Ring of Fire

by Lawrence Blair; Lorne Blaire

  In many respects Toraja women are the equals of men. Sex is encouraged from an early age, and holds no shame for them. Much experimentation has usually taken place before marriage – which then tends to be very long-lived, though it, too, may be dissolved when either party wishes it. The Toraja children refer to all men as ‘Father’ and all women as ‘Mother’ – and their blood parents are not necessarily their favourites. All children appeared to be treated by all the adults with equal and, by our standards, highly indulgent affection. Thus to be a ‘bastard’, or the child of what we would call a ‘broken home’, means simply to have many parents and to be part of a larger, stronger family.

  A Torajan princess watches the rites. (LORNE & LAWRENCE BLAIR)

  Girls are given names like ‘Slippery Eel’ or ‘Downy Bird’s Nest’, and boys get names such as ‘Tall Bamboo’ or ‘Twelve Times’. We were taken aback to learn that the late king’s additional name of Lasso Rinding means ‘Granite Penis’ – a title he apparently did nothing to dishonour. When we asked Ranteallo how many times his father had been married, he replied rather confusingly: ‘Marriages, only five. But wives! Ah! Very many!’

  Apparently he was a man of both great passion and civility, but he was also famed for his ability to project energy. His anger, when fully aroused, was voiced very quietly, but could forcefully throw people in his presence to the ground.

  When the king had died peacefully in bed in 1968 he had been left exactly as he was for the first six months to make sure he wasn’t simply astral-travelling. This was also the period beyond which the Tominah priests could allegedly no longer cause the dead to walk. Only then was his black cat (a participant in many of the rites) ceremonially informed of his death, and his body reorientated towards the south-west – the ‘land of souls’ – initiating a whole symphony of rituals which only now were coming to a head.

  ‘All being well,’ Ranteallo informed us, ‘within a week now we can transport the household and the king’s Tau-Tau to their death-house in the Rante for the culminating rites.’ Tau-Tau, together with textiles and carved panels, are amongst the Toraja’s artistic products most coveted by ethnographic collectors. At the death of a noble, a Tau-Tau is carved in his likeness by a specialized shaman and dressed in his clothes. It will become home for his earthly shade, and will join those of his predecessors which line the balconies hewn in the death-cliffs.

  The Toraja believe we have many layers of spirits, or astral bodies, which at death must detach themselves like the skins of an onion so each may find its proper place. Some of these will remain to watch over the living; others enter the bodies of white birds, such as the sulphur-crested cockatoos or white egrets which hover over the Toraja rice-paddies. Another will inhabit his Tau-Tau, while the essential soul is freed to make its journey across space to its source.

  Ranteallo was a distracted host. His recent conversion to Christianity, his gruelling exposure to the banking system in his attempt to raise money for the rites, and his position as arbitrator between the old Tominah priests and representatives of the Jakarta government were getting him down. He could no longer explain to us what was going to happen next, but he gave us complete carte blanche to explore and question as we pleased, and suggested that we begin by taking a look at the burial-cliffs, about a mile away from the Rante, where the king’s body would be interred.

  Even with Ranteallo’s permission to explore the death-cliffs unaccompanied, we felt, on reaching them, that we were trespassing on very haunted ground. The carved balconies, some over 100 feet high, were lined with disintegrating Tau-Tau which gave the very sinister impression of watchful armies of waking dead. The cliffs all around were honeycombed with caverns, which Lorne and I cautiously entered, brushing aside curtains of cobwebs and creepers with our torches. We gasped to find chambers of dripping stalactites piled to the ceiling with skulls and bones, ancient Tau-Tau heads and crumbling sarcophagi superbly carved with the rippled waves of the ‘waters of space’ which the dead must navigate on their way home.

  ‘OK, that’s it. Enough. Time to leave!’ I was feeling extremely jittery.

  ‘Hold on, just a minute!’ Lorne replied. ‘It’s exactly like those fairytale books they terrified us with. Remember the Ogre’s cave and the mountain of his victims’ skulls?’

  ‘Yes, quite... you’ve got the picture – time to go!’

  ‘Look at this carving,’ he rhapsodised. ‘Do you realize how priceless this stuff is, and just lying around?’ Now he was fiddling with a heap of human jawbones. ‘Gold teeth!’ he announced eagerly. ‘Plenty of them. They must have been at that game for ages – and no anaesthetics, either. I wonder why Ranteallo didn’t think of financing the funeral with them!’

  We finally emerged into the sunshine again to find we were no longer alone in this forbidding place. A few Toraja children had arrived to tend to those remains of their forebears which were not in darkness. They neatly stacked the skulls and re-arranged the femurs with a pottering reverence. We had heard from Werner Meyer that the Toraja custom of burying their dead in high vaults began only a few hundred years ago when Bugis raiding parties from the lowlands began pillaging their burial sites for the booty interred with the corpses, and as recently as 1964 an army general stationed on the island had led his army on similar raids. We found and filmed superbly carved treasures lying about unprotected which, within a decade, were to be stolen, and subsequently appear in private and museum collections around the world.

  We had now been in the village for nearly five weeks, and the atmosphere was heating up considerably. In every house in the Rante, as well as at every animist site throughout the valley, numerous puzzling little rituals were taking place – all of which had to be successfully completed, apparently, before the final ‘star-launching’ could proceed. Tominahs and small family groups could be seen squatting beneath trees or next to streams, intoning over sacrificial chickens and burning incense and symbolic offerings woven from jungle fibres. One of the strangest of these rituals we were to witness only by chance.

  Werner Meyer had told us of a pool about five miles from the Rante, known only to the Toraja, where ‘sacred eels’ were occasionally ‘called forth’ by the Tominahs to accept blessed offerings of rice. One morning, suffering from the cumulative effects of the noise and confusion, we left our cameras behind and took only our snorkeling equipment in search of this waterhole. We found it nestling in a golden green stand of giant bamboos, beneath a soaring cliff. Its opalescent waters seemed to be everything a Star Maiden from the Pleiades could wish to bathe in. Several of them, by the looks of it, in the form of three almond-eyed, half-naked Toraja girls, together with their young brothers, were already doing so. Far from being taken back, they were delighted by our sudden arrival, and unhesitatingly encouraged us to join them in the water. We splashed and laughed and played together for a long time, sharing their delight at looking underwater through a diving mask for the first time. They spoke no Indonesian, even less than ourselves, but talked warmly and directly to us in their tribal language, as we did to them in gentle English. It was perfectly understood that no outer differences between us, however great, had the slightest bearing on this shared moment of enchantment together, at play in the sunlit waters.

  Things abruptly changed with the solemn arrival of about a dozen ceremonially dressed adults, led by a tall, bony Tominah jangling with necklaces of crocodile teeth. Our playmates swam quietly to the edge of the pool, while Lorne and I began to climb out until signalled that we could remain in the water if we wished. Sure enough, against all the odds, and with our cameras back at the Rante, we were about to watch the ‘calling of the eels’, a rite barely referred to in the literature on the Toraja, and which even Werner had never seen.

  While his retainers squatted noiselessly behind him, the Tominah advanced to the edge of a rock overlooking the pool by about six feet, closed his eyes and opened his betel-nut-rouged mouth. Even the surrounding sounds of birds and cicadas were hushed as his thr
obbing ululations resounded off the cliffs above us and through the bamboo forest. After what seemed like a good 20 minutes of this he took a handful of rice from a gourd at his belt and scattered it over the waters.

  We floated there, hardly breathing through our snorkels, watching small schools of transparent, leaf-like fish – which we assumed no ichthyologist had previously seen or named – but there was no sign of an eel. I wondered whether they really meant ‘water snakes’ – a word identical to ‘eels’ in their language – and I focused more closely on the lengths of bamboo which littered the bottom. The chanting continued, slightly changing in pitch, then from separate deep corners of the pool undulated six velvet-black eels, each slightly longer than ourselves, and as thick as our thighs. They converged beneath the priests barely 10 feet from us and settled on the bottom in a relaxed Stygian knot. When the first handful of rice hit the water they didn’t dart to the surface, but calmly waited for it to sink down to them. They ate a few grains, ignored the rest, and cruised back into their hiding places again.

  The offerings had been received, the funeral could proceed.

  We were shocked to discover how important this secretive and ill-attended rite was, and realized that our aquatic curiosity might well have offended these creatures on whose appearance, or otherwise, rested the continuation of the entire festival. On several later occasions we returned to the pool, and tried ourselves to attract the eels with rice from both above and beneath the water. We were observed only by an old man and two buffalo boys, who eventually informed us that the eels don’t eat rice, only live food. ‘They only come to the Tominah’s singing,’ they said. Lorne tried chanting a few limericks over and over, but we never saw the eels again, though we dived there often.

  By now, the nights at the Rante were getting noisier. Hundreds of funeral guests were beginning to filter in on foot from the outlying corners of the kingdom, bringing sacrificial fighting cocks, pigs and magnificently decked-out water-buffalo. Amongst them were the rare white, or pink, variety unique to the Toraja, with china-blue eyes like a Siamese cat, and each worth 20 times more than an ordinary buffalo. The pigs were never pink – but prickly, black, red-eyed close cousins of the wild hog. Some were so bulky that they were borne into the Rante sitting upright like pugnacious lords in specially constructed litters, carried by as many as eight straining porters. They were much less gentle than the water-buffalo, which spend most of their lives doing nothing, wallowing up to their ears in mudpools, while pampered and scrubbed by the little boys who are assigned to look after them from birth. Occasionally they are led through the freshly flooded rice-paddies to turn and fertilize the soil; otherwise their duties extend only to being sacrificed at noble funerals such as these, and leaving their magnificent horns attached in layers to the Toraja houses whose residents had so generously supplied them.

  We lived on chunks of fighting cock, pork and water-buffalo boiled in bamboo tubes until I thought I never wanted to eat meat again. Our grandstand view proved to have its drawbacks as day and night literally hundreds of animals were ritually slaughtered in front of us, and the Rante reeked with blood. The fighting cocks lived in the house with us, sleeping under their owners’ sarongs, and periodically exploded, at all hours, with stentorian ‘cock-a-doodle-doos’ – or, rather, their Indonesian equivalent, for here, of course, the animals speak differently. A cock shouts ‘ruka-ruka-row’, a dog barks ‘gong-gong’ and a cat simply says ‘meng’!

  During our stay we were awakened not only by the cocks, but on several occasions by piercing screams coming from the rice-paddies behind us, which would continue for some time before abruptly stopping. They were ignored by our host and fellow guests alike. Ranteallo simply looked sheepish when we first asked for an explanation the following morning, and it was left to Werner Meyer to give us an explanation, when he finally arrived to join us. He had often experienced it, he assured us, but had thought it had died out with the Christian missionary influence of recent years.

  It is customary for a Toraja girl who feels amorous to walk alone into the rice-paddies shortly before dawn or after sunset and begin screaming. Any swain within earshot who approves of her scream, and feels similarly inclined, is at liberty to rush to her aid and stop her, which is the sign for other suitors to halt their pursuit and file back to bed again. Some girls apparently continue screaming despite the fact that a number of fellows have already reached her and are trying to wrestle her to the ground. She, it appears, is awaiting a particular suitor who is just not as fast on his feet as the others.

  The girls were very beautiful, and flirtatious, but as royal guests there was no question of us, much as we entertained the thought, lumbering off with our torches in the direction of pitiful screams.

  Now that we had been here for nearly seven weeks, we were beginning to wonder if the final climax would ever take place at all. However, one evening an imposing delegation of Tominahs arrived unannounced in our royal upstairs boudoir to inform Ranteallo that the spiritual path was finally clear to transfer Puang Sangalla’s remains from its abode of four years, a quarter of a mile away, to the deathhouse in the Rante for the culminating month of final rites.

  The king’s body was borne on a litter in a sarcophagus resembling a brightly decorated, miniaturized starship. A smaller litter carried his freshly painted Tau-Tau, and a third, draped in black, transported his widows. It was a far less sedate procession than we had imagined. Foaming bamboos of rice wine were being copiously consumed by every level of society, and the two litters were furiously bounced up and down along their journey. This was to assist the layers of the king’s soul to break free and find their proper places, so as not to encumber his final space-flight. Some of these layers are believed occasionally to attach themselves to the living, which can cause madness and even death. Thus the ‘widowed queens’ on one side and the ‘dead kings’ on the other raced each other violently through the rice-paddies, bouncing their burdens for all they were worth, while screaming obscene abuse and exhortations to each other. The unfortunate queen, unable to take sunlight after her lengthy seclusion, was entirely swaddled in black cloth – in which she was undergoing an exercise so rigorous that we wondered if she would emerge from it alive. But she ultimately reached the Rante and was lifted up the death-house steps looking little the worse for wear and, if anything, pinker with health.

  The days and nights that followed this procession became filled with the ghostly rhythms of the Ma’badong dance – a cumulative mantric tone intended to induce altered states, which most successfully, we found, interfered with our capacity to keep a grip on the job of filming. It begins with a human circle, linked by the little fingers, swaying and chanting themselves into a deep trance with eyes closed. The circle expands, ruptures and spawns new circles – which eventually fill the entire Rante with wheeling vortexes of hypnotic sound. In the Ma’badong, we were told, they could feel all the past and future generations of their tribe resonating through them as one – they could touch their Whole People, outside time, in the here and now. There was no doubt that this unceasing hypnotizing rhythm was, as it was doubtless designed to do, dulling our left-brain ‘edge’, and weakening our concentration and our will. Rushing about the Rante, attached like Siamese twins by a synch-pulse cable, tripping over and swearing at each other, burying our heads for mysterious minutes in black film changing bags, endlessly sticking our noses into other people’s business was a cause for considerable levity amongst the participants.

  Added to the Ma’badong there were now also spontaneous explosions of Pa’gellu dancers, young girls dressed in green and gold and the most fashionable jewellery of the time – hollow Taiwanese watches, without their works, which some enterprising pirate had no doubt made a killing on. They, too, chanted a trance-inducing song – and their swaying arm movements sought to still the ‘invisible waters of space’ which a dead king must cross.

  The finest of the remaining buffalo, one by one, were brought into the circle, and dispa
tched with a single blow to the jugular from a machete. From a high bamboo platform the priests, some with battery powered megaphones, supervised the distribution of every morsel of the sacrificial victims. The buffalos’ souls, we were assured, would join the king’s Celestial Herd in the afterlife. Funeral giving is a vital ingredient in the Toraja economy, which is primarily concerned with the redistribution of wealth; gifts are determined by the previous history of generosity between clans and families at their funerals.

  Then the rains arrived, in a stifling, continuous downpour, accompanied by shattering thunder, and the Rante was transformed into a red quagmire. Rather than dampen the festivities, the storm initiated a whole new cycle of tumult with ensuing days and nights of ritual cockfighting which took place beneath a hastily assembled palm thatched enclosure in the centre of the Rante, observable by the throng from the protection of the slanting gables of the surrounding houses. They were bold gamblers, and noisily made bets which left some people in debt literally for years to come.

  The cocks symbolize the upper world of fiery courage. They are pampered and hand-fed from hatchlings and their hidden ferocity is nurtured with affection. A Toraja boy desires his own fighting cock just as longingly as a youngster might desire his first motorbike in the West.

  They are armed for battle, with a single five-inch steel spur bound to their right heel with magic knots and whispered incantations. In Bali, where cockfighting is also a controlled ritual, the cocks have two spurs with honed edges, rather than a single spur with a sharpened point, so the battles differ in style and technique, according to the aficionados, rather as swordsmanship differs depending on whether a cutlass or a rapier is used.