NOTES
ON DEATH AND CREMATION
A
corpse that is to be kept mummified within the house and
not buried before cremation remains in the pavilion destined
for it (bale layon), where it is taken care of by female
relatives (in old times by a family of slaves), who attend
to the collection of the body liquids that flow from the
coffin through a bamboo tube into a Chinese porcelain bowl,
often a priceless piece of Sung celadon, a family heirloom,
to be buried after a sprinkling of holy water.
In old times the slaves appointed to the gruesome task of
caring for a noble corpse were regarded as already dead
and were treated as such; nobody could talk to them and
they could not be denied anything. After the cremation they
were set free, but, being " dead," they could
not remain in the village. This strange practice, found
also among other Indonesians, could be explained as being
in the same spirit that caused widow suicides, a symbolical
sacrifice of a servant or a slave to accompany his master
in the hereafter.
The uncleanliness that emanates from a dead body demands
that such preserved corpses be taken outside the village
during festivals. Likewise, a carcass of an animal must
not remain in the open and must be buried.
The
great cremation towers used to convey the corpses to the
place of burning are called ordinarily wadah, but that of
a nobleman, which has many roofs, receives the more impressive
name of bade. In detail the tower consists of a strong bamboo
platform ( senan ) by which it is carried by hordes of men;
then comes the " base " (dasar), which represents
the underworld (bhur). Next come the mountains (gegununggan
) ; three receding platforms that represent our visible
world ( bhuwa ) , ornamented with bunches of paper flowers
and leaves ( kekayon ) , the forests. Then comes the bale
balean, the pavilion for the bodies " not yet in heaven,
no longer on this earth "; the whole topped by the
number of roofs or " heavens " (tumpang) allotted
to the family by caste. These are symbolical of the celestial
world (swah).
High
priests become merged at death with the sun, and their cremation
bier takes the form of a padmasana, a throne for the sun-god.
The wadah or bade and the padmasana are, like the stone
tjandis, the ancient burial monuments of kings, the modern
temple gates and stone sunthrones, symbols of the three
worlds (tribhuwana) that constitute the Balinese universe:
the upper, intermediate, and lower worlds.
The great serpent, the naga banda, used at cremations of
the descendants of the Dewa Agung, the highest aristocracy
in the land, is shot and " killed " by the priest
to serve as a vehicle for the royal soul in its flight into
heaven. The naga banda ceremony commemorates the legend
of the strife between the ruling class and the Brahmanic
priests, when the Dewa Agung's life was saved by a priest
who killed a serpent about to crush him.
In Den Pasar we had occasion to witness the great cremation
of the old king of Djerokuta, killed in the mass suicide
of rqo6. His body was burned then, hurriedly and almost
without ceremony, together with other victims of the war,
and it was not until the 12th of February 1934, twenty-eight
years later, that his descendants could afford to hold a
great ceremonial cremation befitting his rank. He was entitled
to use the serpent by a special decree of the Dewa Agung,
and the town was aroused because for over thirty years the
event of a naga banda had not taken place in Den Pasar.
The cremation rites were performed through an effigy, but
there were well over a hundred corpses burned on that afternoon
because other relatives of the Radja and many of his former
subjects joined in the cremation to accompany their prince.
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