RITES
AND FESTIVALS
SOCIETY
AND RELIGION
The
conglomerate of religious principles manifests itself elaborate
cults of ancestors and deities of fertility, of fire, water
earth, and sun, of the mountains and the sea, of gods and
devils They are the backbone of the Balinese religion, which
is generally referred to as Hinduism, but which is in reality
too close to the earth, too animistic, to be taken as the
same esoteric religion as that of the Hindus of India.
Since
the earliest time,, when Bali was under the rule of the
great empires that flourished in the golden era of Hinduistic
Java, the various forms of Javanese religion became in turn
the religions of Bali, from the Mahayanic Buddhism of the
Sailendras in the seventh century the orthodox Sivaism of
the ninth, to the demoniac practices c the Tantric sects
of the eleventh century. In later times Bali adopted the
modified, highly Javanized religion of Madjapahit, when
Hinduism had become strongly tinged with native Indonesian
ideas.
Each
of these epochs left a deep mark in Balinese ritual; to
the native Balinese cults of ancestors, of the elements,
and of evil spirits, were added the sacrifices of blood
and the practices of black magic of the Tantric Buddhists,
the Vishnuite cult of the underworld, Brahmanic juggling
of mystic words and cabalistic syllables, the cremation
of the dead, and so forth, all, however, absorbed and transformed
to the point of losing their identity, to suit the temper
of the Balinese.
It is
true that Hindu gods and practices are constantly in evidence,
but their aspect and significance differ in Bali to such
an extent from orthodox Hinduism that we find the primitive
beliefs of a people who never lost contact with the soil
rising supreme over the religious philosophy and practices
of their masters. Like the Catholicism of some American
Indians, Hinduism was simply an addition to the native religion,
more as a decoy to keep the masters content, a strong but
superficial veneer of decorative Hinduistic practices over
the deeply rooted animism of the Balinese natives.
Religion
is to the Balinese both race and nationality; a Balinese
loses automatically the right to be called a Balinese if
he changes his faith or if a Balinese woman marries a Mohammedan,
a Chinese, or a Christian, because she takes leave forever
of her own family gods when she moves into her husband's
home and instead worships his gods from that time on. The
religious sages, the Brahmanic priests, remain outsiders,
aloof from the ordinary Balinese, who have their own priests,
simple people whose office is to guard and sweep the community
temples, in which there are no idols, no images of gods
to be worshipped.
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