Barong

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In the temple at the seaward end of the village, in the half-dark of a storeroom hung with old cloth, a face waits. It is a broad lion’s face of tooled leather gilded with gold leaf, its bulging eyes fixed open, its jaw hinged and set with teeth, its whole long body sewn over with fur and with hundreds of small pieces of mirror-glass that hold no light while nothing moves. From the mask hangs a beard of human hair, and threaded through the hair are frangipani flowers, changed when they wilt. This is not stored the way a costume is stored. It is fed. Offerings are set before it; holy water and incense keep it, and on the days appointed it is woken with prayer before a single dancer is allowed to climb inside. Only then does the thing move — and what moves is not leather and mirror but Banaspati Raja, king of the wilds, the guardian of the place.

The name and the shapes it wears

The word barong is old and its root is argued. The most common frame-internal derivation traces it to bahruang, the term that survives in modern Indonesian as beruang, “bear” — so that the name may once have meant something like the great shaggy beast of the forest, the wilderness-creature made guardian. The Wikipedia account of the Barong records this etymology while noting it is not settled, and the uncertainty is fitting: the Barong is less one animal than the idea of the protecting beast, a wildness turned toward the village rather than against it.

Inside that idea the tradition names a spirit. The Barong is animated by Banaspati Raja, glossed as the king of the forest or lord of the wilds, and he is not a stranger to the people he guards. In the reckoning the Balinese call the kanda mpat, the four siblings, every person is born in the company of four unseen companions who arrive with the child and keep near through the whole of a life; Banaspati Raja is counted among these, the fourth brother, a protector as close as the body. This is the first thing the mask conceals and the thing outsiders most often miss. The Barong is not a symbol of protection. He is a protector, a kinsman who can be met face to face, and the mask is the body he is invited to wear.

His most familiar shape is the Barong Ket, the shaggy lion-like guardian worked by two men — one at the head and forelegs, one bent under the long body at the haunches and tail — so that the beast moves with a single heavy, skittish, snapping life, the jaw clacking, the mirrors throwing the sun. The face is a made thing rather than a copied one: the artisans build it from the mane and majesty of the lion, the fangs of the tiger, the heavy brow of the ox, until it is every powerful creature at once and none of them exactly. The crown is gilded leather; the mane and the body-fur are layered from fiber and hair; the whole animal shivers when it walks. Of all the sacred objects a village keeps, the Barong Ket is among the most laborious to make and among the most treasured, and its making is not finished when the carving is done. The mask must be brought to life by ceremony before it holds any power at all.

But the guardian wears more than one body, and the forms belong to different animals and different places. There is the Barong Bangkal, the boar — an old tusked beast, the male pig sometimes called Sang Bawi in the tradition — paraded through the lanes on the high holy days of Galungan and Kuningan. There is the Barong Macan, the tiger, its hide sewn to a tiger’s coat and its figure drawn from the animal stories of the island; the tiger’s spirit is named Sang Mong. There is the Barong Asu, the dog, held especially sacred at Pacung in the regency of Tabanan, where its procession is a grave and careful thing. There is the rare Barong Gajah, the elephant, its form recalling the elephant-lore that reached Bali from India along with so much of its sacred imagination. And there is the strangest member of the family, the Barong Landung, which wears no animal body at all: a towering pair of human puppet-figures, the dark broad-featured male Jero Gede and the pale slender female Jero Luh, carried through the village by dancers hidden within them rather than worked from inside a beast costume by two. That the same word gathers a lion, a boar, a tiger, a dog, an elephant, and a pair of giants tells its own truth about the Barong: he is not a species but a station, the guardian office that the wildness of the world can be asked to fill.

A Barong performed in Bali, the beast worked in gilded leather and set with hundreds of small mirrors. Michaelparikesit, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Barong reaches the outside record chiefly through his one great adversary, and her descent runs off the island. Rangda comes down from the Javanese narrative of Calon Arang, a tale carried in Old Javanese and Balinese and set in the eleventh-century reign of King Airlangga. In the story the widow of the village of Girah — rangda is simply “widow” in Old Javanese — calls destruction down upon the land, and a flood and then an incurable plague sweep the kingdom until the sage Mpu Bharada, working by patience rather than force, undoes her. Scholarly consensus holds that this Hindu-Buddhist material entered Balinese ritual life through the long Majapahit imprint on the island, the courtly Javanese world that took root across the strait as Majapahit itself dissolved around 1527. Whether that imprint arrived by the Majapahit expedition of 1343, read by some as a conquest, or by the slower work of migration and cultural influence, is contested among historians, and the ethnography that first carried the Barong to a foreign readership — Miguel Covarrubias in Island of Bali (1937) — was written before those questions had been sorted. What is not in doubt is the shape the material took once it was Balinese: the widow of Girah became Rangda, and Rangda was given a beast to meet.

What the guardian keeps

Within the Balinese cosmos the Barong is the order-keeping power of the village made present — the incarnation of health, of fertility, of the built and cultivated and well, the guardian who drives sickness and misfortune out through the gates. He works this along the axis on which the whole island is laid: kaja, toward the mountain, the direction of the pure and the ancestral and the high; kelod, toward the sea, the direction of the wild and the fearsome and the dissolving. The Barong holds the mountainward pole, the side of protection and cultivation, and it is from that pole that he faces what comes up from the other.

The mask through which he does this is not a prop but a pratima — a consecrated vessel into which divine power is invited and then renewed, offering by offering, so long as the community keeps it. An unconsecrated Barong is craft; a consecrated one is a resident, charged and sacred, housed most often in the pura dalem, the temple of the seaward, death-associated pole, and brought out for the odalan, the temple-anniversary festival, and for the mecaru, the purification rites that cleanse the settlement of malign influence. Where the power sits, the tradition can say with unusual precision. According to Britannica, a beard of human hair decorated with frangipani flowers hangs from the mask, “in which the magic power of Barong is thought to reside” — so that the most potent part of the guardian is not the gold or the mirrors or the great carved face but the hair and the flowers threaded through it, the part that most resembles a living body. To make the mask, wake it, feed it, and house it is to keep a member of the community alive; and this is why the two men who animate it are described less as wearing a costume than as lending their bodies to something that is already present.

Everything turns, in the end, on the encounter for which the Barong is famous, and it is the part most reliably misread. He is the eternal counterpart of Rangda, and in the drama drawn from the Calon Arang tale the two come together — the shaggy beast-king and the fanged widow with her lolling flame-red tongue — and they contend, and the contention does not end. Neither is destroyed. This is the crux the tradition insists upon and the poster erases. Their meeting is rwa bhineda, the two-that-are-different: the doctrine that order and disorder, the protective and the transformative, the cultivated and the wild, are two halves of one sacred whole, each real, each necessary, each holding the world in place precisely by not consuming the other. The Barong is not goodness beating an evil Rangda. He is the counter-weight to a power that must exist for the cosmos to be whole — the anchor of the mountainward good against the seaward force that is fearsome but not, in this world, the devil. A balance in which one pole simply won would be no balance at all, and the dance-drama knows it: it characteristically ends not in a final victory but in a restored and unstable equilibrium, the two powers held in tension so that life, which needs both, can go on. What looks from the front row like a fight is nearer to a marriage of forces, permanent because it is never resolved.

Behind both poles stands a further truth the theology holds and the reception often flattens. The Barong and Rangda are not two rival gods but two faces of a single divine order that, in the developed Balinese account, emanates in the end from one formless godhead — the One whose full name and whose explicit foregrounding as a single supreme God belong to the story told under Sang Hyang Widhi, and which twentieth-century reform (the Parisada council of 1959; state recognition of the faith around 1962) brought to the front of Balinese Hinduism’s self-description. Set in that frame the guardian is not a small local charm but one working face of a coherent sacred world, and his contest with Rangda is that world keeping its own poise.

Barong Landung, the paired giant male and female puppet-figures Jero Gede and Jero Luh, carried in procession. Alain J Secretan (ASITRAC), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The drama, the camera, and the morning show

The Barong-and-Rangda encounter is the most internationally famous thing performed in Bali, and the distance between its sacred and its staged forms is itself part of its modern history. In its fullest sacred version — the Calonarang drama tied to a temple ceremony — the play builds toward the passage that has drawn ethnographers and cameras for the better part of a century: the kris sequence, in which male dancers, fallen under trance, turn their wavy daggers inward against their own chests and are not wounded, held unharmed within the frame of the drama under the Barong’s protecting power. Because it involves genuine trance and consecrated objects, this segment is treated as sacred, closed, and grave, bounded by the ritual that opens and closes it and by the priests who guard it. It is described here at the distance of the public record and no further; it is not a technique, and it is not set down as anything a person might do.

The record of it is nonetheless long. In the late 1930s Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson filmed and photographed the trance and the kris-dance in Bali, publishing the results in Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942), one of the founding works of visual anthropology; Covarrubias had described the Barong and the Calon Arang play a few years earlier. That same era saw the Barong become a fixture of tourism. From the 1930s onward a shortened, legible version of the drama was shaped for visitors, and its best-known home became the village of Batubulan, in the regency of Gianyar, where troupes with a full gamelan stage the tale most mornings — the beast, the widow, the entranced daggers, the whole arc run through in about an hour — as a ticketed daytime show distinct from any temple rite, even where the mask itself remains a consecrated object.

The doubleness is genuine and worth naming on both sides. The daily performance has kept carvers carving and gamelan groups playing and the repertoire alive and paying through generations that might otherwise have let it thin. It has also compressed a bounded sacred encounter into a scheduled attraction, and — worse than compressing it — the marketing gloss that sells it as a battle of good against evil in which good prevails actively misdescribes the balance the drama exists to hold. Even the standard reference literature carries the residue: the Wikipedia article on the Barong dance still frames the play as “the eternal battle between good and evil” ending in “Barong’s victory,” which is the tourist reading pressed back onto the rite. Balinese practice itself keeps the registers apart. The consecrated beast of the desa adat, the customary village, danced to discharge a temple obligation on its own holy day, is not the same thing as the show mask danced for guests at ten in the morning, and communities know the difference and maintain it, often keeping their charged masks out of visitors’ sight altogether.

Scholarship has spent the decades since correcting the earlier record’s own distortions. The classic accounts, for all their value, reached repeatedly for the vocabulary of “witch,” “demon,” and “black magic,” pressing a grid of good and evil onto a cosmology built on the balance of opposites, so that the very act of describing the pair tended to falsify it. That imposition has since been criticized, and the correction turns on returning to Balinese categories — to rwa bhineda, and to the distinction Fred Eiseman drew between sekala and niskala, the seen and the unseen, the world available to the senses and the charged world of spirit that runs beneath it. Read through those categories the Barong is not superstition dressed as spectacle. He is the seen body of an unseen guardian, and his meeting with Rangda is theology performed, not melodrama. In 2015 the wider tradition to which the dance belongs was recognized when three genres of Balinese dance were inscribed on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage — an acknowledgment, from outside, of what the villages had never stopped treating as sacred.

For the Barong remains a living guardian, present tense and unfinished. Villages still carve, consecrate, house, and process their Barong; households still receive the smaller beasts at their gates on the festival days, when the boar and the tiger are danced door to door along the lanes to sweep sickness from the paths; the great masks are still fed in the temples and woken before they walk. To stand in a Balinese village is to live a short distance from a beast who is also a fourth brother and also a god, kept under cloth until the day he is needed. The wider story of how the world came to see this island, and of the living people beneath the image, belongs with the Balinese. What belongs to the Barong alone is the particular shape of his guardianship — that he does not conquer the power he meets, and was never meant to. He holds the line the world is built along, and holds it by not crossing it, the frangipani wilting in his beard and being changed, the mirrors dark until two men lift him and he throws back the light.

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