gani séances take place in a small wood-and-brick temple in Kampong Natuna. There is a portrait of the saint in an outdoor shrine in front of the temple. The separate accommodation is because Pak Gani is a Muslim spirit, whereas the temple is Daoist. His picture shows Pak Gani as a distinguished old man dressed in white, wearing the skull cap of a returnee from the pilgrimage to Mecca (Figure 3).

The original Pak Gani basket is about thirty years old and still in use. Made of thin cane, the basket measured about 35 centimeters wide at the base. Draped over the basket is a stained white, one-shouldered shirt with Arabic-style calligraphy written on it. An assistant lit altar candles and burned aromatic resins. He added broken pieces of joss sticks to the censer so that smoke billowed out in suffocating clouds, bringing tears to the eyes of the eight people crowded around the spirit basket.

The two younger Lies took up the jailangkung by means of sashes tied to the basket base (Figure 4). In less than a minute, the basket began to nod, although the handlers held steady. The Pak Gani spirit basket wrote agitatedly into a student’s exercise book using the ballpoint pen pushed into the basket reeds. Pak Gani was displeased with the red candles on the altar. These were for Chinese gods, whereas he, being Muslim, demanded white candles. The session had to wait for the assistant to go on bicycle to buy suitable candles. When all was in order, Pak Gani patiently took questions, writing replies in Bahasa Indonesia in a legible hand. When I asked Pak Gani to demonstrate Arabic calligraphy, the spirit basket obliged (Figure 5). I asked the Datok where he was in relation to the basket. Pak Gani replied that he was standing in front of the basket and moving the jailangkung with his hands. The spirit basket swayed and bobbed gently in a manner seemingly appropriate for a wise old man.

Through the spirit basket, Pak Gani told me that he was Javanese, originally from Gunong Kawi Raya in Surabaya (Figure 6). He had come to West Kalimantan in the 1800s and retired as an ascetic to Serasan Island. Pak Gani achieved sainthood in death because of his prayers and meditation. He used the jailangkung in order to prescribe medicines to people in need. Pak Gani wrote that he first possessed the jailangkung in 1980 in Jakarta, where Old Lie, the original medium/channeler, was working as a spirit medium. One day, a friend of Old Lie needed medicine so Old Lie made a jailangkung and invited a spirit that knew medicine to possess the basket and write a prescription.

Datok Pak Gani interrupted the spirit-writing session three times to smoke cigarettes. The jailangkung moved automatically to a candle flame to light sticks inserted into the basket weave. Surprisingly, the cigarettes burned to stubs, although no one drew on them. Pak Gani also drank coffee by dipping the pen into a cup. After a drink, the basket would write, staining the pages with coffee. Toward the close of the session, the jailangkung asked to write talismans. The jailangkung wrote Arabic-type script on two strips of white paper, each about two centimeters wide and six centimeters long. Pak Gani instructed that the talismans be burned and the ashes mixed with water, which Old Lie had to drink while facing north during the magrib (sunset prayers) hour. Apparently, Younger Li has been too busy recently to invite Datok Pak Gani to possess the jailangkung. Pak Gani wrote that he did not want to miss a chance to prescribe medicines for his old friend. Around 11 a.m., three hours after the start of the session, it was time for Pak Gani to take his leave. Datok Pak Gani tossed two sheng bei [圣杯] divining blocks placed on the spirit basket. After three throws, the answer was “yes” when the basket abruptly became still.³⁶

I met two Dayak jailangkungs on July 2, 2009, at a shrine on Ali Anyang road. Both spirit baskets were dressed in white shirts trimmed with black. They identified themselves as Iban spirits who had come from nearby Kabung Island. One was a vegetarian that drew sustenance by pressing its pen into white flowers set before it. The other was a fierce spirit that chain-smoked throughout the séance. The medium/channeler, Bhong Ci Thung [汪志星], told me that every Cap Goh Meh he chopped off the head of a rooster so that this jailangkung could peck into the bloody neck with its pen.

The most successful jailangkung practice in Singkawang was that of a temple on Kalimantan road. On July 1, 2009, I went to the temple and communicated with two jailangkungs. Both spirit baskets emphasized that they were possessed by higher Daoist deities, not mere local earth gods. The higher standing of the two gods is reflected in their ascetic vegetarian diet, and this is why they chose to communicate through spirit baskets and not the bodies of spirit mediums, for the latter were likely to be meat eaters.

The jailangkungs wrote handsome Chinese characters neatly set out in rows. Each spirit had a distinctive hand. The jailangkungs moved in stately manner, bowing often and writing steadily. No one dared to ask for lucky numbers. The jailangkungs became impatient when I asked them to relate their life histories; they said their purpose was to give spiritual advice and not interviews. Someone asked the jailangkung possessed by Zhi Gao Da Wang [志高大王, The High Achieving Emperor] if one in the crowd of onlookers could hold it. In reply, the spirit basket scanned the faces of those around the table, turning to me. The person who supported the basket yielded his place to me. I gingerly held onto a handle on the base of the basket when the jailangkung began again to write and it moved easily. I was not able to tell whether the basket moved on its own accord, or whether it was the hand of sixty-one-year-old medium/channeler, Ma Guo Hui [马国讳], that wrote.

I have argued that Nini Thowong is an involution of Chinese spirit-basket divination that has now become entirely Indonesian.³⁷ Geertz discussed involution as the tendency to embellish cultural items. Over time the ornamentation can be so elaborate it appears to be a new artifact, but the original idea remains intact.³⁸ The evolution of the anthropomorphic basket into a doll is instinctive, and I illustrate this process with pictorial evidence. At Guang Hui Gong [廣惠宫, Shrine of Boundless Benevolence], Kebumen, the jailangkung of Bei Gu Xing Jun [北姑星君, Lady Northern Star Deity], has a doll’s head, but underneath the sumptuous red gown I found a basket armature (Figure 7).

At Boen San Tong [汶山堂, Wen Mountain Shrine], Cirebon, the jailangkung, also of Bei Gu, had fully evolved into a sculpted wooden image sans basket body (Figure 8). The temple people told me that this made a handier jailangkung.

Somewhere between the two developments lies the jailangkungs of Kwan Seng Boen [关圣闻, The Famed Sage Guan] temple in Semarang. Sugiharto Mulyo is the medium/channeler and owner of Kwan Seng Boen. He conducts divination using two jailangkungs. One belongs to Mazu-Guanyin,³⁹ and the other is for Guangong, God of War. Mulyo said that his grandfather had set up the original shrine in 1970. The old man also used two jailangkungs. Sugiharto’s father inherited the spirit baskets and the temple in 1986. In 1996, a fire at the temple destroyed both original jailangkungs. Similar-looking substitutes were made. Sugiharto inherited the temple practice in 1999, including the replacement jailangkungs, beautiful paper-mâché sculptures built over basket armatures (Figure 9).

Sugiharto believes his grandfather was Hokkien, but he considers himself an indigene and he speaks no Chinese. He said he was Muslim but saw no conflict between his personal faith and his Tridharma temple practice. Sugiharto is proud of his work and wanted to be identified by his name in my research. Having witnessed religious intolerance firsthand in Indonesia, I worried about the ethics of identifying Sugiharto as Muslim, so I pointedly asked him again if I should give my readers this information. He said “yes.” Back in Singapore I telephoned him to once again check his decision to be named. He said “yes” once more, but sounded irritated on the line, as if I doubted his words. His daughter is Muslim, he pointed out, and he planned on her taking over his temple practice.

The Kwan Seng Boen jailangkung divination has been successful enough for Sugiharto to build a good-sized temple of zinc, wood, and concrete. The attractive façade, painted fire-engine red, made the temple stand out from among the wooden huts clustered around it in Gendong Utara village. A wonderland of altars lay within. There were large altars with large tables as well as small worship nooks all over the place. Gaudy paintings on the walls presented a bewildering spectrum of pre-Islamic Javanese deities and Chinese gods, including a giant portrait of the Chinese God of War.

Sugiharto estimates that 80 percent of his clientele are Chinese; the rest are indigenes. There is a weekly schedule of divinatory times, but people also come for private one-on-one consultations. For questions concerning illnesses, marriage, and love, Mazu-Guanyin would be consulted. Guangong is appealed to for inquiries regarding business and work.

When I asked for a spirit-writing consultation, Guangong obliged, but I first had to kneel and pray with joss sticks at several altars, in front of the temple, and even at the head of the path leading to the temple. After the elaborate preparation, the divination itself was anticlimactic (see Figure 10).

Sugiharto sat at a table before a pad of recycled paper printed on one side. In his right hand, Sugiharto held the Guangong effigy by its base. The basket swung back and forth, writing out answers in blue pencil. There was no way I could tell whether the basket moved automatically or if Sugiharto wrote. Guangong’s replies looked like the scrawls of a one-year-old, so I had to depend entirely on Sugiharto for interpretations. He said that he channeled the deities and could hear their voices:

“Was my present job good for me?”

“Yes. Focus on what you have to do and do not fritter energy pursuing other initiatives.”

Every question triggered vigorous writing. Later when I asked Sugiharto whether evil spirits could possess the jailangkungs, he seemed genuinely baffled. He had never thought of such a possibility.

Research into the world distribution of Chinese spirit-basket divination reveals a trail that has run cold. Divination using the ngoc co [beaked basket] was central to Vietnamese Cao Dai spiritism, but the practice is proscribed under communism.⁴⁰ Spirit-basket divination must have been popular in Malaysia to be featured in a fictional story about a Hakka woman living near Kuala Lumpur in the 1940s,⁴¹ but Jean DeBernardi, who researched spirit mediumship in Penang in the 1970s, wrote that she had heard of sieve and spirit-basket divination but never observed a séance.⁴² Malaysian independent researcher Lee Eng Kew [李永球] told me that he witnessed the game only once. As a child, he watched his mother and another woman hold a basket that moved on its own to rap upon a stool.⁴³ The situation repeats itself in Singapore. There is an account of a 1949s Datok Bakol [Deity of the Basket] practice in a popular magazine.⁴⁴ Elliot, who researched spirit mediumship in Singapore in the 1950s, described basket rapping as a moribund practice of illiterate folk.⁴⁵ A 1975–1976 research project on a Singapore Peranakan temple revealed a large basket dressed in a cloak on an altar table. The male medium who had channeled the Datuk Bakol had passed away before the time of the research.⁴⁶

Apparently, in Chinese divination, the clumsy spirit basket has been replaced by the handier fuji triforked branch, or a pen held in the hand of a medium.⁴⁷ Even in China it appears that spirit-basket divination is a dying tradition. Lin writes of spirit-basket practices at seventeen sites in China, but he provides no data or ethnography to support this proposition.⁴⁸ Robert Weller, who researches Chinese popular religion in Taiwan, said he had never seen spirit-basket divination.⁴⁹ The only contemporary report on spirit-basket divination outside Indonesia comes from Hong Kong.⁵⁰

This evidence proposes jailangkung as a cultural treasure largely lost to the world. Archaeology of the Indonesian everyday reveals that the survival of spirit-basket divination owes to its having melded into Malay magic. However, ancient beliefs of magic are now under threat.

Nineteenth-century reports of Nini Thowong and lukah gilo comprise sightings of well-developed indigenized practices, provide proof that the jailangkung prototype must have come to the Malayo-Indonesian region earlier, allowing for involution over time.⁵¹ The contemporary “thick” descriptions of jailangkung in this essay show that the practice is very much alive in the Indonesian everyday. However, jailangkung and other folk beliefs are increasingly being rationalized by notions of modernism and religious fundamentalism. The attitude is reflected in local scholarship that present Nini Thowong and lukah gilo as pre-Islamic practices now belonging to the secular world of tourism and village sports.⁵² The academic silence on jailangkung transforms the Chinese tradition into an Other that can be ignored. This modus operandi—ignoring that which may not be countenanced—was how newly independent Indonesia repudiated indigenous animism for modernist monotheism.

Only six institutionalized religions are constitutionally recognized: Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. Denied is the real belief in magic embedded in the indigenous psyche and manifested in the Malayo-Indonesian everyday as “culture-bound” behavior such as latah (a startle reaction) and amok (an unexplained rampage), concepts that have entered Western psychiatric vocabulary.⁵³

The rich variety of indigenous faiths has been bundled into one category: Kepercayaan Terhadap Tuhan Yang Maha Esa [Beliefs in the Almighty God, Kepercayaan for short],⁵⁴ a misnomer since animist pantheons include good and bad spirits. Kepercayaan believers had until recently been forced to leave blank the space for religion on their national identity card (KTP).⁵⁵ Only on November 7, 2017, did the Constitutional Court rule that “Kepercayaan” may be recorded as a religion in the KTP.

The Indonesian Ulama Council (MUI), the nation’s highest Muslim authority, has challenged this ruling on the basis that beliefs do not constitute religion.⁵⁶ Whereas members of a Kejawen [Javanese indigenous faith] group I worked with from May to December 2010 in Cilacap proudly declared their faith as preceding any imported religion,⁵⁷ Anton Tabah Digdoyo, a member of the Law Commission of MUI, spoke of the constitutional recognition of Kepercayaan as a return to the Stone Age in an era of science.⁵⁸

This archaeology into the materiality of spirit-basket divination in the Indonesian everyday reveals how Western concepts, including nationalism and education, have been adopted, but the colonial dismissal of the native as primitive is challenged by a penchant for scientism that would dismiss indigenous animism as naive. An increasing influential theocracy of Middle-Eastern ideation is bent on imposing an austere school of Islam. The new sanitization of indigenous traditions can only result in an impoverishment of the cultural world because spirit-basket divination, which dates to the southern Chinese Liu-Song [刘宋; 420–479 CE] dynasty, would have been lost to the world had not jailangkung found a home in Indonesian folklore.