mos that combine themes of reproduction and destruction.
Among the Ngaju of Kalimantan (Borneo) creation begins
when the mountain abodes of the two supreme deities clash
repeatedly, bringing forth the upperworld and underworld
and various of its parts; in the next phase of the creation,
male and female hornbills of the two deities, perched on the
tree of life, renew the struggle, destroying the tree but in the
process creating the first man and woman. Among the Toraja
of Sulawesi the universe originates from the marriage of
heaven and earth: Heaven lies upon the broad earth and, as
they separate, the land is revealed and all their divine chil-
dren, including the sun and moon, come forth. Among the
Mambai of east Timor, a formless hermaphroditic being
molds and shelters Mother Earth and Father Heaven; they
separate and the pregnant Mother Earth bears the first
mountain, known as the Great Father. Heaven descends
upon Earth again and from their union are born the first
trees and rocks and the first men and women. At each birth,
the waters of the world increase, until Father Heaven eventu-
ally abandons Mother Earth, who is left to decompose and
disintegrate.
Ideas of complementary duality are reflected in ideas
about the principal divinity, who is often conceived of as a
paired being (Mahatala/Jata among the Ngaju, Amawolo/
Amarawi among the Sumbanese, or Nian Tana/Lero Wulan
among the Ata Tana Ai); in ideas about categories of spirits,
heroes, and other ancestral figures; in ideas about the division
of sacred space: upperworld and underworld, upstream and
downstream, mountainward and seaward, or inside and out-
side; and above all, in ideas about classes of persons and the
order of participants in the performance of rituals.
Major celebrations based on this complementarity can
become a form of ritual combat that reenacts the reproduc-
tive antagonisms of creation. To choose but one example, the
Savunese of eastern Indonesia gather on the day preceding
the night of a full moon to form male and female groups ac-
cording to lineage affiliation; they position themselves at the
upper and lower end of a sacred enclosure on the top of a
particular hill. There they engage in ceremonial cockfighting
that is timed to reach its crescendo precisely at noon. This
high cosmological drama is based on a series of complemen-
tary oppositions: the conjunction of male and female, the
union of the upper and lower divisions of the cosmos, and
the antagonism of spirits of the mountain and sea, all of
which are timed to climax when the sun is at its zenith and
the moon at its fullest.
A significant feature of the traditional religions of the
region is the preservation of sacred knowledge through spe-
cial forms of ritual language that are characterized by the per-
vasive use of parallelism. Parallelism is a form of dual phrase-
ology and, in its most canonical form, results in a strict
dyadic expression of all ritual statements. The following
lines, excerpted from a traditional Rotinese mortuary chant,
give an idea of the parallelism of such ritual poetry:
Delo Iuk has diedSo plant an areca nut at her foot
And Soma Lopo has perished
So plant a coconut at her head
Let the coconut grow fruit for her head
And let the areca nut grow flowerstalks for her feet.
This parallelism, which is a common feature of oral composi-
tion, resembles in form the parallelism that is to be found
in the sacred literatures of other peoples of the world. (Both
the Psalms and the Popol Vuh of the Quiche Maya provide
good examples of such canonical parallelism.) Myths of the
Batak, of the people of Nias, of the Ngaju, Kendayan, and
Mualang Dayak, of the Toraja, and of a majority of the peo-
ples of eastern Indonesia adhere to relatively strict forms of
parallelism, whereas the myths of other traditional religious
adherents follow freer forms of parallel compositions. In all
cases, a form of duality is an essential part of the very process
of composition.
Conceptions of complementary dualism continue to
pervade even those societies that have adopted Hinduism,
Islam, or Christianity. Balinese society is replete with dual-
ism. The opposition between Barong and Rangda, which
forms one of Bali’s best-known dramatic temple perfor-
mances, is a particularly striking example of complementary
dualism. The Javanese wayang, or shadow theater, is similarly
based on forms of dual opposition. Although the initial basis
for many of the most important dramas was Indian, the Java-
nese have developed and extended these dramas to suit local
conceptions. In the Bha ̄ratayuddha (in the Javanese version
of the Hindu epic Maha ̄bha ̄rata), the Pandawa heroes defeat
and destroy their cousins, the Korawa. Yet according to the
Korawasrama, an important Javanese text for which there ex-
ists no Sanskrit equivalent, the Korawa are resuscitated to
continue their struggle with Pandawa for, as the text asserts:
“How could the world be well ordered if the Korawa and
Pandawa no longer existed? Are they not the content of the
world?”
BELIEF IN THE IMMANENCE OF LIFE. Virtually all of the tra-
ditional religions of the region are predicated on a belief in
the immanence of life. In the literature this concept is often
simplistically referred to as “animism.” In traditional my-
thologies, creation did not occur ex nihilo: The cosmos was
violently quickened into life and all that exists is thus part
of a living cosmic whole. Life is evident everywhere in a mul-
titude of forms whose manifestation can be complex, par-
ticularistic, but also transitory. There are many different
classes of beings, including humans, whose origin may be
identified in some mythological account but the system is in-
herently open and other classes of beings may be recognized
whose origin is unknown, even though their manifestation
is evident. In many of the traditional religions there is no sin-
gle origin of humankind. Commonly, humans either de-
scended from a heavenly sphere or emerged from earth or
sea; yet, often, the origin of some categories of humans is left
unexplained. The openness of these systems does not neces-
sarily involve indifference so much as a recognition of the
limitations of human knowledge.SOUTHEAST ASIAN RELIGIONS: INSULAR CULTURES 8649