[A. G. Maisey]

Possibly David, possibly.

What I actually wrote, and what Jussi picked up on was this:-

"Yes, the ways in which European ideas of "magic" might have influenced Javanese perceptions of not only the keris, but also of other aspects of Javanese life is something that as far as I know has not been subjected to close investigation."

I used inverted commas around the word magic, because I was talking about the European concepts of magic rather than the way in which Javanese people understand parallel concepts.

In Javanese the word for what we think of as stage magic is "sulap", and actually it has the sense of sleight of hand.

The word for black magic is "sihir" , which is from the Arabic, it is not an indigenous word, and I believe that in the Arabic it actually means asking for help from demons or evil spirits to harm somebody, essentially it is what people in European societies think of as "black magic". This word does not appear in Old Javanese, so it is a pretty recent way of looking at the idea of using the dark forces of the Hidden World.

Those Javanese who have been influenced by Western Culture probably now have concepts of magic that are not much different from the concepts of magic held by lay people in European societies, but the indigenous Javanese concepts relating to what Europeans might think of as magic are quite different to these.

I believe it goes without saying that we can automatically exclude stage magic, or sulap, from consideration. In fact, when I wrote the word "magic" it didn't even occur to me that there is something called stage magic, I guess because I never think of these performances in these terms.

So yes, I did sort of sidestep Jussi's reference to the magic of technology, simply because I did not really want to write thousands of words in trying to explain why the Javanese would never confuse technological advancement with their own ideas of supernatural forces, any more than they would confuse the working of supernatural forces with sleight of hand. Javanese people simply do not think in this way.


When the Europeans first came to Jawa they came into contact with an advanced culture, a culture that had had contact with the civilisations of China and India for over 1000 years. The Javanese were already familiar with the technology that these Indian and Chinese civilisations used, and they had adopted some of this technology for themselves.

After the industrial revolution in Europe, when technology took off and we saw the move to the cities in the British Isles and Western Europe, the Javanese had already been in close contact with the Dutch and other Europeans, for well over 100 years. We could comfortably liken the situation of the Javanese to the situation of Europeans who were living in rural areas of Britain, or perhaps France or Italy:- remote from daily contact with advanced technology, but certainly not unfamiliar with its existence.

In our own time we have seen the appearance on the scene of personal computers.

My first real job was in the data processing section of a major government organisation. Around 80 or 100 girls putting holes into little cards, other girls reading those cards, others working on comptometers (machines for mathematical calculation), a mostly male administrative staff of perhaps 30 people, over 6000 square feet of floor space. At the time, mid-1950's, this was an advanced information technology --- even though it originated in the 18th century and what we were using in the mid-1950's probably hadn't changed all that much since about 1920.

These days I carry greater computing capacity in my briefcase, than was available from all those old IBM machines and the enormous staff required to operate them.

This is truly magic --- or very rapid technological advancement --- but it didn't stun me as it developed, I knew it was happening, I saw it coming, as did any educated person in our society.

I believe that the Javanese who saw the introduction of European technology to Jawa during the 19th century would have had a similar attitude. At least the educated ones would have. Farmers and other people who were out of the mainstream in rural backwaters would probably be somewhat more amazed, but I have not encountered any evidence that would suggest that any Javanese would have confused advanced technology with the magic associated with his own unseen world.

The Javanese of any time after European contact were not primitive natives who had no concept of the happenings in the world outside Jawa. They were members of an advanced culture, and could probably be regarded as living on the fringes of the civilised world.

They could very certainly differentiate between technology with which they were not familiar, and the essence of the Unseen World. However, the way in which a Javanese person would regard the Unseen World and those things attributable to it, should not be confused with the way in which a person of Western European heritage would think of "magic".

But if we do a fast forward to the 20th century, what we begin to see, I think, is the attitudes of educated Javanese people toward the keris mirroring the mystical/magical view of Western Europeans. When I am sometimes confronted by this I cannot help but ask myself where these ideas came from.

I know I did use the word "magic", but I used this word as something associated with European ideas. In truth, I try in so far as is possible to avoid the use of this word in respect of the keris or of other aspects of Javanese society and culture. In the European mindset the keris can possibly be thought of as a "magical" thing in some ways, but in the Javanese mindset the relevant ideas simply do not translate in any way as any type of magic that a European could readily understand.

This is a bit like trying to understand the indigenous Javanese ideas associated with what happens to the human essence after death. People of European heritage simply do not have a frame of reference to allow them to understand.

Now, when we consider death from the indigenous Javanese point of view, we come very close to a similar way in which the old Javanese people thought about the powers of the worker in the forge. The concept of death embodies the concept of rebirth. Anybody from any agricultural based society anywhere in the world is unable to escape from this idea:- things die, and they are reborn next season. The society of Jawa is an agriculturally based society.

The idea of death embraces the idea of rebirth, thus death is only a part of life, for life to exist, death must also exist.

The worker in the forge fulfils a similar function:- he takes iron that is dead and he turns it into something that is living, but this living piece of iron will eventually perish, only to be renewed again. The iron changes, but it does not disappear, its form alters, but it is only waiting to be brought back to life by the worker in the forge.

This is not magic. It is simply the way in which the world functions, and its there for everybody to see, all they need to do is to look.

Candi Sukuh on Mt. Lawu is possibly associated with this relationship between the forge worker (pandai, mpu), and the renewal of souls.(O'Connor).

But here we are specifically looking at the keris, and trying to consider how the ways in which Javanese people regard the keris might have been influenced by ideas and concepts that came into Javanese society from outside Javanese society.

For example, traditionally the Javanese gentry have regarded the keris as a store of wealth. When did this attitude start to appear in Javanese society? Is it possible to identify any of the possible causes for its appearance in Javanese society?