Gunung Agung

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On Bali the direction that matters most is not north. It is kaja — toward the mountain — and it will not hold still on any compass. In the east of the island it runs toward one summit; on the far coast it swings to face another; everywhere it means uphill, upstream, toward the high ground where the gods and the ancestors keep their seats. A sleeping person lays the head kaja. A walled house-compound sets its family shrine in the kaja corner. A temple keeps its holiest pavilion at the kaja end of its highest courtyard. Against kaja stands kelod, seaward and downhill, the direction of the sea and of the powers that dwell close to the ground. Between the two the whole island reads as a single body turned toward its own navel — and in the east of Bali that navel is a volcano a little over three thousand meters high, its head most days lost in cloud.

Gunung Agung at sunset, photographed from Gunung Rinjani on Lombok. Rosino, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

The Great Mountain and how it enters the record

The name says the whole of it. Agung is Balinese for great, high, supreme — the word used of a paramount lord and of the highest sanctuary in a temple — so Gunung Agung is simply the Great Mountain, the one that needs no further name. At about 3,031 meters (9,944 feet) it is the highest point in Bali, an andesitic stratovolcano rising over Karangasem regency in the island’s eastern arm, and the Global Volcanism Program of the Smithsonian Institution lists it, under number 264020, as an active volcano. Its summit stands near 8°20′ south and 115°30′ east, and from the sea its cone dominates the eastern skyline the way a cathedral dominates a plain — a single mass with a broad, ragged crater, visible from most of the island on a clear morning and from the neighboring island of Lombok across the strait.

The rock itself tells part of the story. The lava of the great 1963 eruption was analyzed as andesite, some of it mafic enough to be called basaltic andesite — the sticky, gas-charged magma of the volcanoes that ring the Pacific and Indian oceans, the kind that does not flow gently but stands, plugs, and then explodes. Agung sits on the Sunda arc, where the Indo-Australian plate grinds beneath the Eurasian and drives a chain of such peaks the length of the archipelago; its neighbor to the northwest, Gunung Batur, holds a caldera and a crater lake, and the two mountains are named together in the island’s sacred geography as they are in its geology. What the summit offers the eye is a broad, deep crater and a long history of dormancy broken by paroxysm — a mountain that keeps its counsel for lifetimes and then, on a scale of decades, remakes the land at its feet.

That is the mountain the record measures. The mountain the Balinese live beneath is the same rock understood as something more: the local Mahameru, the reflex on earth of Mount Meru, the golden world-axis of Hindu-Buddhist cosmology around which the ordered universe is arranged. In the tradition’s own account the island once had no such center, and so a fragment of Meru was carried across from Java and set down in the east of Bali, that the gods might have a footing on the island and the land a point to turn on. Gunung Agung is that fragment: not a symbol of the world-axis but the world-axis made local, the place where the vertical line joining the underworld, the middle world of the living, and the heaven of the gods comes to ground. Britannica records the plain fact that it is the island’s sacred mountain and highest peak; the lontar, the palm-leaf manuscripts, carry the cosmology in which that fact is set.

Between the two accounts lies a documented history. The temple order of Bali — and with it the articulation of Agung as Meru — is traced by scholars to the Warmadewa dynasty of the first millennium and, decisively, to the fourteenth-century conquest of the island by Majapahit, the great Hindu-Javanese empire of eastern Java. When Majapahit fell to the rising Islamic states of the coast, around 1527, its priests, courtiers, poets, and gods crossed the strait to Bali, and the island became the last redoubt of a Hindu-Javanese court culture that had ended on Java itself. It is within that inheritance — Old Javanese letters, Shaivite theology, a Meru cosmology carried by an exiled aristocracy — that Gunung Agung is named the seat of the divine. The god enthroned on its summit is Mahadewa, the great god, a manifestation of Ida Sang Hyang Widhi in the form of Shiva; the mountain is his stana, his seat, and the summit is spoken of as the throne not only of the high gods but of the deified kings and ancestors gathered about them. What the Bali Aga, the pre-Majapahit “original” Balinese of the mountain villages, would add is that the peak was already holy before any of this — that the reverence for the high ground is older than the Hindu names laid over it, a continuity the terraced platforms beneath many Balinese sanctuaries seem to confirm.

The still center: axis, watershed, and the balance of opposites

Within this world Gunung Agung is the still center — the puser jagat, the navel of the world, the point about which Balinese space and value are ordered. Everything is measured from it. Purity increases toward the summit and diminishes toward the sea; height on the mountain is height in a moral and ritual sense as much as a physical one. This is the work the kaja/kelod axis does. Kaja, mountainward, is the pole of utama, the high and pure, the direction of the gods and the ancestors and of clear water at its source; kelod, seaward, is the pole of nista, the low, the direction of the sea and of the buta-kala, the chthonic forces that gather at the island’s edge. A Balinese does not need a map to know which way is holy. The body turned in prayer, the corpse laid out for cremation, the shrine raised in a rice field — all take their bearing from the peak, so that to orient toward Agung is a devotional act woven into the plainest gestures of ordinary life.

It would be a mistake, and a familiar one, to read this as a map of good against evil with the mountain as heaven and the sea as hell. The governing logic is rwa-bhineda, the balance of complementary opposites: the mountain and the sea, the high gods and the ground-dwelling powers, purity and pollution, are two halves of one sacred whole, held in tension rather than set at war. The buta-kala of the seaward pole are not to be destroyed but balanced, fed, kept in their place; the green queen of the southern ocean, Nyai Loro Kidul, and the fanged lord of the offshore island, Ratu Gede Mecaling, belong to the kelod end of this order and are honored there, not exorcised. The same balance runs through the island’s great dramas — the encounter of the widow-queen Rangda and the beast-king Barong resolves in no victory, because neither pole is meant to win. Agung is the utama pole of that whole, the highest and purest point, but it is a pole in a system, not a throne over a defeated adversary.

The mountain is also, in the most literal sense, the source of life on its side of the island. Rain and cloud gather on its flanks; water descends through the high crater lakes and springs and down the rivers of the east to feed the subak, the cooperative rice-irrigation society that terraces the Balinese hillsides and that UNESCO inscribed in 2012 as a living cultural landscape. The water that leaves the mountain as pure descends through a chain of temples and weirs, each community drawing and returning it in turn, until it reaches the sea — the whole hydrology sacred at its source and administered as worship. The goddess of the crater lakes, Dewi Danu, presides over that descent; the holy spring of Tirta Empul, where the Balinese bathe for melukat, purification, is one of the places where the mountain’s water surfaces as blessing. To live below Agung is to drink the mountain, plant by its water, and return to it at death.

For the mountain is also the destination of the dead. The deified ancestors are gathered at the summit; the rites of cremation, ngaben, release the soul toward the high ground; and the greatest of all Balinese ceremonies is performed on Agung’s own flank. This is the Eka Dasa Rudra, the once-a-century purification of the whole island, held at Pura Besakih, the mother temple terraced up the mountain’s southwest slope. It is the supreme expression of Agung’s role as the point where the island’s fate is negotiated with the unseen: a sacrifice aimed at rebalancing the cosmos and pacifying the eleven Rudra, the terrible forms of Shiva, so that the world may be renewed. Its specifics are house- and desa adat-variable and closed to public description; what belongs to the record is only its scale and its place — the largest rite the religion knows, performed at the seat of the gods on the mountain that is their throne. The mother temple’s architecture, its shrines and its guardian naga, belong to its own account; here it is enough that the greatest ceremony of the island is offered on the slope of Gunung Agung, because that is where the island touches the sky.

Morning below the Great Mountain: rice paddies at Muncan village, Karangasem, on the lower slopes of Gunung Agung, whose descending waters feed the subak. Tri Arya Dhyana K., via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nineteen sixty-three, and the mountain read as meaning

For a hundred and twenty years the mountain kept quiet. The last confirmed eruption before the modern era had come in 1843, recorded by the Swiss naturalist Heinrich Zollinger; afterward only faint solfataric breathing was noted, in 1908, 1915, and 1917, and a generation grew up beneath a summit that did nothing but hold cloud. Then, in February 1963, the Great Mountain woke. The Global Volcanism Program dates the first explosions to 18 February; on 24 February lava began to move, creeping some seven kilometers over the following weeks. On 17 March 1963 the mountain reached its paroxysm — a VEI-5 eruption that drove ash and incandescent debris eight to ten kilometers into the sky, sent pyroclastic flows down the ravines, and loosed lahars that ran the valleys toward the sea. The villages of eastern Bali burned and were buried. The documented toll runs on the order of 1,100 to 1,500 killed directly by the flows, with roughly two hundred more from the lahars, and a second deadly eruption on 16 May added perhaps two hundred again — a total best given as a range, on the order of 1,100 to 1,700 or more, not a false-precise single figure. It was the deadliest volcanic disaster in Indonesia’s modern history.

What fixed the eruption in Balinese memory was its timing. The paroxysm of 17 March fell while the Eka Dasa Rudra — the once-a-century purification — was under way at Pura Besakih, on the mountain’s own flank, the priests in the middle of the greatest rite their religion knows. And the mother temple was spared — a sparing whose meaning belongs to its own account. Across Bali the escape was read as portent — the mountain speaking, the gods refusing or accepting an offering, the world’s balance shaken and shown. That reading is the Balinese reception of the event, and it is reported here as such, not adopted in the encyclopedia’s own voice: the eruption was a documented geological catastrophe that killed on the order of a thousand and more people, and it is not the place of a record to call a volcano a judgment.

The tradition’s own retrospect is more careful than the outside legend: the 1963 rite came to be regarded by many Balinese as astrologically premature, and the Eka Dasa Rudra was performed again, correctly, in 1979 — a reckoning whose fuller account belongs with Pura Besakih, where the rite is held. The disaster of 1963, then, is held within Balinese memory as both an omen and an error — a rite offered out of its season, and a mountain that answered.

The eruption’s shadow reached beyond the villages it buried. In 1965 and 1966, in the anti-communist mass killings that followed the fall of Sukarno’s order, Bali was among the hardest-hit of Indonesia’s provinces, and in Balinese memory the two traumas — the mountain’s fire and the killing — lie close together, a darkness over the same few years. It is named here gravely and briefly, as a fact that belongs to the mountain’s decade, and left to the histories that treat it whole.

Agung has spoken since. Late in 2017, after more than half a century’s quiet, the mountain stirred again: a phreatic eruption on 21 November 2017 threw an ash column to about 3,842 meters above sea level, and magmatic eruptions followed on 25 and 26 November, rated VEI 3 in the documented account of the 2017–2019 crisis, with further activity through 2018 and into 2019 before the series was declared ended in June 2019. More than a hundred thousand people — by some counts over 120,000 — were ordered out of the danger zone around the volcano, and the ash repeatedly closed Ngurah Rai International Airport, stranding tens of thousands of travelers at the height of the tourist season. The episode laid bare a friction the “island of the gods” brand prefers to keep out of the brochure: the mountain that is a hazard to be managed by a mass-tourism economy is, to the Balinese living beneath it, tenget — charged, sacred, dangerous in a sense no alert level measures. When the volcano threatened, some in the villages spoke less of evacuation routes than of what the mountain might be asking.

That gap is the whole of the modern reception. The peak is sold as an adventure — a pre-dawn trek to the summit for the sunrise, a photograph above the cloud — and the trade treats the climb as it treats any high viewpoint, a thing to be booked and bagged. The tradition holds the summit as the throne of Mahadewa and the gathering-place of the ancestors, and there are seasons and stretches of the mountain where the Balinese do not go, because some ground is not for standing on. Both are true at once, and they do not resolve. The mountain that the map records at 3,031 meters, and the mountain toward which a sleeping child’s head is turned each night in ten thousand houses across the island, are the same rock; the first can be climbed before breakfast, and the second is the direction of the holy. What the compass on Bali points at is not a summit but a seat, and the needle has not moved in a very long time.

→ Related: Besakih Temple · The Balinese · The Bali Aga · The Majapahit · Tirta Empul · Tanah Lot · Dewi Danu · Rangda · Barong · Nyai Loro Kidul · Ratu Gede Mecaling