Jailangkung

Chinese spirit-basket divination, which dates to the fifth century, would have been lost to the world had it not been reincarnated as Indonesian jailangkung. The term is the homophonic rendition of the Chinese cai lan gong [菜篮公, vegetable basket deity] and unambiguously links the Indonesian practice with the Chinese. Contemporary Chinese divinatory methods have replaced the clumsy basket planchette with the handier triforked branch or a pen held in the medium’s hand, but a spirit basket still features in jailangkung and remains the key element in involutions of the prototype. For example, Nini Thowong’s spirit-possessed doll originated as an effigy built over a basket armature. Jailangkung and its iterations are performed as sacred rituals or games of amusement all over the archipelago to an extent that jailangkung has been absorbed into Indonesian magic folklore. Jailangkung starred in the country’s most successful horror movie. This investigation discusses the domestication of an alien tradition as social-political engineering.