Steph: Before we begin, a quick content warning: Paranormal Pajama Party is a podcast about scary stories and legends, but there’s nothing scarier than the patriarchy.
When discussing tales in which women are often the villains, we’ll have to unpack some stories in which women are the victims.
This episode contains the usual amount of cursing, as well as mentions of epidemics, murder, a little blood and gore, rape and other sexual violence, torture, military violence and forced captivity. Please listen with care.
This episode features a rage-fuelled woman who undergoes a shocking transformation, ultimately for the greater good. That is also a description of me, last week, building a new website for this podcast because the old one sucked.
The new one is much more functional and has show notes, sources transcripts of every episode, pretty (and sometimes pretty scary) pictures of our party guests, and links to the podcast’s social media channels. It’s nice! You can see it for yourself by visiting paranormalpjparty.com.
Many years ago, in a remote village of East Java, during the reign of the hero King Airlangga, there lived a young woman named Ratna.
Ratna was beautiful and should’ve had her pick of the kingdom’s suitors, but no man had ever even considered courting her because her widowed mother, Calon Arang, was known to be a ruthless witch.
Calon Arang watched her daughter become more lovely with each passing day. And she watched as the young men of Java crossed the street when they saw her coming and chose lesser brides over the worthy Ratna. She knew they shunned Ratna because they feared Calon Arang’s black magic, and this filled her with a dark rage.
So one auspicious night, she and her disciples took it upon themselves to visit the local graveyard. Inside its grounds, they began to dance wildly – a ritual to call upon the fierce, eight-armed goddess Durga, destroyer of enemies. Midnight fell and the dancing picked up its pace and suddenly Durga herself, accompanied by her entourage, appeared in the humans’ midst and began to dance along, signalling her acceptance of Calon Arang’s tribute.
As thanks for her devotion, Durga granted the widow-witch Calon Arang’s vengeful wish – the annihilation of everyone in the kingdom. Durga’s only caveat was that those in the centre of the kingdom would be spared. Calon Arang accepted the terms, Durga and her associates disappeared, and the next morning, the people of East Java began to complain of chills and fever. Within a day or two, the afflicted inevitably died.
Calon Arang’s curse spread through the kingdom quickly, laying waste to the population outside the capital. King Airlangga, in the centre of his kingdom, was untouched by the plague but heartbroken for his people. When he learned its cause, he sent a special force to the village with orders to kill the widow-witch.
The men snuck up on Calon Arang as she slept, sharp daggers unsheathed. But then their hands began to shake. The witch woke up with a start and, with her powers, set the would-be assassins on fire, killing two of them instantly. Terrified, the survivors returned to the capital to tell King Airlangga what had occurred.
Calon Arang, more furious than ever at being attacked, gathered her disciples and returned to the cemetery under cover of darkness. Again, they danced, but this time, Calon Arang also used the breath of life to return a corpse from the graveyard to life. The dead man opened his eyes, amazed, but one of the witch’s disciples immediately beheaded him, sacrificing him to the goddess Durga. Calon Arang washed her hair in his blood and draped herself in his intestines. And once the sacrifice was complete, Durga again appeared.
This time, Calon Arang wished for the death of the entire kingdom, including the centre where the king and his soldiers lived. And obliged by the power of Calon Arang’s black magic ritual, Durga agreed.
The plague ravaged the kingdom with renewed force, this time reaching its innermost regions. The devastation was unthinkable. Crows swarmed the skies while people buried one beloved family member and then another and another. The people lucky enough not to fall ill were beset by the demons and leyak – flying heads with their entrails still attached – who counted among Calon Arang’s allies.
Desperate, King Airlangga turned to his trusted adviser, Empu Baradah. They knew that Calon Arang’s revenge was all to do with Ratna’s lack of suitors, and so the wise Empu discovered a solution – he sent his favourite pupil, Mpu Bahula, to the village, to ask for the witch’s daughter’s hand in marriage.
Mpu Bahula met with Calon Arang when he arrived. He told her of his connection to the King’s esteemed adviser and asked for Ratna’s hand. The widow-witch was pleased – she couldn’t have asked for a better match for her beautiful daughter.
Once the couple was happily married, however, Mpu Bahula set the second step of the plan in motion. After Calon Arang had snuck out to the graveyard to conduct another of her dark rituals, Bahula innocently asked Ratna where his mother-in-law was going. Ratna, ashamed of the destruction her mother had wrought, admitted to Bahula what Calon Arang was up to. She also told him where the witch kept her book of mantras, the source of her power.
Through clever means, Bahula managed to steal Calon Arang’s book and take it back to the capital to share with his mentor. When Mpu Baradah saw the book and heard more about Calon Arang’s dealings with Durga, he knew what he had to do. He sent Bahula back to the village, and told him he’d meet him there soon.
Calon Arang continued to worship Durga, and one day, the goddess spoke to her. “Be aware,” said Durga. “I sense death.” At that moment, one of the witch’s disciples interrupted to announce the arrival of the great scholar and king’s adviser, Mpu Baradah.
As soon as the two locked eyes on each other, Calon Arang knew that she had met her match. She showed Mpu Baradah the strength of her powers by killing an enormous banyan tree, poisoning it all the way down to its roots. Caught up in a rage, Calon Arang’s body mutated into a hideous demon form, and in this guise, she was called Rangda.
Her eyes bulged from her head, and her canines grew and curved until they became long fangs. Her tongue lolled out of her mouth, and her fingernails became razor-sharp claws. She had all the fearsome powers and bloodthirsty characteristics of her beloved goddess, Durga. She also had control of an army of demons and leyak, who worshipped her as their queen.
This would’ve terrified anyone, but the guru Baradah was unphased. In response to Calon Arang’s demonic mutation into Rangda, he, too, began to change. His body transformed into that of a great, lion-like creature and he became the guardian Barong, King of the Spirits and leader of the host of good.
Barong and Rangda stood face to face, good versus evil, equally matched. The fate of the cosmos hung in the balance. The battle began.
[Music]
Steph: Hi! I’m Steph, and this is Paranormal Pajama Party, the podcast that brings you classic ghost stories and legends featuring female phantoms and femme fatales. Together, we’ll brush the cobwebs off these terrifying tales to shed some light on their origins and learn what they can tell us about the deep-rooted fears society projects onto women.
When I first moved to Australia, I couldn’t understand why all my co-workers kept going on vacation to some seaside tourist destination called Barley. People were always off to Barley on holiday, and everyone in the office would go, “Ooo, Barley’s lovely!” And I’d just sit there smiling and wondering why I’d never heard of Barley, a town apparently named after cereal. I guessed it was somewhere near Perth, maybe.
Months went by before I finally asked someone what the hell Barley’s deal was. And then everyone laughed at me because it turns out I’m a moron. The whole time, all these Aussies had been saying BALI. You know, the Indonesian province where Elizabeth Gilbert either ate, prayed, or loved.
I’ve still never been to Barley – uh, Bali – but if you have, you’ve definitely met tonight’s special guest before. Rangda the demon-queen is an integral figure in Balinese mythology, the physical manifestation of illness and destruction. She’s the shadowy yin to the yang of Barong, the lion-esque guardian of all things good.
The oversimplified story I just told you is known as Calon Arang, and it’s popular in Balinese religion and in the resorts. The story is usually told through an elaborate dance with dramatic, bug-eyed masks and large, hairy costumes.
The version for tourists boils Calon Arang’s transformation into Rangda and her confrontation with Barong into an uncomplicated battle between good and evil. Barong, of course, wins in the end, purifying Calon Arang’s soul and saving the kingdom from her wrath. These performances are done in the daylight to allow plenty of time for good photos of the dancers and their impressive masks.
But in local communities, Barong and Rangda are much more complex, and taken very seriously. They are stand-ins, sort of, for Hindu deities corresponding to creation and destruction. Rangda corresponds and is strongly associated with the goddess Durga, and Barong corresponds generally with the god Siva.
Rangda isn’t technically a manifestation of Durga, but the two are so closely associated that they seem to be mostly undifferentiated. If you remember Episode Eight of Paranormal Pajama Party, “Felines, Females, and Fear”, you may recall that Durga is most famous for being the Hindu pantheon’s protector. She rode a lion, or in some depictions, a tiger, into battle against the villainous Mahishasura, the Buffalo Demon, who had chased all the gods out of heaven. After a ferocious battle, she managed to pin him down and chop off his head.
In India, Durga is associated with protection, motherhood, and strength. She’s usually depicted as a beautiful, slender woman with eight arms and a pretty serene expression for someone busy chopping off a buffalo demon's head. When she’s angry, she uses her wrath to destroy things that stand in the way of creation.
In Bali, on the other hand, Durga and her sort-of-devotee, sort-of-avatar Rangda are depicted as hideous, grimacing creatures with bulging eyes, fangs, long tongues, claws, and matted hair. We’ll get into why that happened in a moment.
I’m going to talk out of my ass here for a minute, because as I’ve mentioned before, I was raised Protestant Christian like 1.05 billion other people on Earth, and that’s the reference point my brain has to work with. In Christianity, there are very clear lines between good and evil. God is good. Satan is evil. These lines are also very gendered, right?
One of my sources for this episode was a book chapter by Dr Kathy Foley – as usual, you can find all my sources in the show notes. Dr Foley wrote, “The West wants its god all-good and women do not qualify. What is more, antagonists like Satan and Eve are rebels who bring on suffering and instigate evil. In the Christian paradigm, the divine is exonerated from anything negative, and demons and women deviate from the divine plan.”
I think we saw that demonstrated pretty clearly in the Malleus Maleficarum episodes earlier this season.
Hinduism and many other Eastern religions are much less black-and-white in the way they view the relationship between things. Deities aren’t pure good or pure evil, because nothing is. Things must be destroyed to make room for creation, and that’s not a good thing or a bad thing. As humans, all we can do is whatever is required to maintain the balance of these forces. Whether we’re paying tribute to a deity or purifying something that’s been touched by demons, our desired outcome is the same – tranquillity in heaven, the underworld, and on Earth.
I’m not sure that made very much sense, and I feel wildly underqualified to expand on it. As always, I recommend getting your information from someone with actual lived experience.
The point is that while it’s tempting to think, as I might in a Christian context, that Rangda equals evil and that’s why she’s a woman, and Barong equals good and that’s why he’s a man, it’s not really about that for the Balinese.
Their understanding of the world is grounded in a concept called “Rwa bhineda”, which I read translated as “two in opposition” and “unity in duality”. In that context, Rangda is probably female and Barong is probably male because it’s another layer of duality and balance. Rangda may represent the forces of darkness and destruction, but in the all-night community versions of the dance, which is often done for purification reasons after illness or death, Barong steps back and she is the one who finishes the ritual, curing the community. She brings disease and death, but also life and blessings.
And for this reason, neither Barong nor Rangda can ever win their symbolic battle. They are equally matched, and we need them both.
On a side note, trying to understand this was such a stretching exercise for my Western brain, which was kind of interesting. I keep having to reconsider these very black-and-white thoughts – something is either all good or all evil. Something is either perfectly correct or it’s completely wrong. Behaviours are either healthy or unhealthy.
And that has, weirdly, given me a little ah-ha moment about why some people continue to automatically reject things like transsexuality, gender fluidity, intersex people, and pronouns other than he/him or she/her.
I honestly think it might boil down to these binary structures we’ve internalised that don’t allow for shades of grey because that might be kind of uncomfortable. It’s so tempting to label the ideas and people we come across as exclusively good or exclusively bad, only positive or only negative. Sitting with the discomfort of a murkier reality is very challenging and takes a little bit of courage.
When I get soft-serve ice cream, I order a twist every time – it's way better that way. Much better than all chocolate or an all vanilla cone. And it's prettier, too. But enough about ice cream.
Rangda’s and Barong’s masks are both kept in the local Pura Dalem, the death temple, close to the cemetery. Barong’s is usually displayed over Rangda’s, not because of any superiority, but because Rangda is a Cthonic being, associated with the underworld. She literally hangs out below Barong.
The masks are used in various practices to keep things in balance for the community. I’m not even going to attempt to scratch the surface of the meaning behind the dances and other rituals. For an excellent explanation of all the elements of the Calon Arang performance, definitely check out Dr Foley’s chapter in the show notes.
As I mentioned, the Balinese depiction of Durga can look very different than her images in other Hindu countries, and even on other Indonesian islands. Her appearance in Javanese sculpture, for example, is much closer to how she looks in India. And the reason for that, and for her association with Rangda, is due to the reputation of one historical Bali queen: Mahendradatta.
Time for some very fast and very loose history. The powerful Mataram Kingdom held sway in this area of the world in the eighth through 11th centuries, CE. Based in Java, this Hindu-Buddhist kingdom also held significant power in Sumatra, Bali, southern Thailand, parts of the Philippines, and part of Cambodia.
Sometime in the 9th century, there was a civil war between the Hindus and the Buddhists, and the kingdom split in half along religious lines. The Hindu kingdom was still called Mataram and stayed based in Java, and the Buddhists established a kingdom of their own in Sumatra.
Mahendradatta was born in East Java in 961, the daughter of the Mataram king, and a direct descendant of another powerful king who had an important role in regional rituals. I guess the Christian equivalent might be being the granddaughter of a saint.
A little note here: Mahendradatta was originally called Gunapriyadharmapatni and changed her name when she moved to Bali. For clarity’s sake, I’m just going to call her Mahendradatta, which was her name when most of the significant stuff in this story took place.
By the time Mahendradatta arrived on the scene, the Mataram kingdom was starting to crumble. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to show up right as the formerly impressive empire you were born into was starting to fall apart at the seams… oh wait, I can, actually, and it’s very existentially stressful.
Mataram still had vassal states, though – basically, smaller kingdoms that paid tribute to the larger kingdom and sent soldiers to fight in its military in exchange for resources and protection. According to my international relations professor husband, sometimes that meant protection from the larger kingdom. Nice nation you got there. Be a shame if someone were to… raid and pillage it.
One of those vassal states was Bali, and part of Mataram’s strategy was to marry Mahendradatta off to its king, Udayana.
There’s speculation that this wasn’t Mahendradatta’s first marriage and that her previous relationship had ended in divorce. The reason historians think this is that, although Mahendradatta had three sons, the oldest was not named crown prince. In fact, both of his younger brothers went on to hold the throne for a short time, possibly because he wasn’t Udayana’s child but her son from a previous marriage. But we’ll come back to him.
When I said Mahendradatta was married off, it may have sounded like she was being used as a pawn in a political game like so many other royal women throughout history. While it’s true that this marriage was clearly political, Mahendradatta does not seem to have been a helpless pawn. Rather the opposite.
Based on historical and archaeological evidence, experts believe that male and female Balinese monarchs had relatively good gender equality. Statues of royal couples don’t emphasise one person over the other, although only the king’s name was ever written down.
That changed with Mahendradatta. Probably because of her status in the powerful Mataram kingdom and her descent from that famous king, Mahendradatta seems to have actually held a higher status position than her husband, the actual Balinese half of that relationship.
During their marriage, the language of inscriptions on the island changed from Old Balinese to Old Javanese – Mahendradatta’s native tongue. Unlike the queens before her, Mahendradatta’s name was recorded for posterity, and in those records, it was given a more prominent position than Udayana’s.
The other way Mahendradatta changed Bali was by bringing the cult of Durga to the island, which previously didn’t worship the goddess at all. Mahendradatta was a devotee and promoted her religious practice to the rest of the kingdom.
As I’ve said, Durga is a pretty intense gal. She’s kind of the antithesis of gentler Hindu goddesses such as Lakshmi, and it kind of seems like the Balinese had a hard time adjusting to this fierce warrior goddess who rides around on a lion with eight different weapons at the ready. She is literally armed and dangerous.
Sorry, that was stupid.
[Laughter]
Steph: It seems like Mahendradatta, too, was a hard pill for the Balinese to swallow. This foreign queen with the support of a powerful empire sweeps in and starts enacting all these societal changes, including the introduction and promotion of a very scary deity. She’s overshadowing her husband, the hometown hero, and she’s also a divorcee with a child from a previous marriage who might someday try to claim the Balinese throne without any familial right to it.
At some point, probably coloured by these feelings of discomfort and distrust among the people, worship of Durga started to be strongly associated with sacrifice, witchcraft, and black magic. These associations still exist in Bali today.
So this is about where we lose historical facts and head into “allegedly” territory. Allegedly, Mahendradatta was caught practising black magic rituals in her worship of Durga. Allegedly, Udayana then condemned and exiled her to the jungle. This essentially made her a widow.
Being a widow in conservative Hindu cultures is really hard. Religious tradition says that, as punishment for failing to retain their husband’s souls, they might even deserve to die. Widows cannot remarry. They are to remove their jewellery and dress only in white, the colour of mourning.
They can’t participate in religious life and are socially isolated, forced to hide in their homes because they are a source of shame for their family. Unfortunately, they usually live in their in-laws’ house, so sometimes, grieving widows also find themselves homeless and without an inheritance, in addition to being shunned.
The clearest example of Hinduism’s difficult relationship with widowhood is, of course, sati – the now-illegal practice of immolating a widow on her deceased husband’s funeral pyre. Now-illegal doesn’t mean it doesn’t still happen, though, especially in rural communities. Sati was prohibited in Bali, where it was only practised by royalty, in 1903.
Ashamed by her new status as a pariah and angered by her husband’s actions, Mahendradatta allegedly summoned all the evil spirits of the jungle to her and also gained the sympathies of the leyak – black magic practitioners whose heads and entrails fly around without them, looking for newborn baby blood to drink. And with these dark forces and Durga’s blessing, she allegedly sent a vengeful plague that killed half the kingdom. The carnage was only stopped by the intervention of a holy man.
Sounds familiar, right? That’s basically the plot of the Calon Arang, which you may recall takes place in East Java, Mahendradatta’s native home. And in the context of Hinduism, Calon Arang’s status as a widow begins to take on increasing importance – she was powerful even though all the rules of society said she should have been negligible. Fun fact: Rangda means widow in Old Javanese.
You may also remember that the wise king in the Calon Arang myth was named Airlangga. Airlangga is the Javanese hero king, and he is also – and this is true, not alleged – Mahendradatta’s oldest son.
He was either sent away to be brought up by her family of origin in the Mataram kingdom’s East Java palace, or he was invited there in his youth by her older brother, who became king after her father’s death. He was at the Mataram palace in 1017 for a royal wedding – it may even have been his own. In the middle of the ceremony, the rival Buddhist kingdom from Sumatra attacked. Caught completely unprepared, the entire royal family was massacred and the Mataram kingdom finally fell.
For the next few years, the kingdom collapsed into anarchy. Regional warlords took advantage of the chaos and raids and robbery became commonplace.
Oh, did I say every member of the royal family was massacred? Every member except one. Airlangga managed to escape into the jungle. He spent that time in hiding rallying support. In 1019, he managed to gather a large enough force to rid the kingdom of the violent factions, restore order and establish a new kingdom under his reign.
So you can kind of see how the story of a Durga-worshipping widow became wrapped up with the details of Airlangga’s reign, even though the basis for the myth was actually his own mother.
For the record, historians dispute the fact that Mahendradatta was ever exiled and condemned in real life. The evidence of this is that her name continued to receive prominence and respect during the short reigns of her younger sons, and when she died, she was deified. In the temple where she is entombed, she is depicted as a slender and beautiful Durga slaying the buffalo demon Mahishasura.
In life, Mahendradatta may have been respected (or at least feared), but in death, she was slowly demonised. The goddess of destruction that she worshipped became more and more closely associated with black magic and pestilence, which started to change the way she appeared in art and temples until she became a fanged and clawed demon.
The power Mahendradatta wielded in life was viewed as unnatural and deviant. The story of Calon Arang, which introduced Rangda, wasn’t written until the 16th century, but as one of my sources said, it suggests that “historical events like the catastrophe that befell East Java in 1017 CE might have been interpreted in the popular imagination as signs of the evil effects of magic practised by powerful women.”
Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be the last time that women in Indonesia were vilified for political purposes. If I’ve learned anything from this podcast, it’s that the demonisation of women who are perceived to have stepped out of line is a global pattern, and at this point, I’m willing to believe that it probably happens on other planets, too. But let’s stick to a more local example for now.
Shout out to Dr Ni Wayan Pasek Ariati – I learned about all of this next part from her thesis, which I’ve linked in the show notes.
In 1950, 500 Indonesian women joined a new organisation that would come to be known as Gerwani, which stood for the Indonesian Women’s Movement. Gerwani advocated for gender equality, women’s labour rights, and other feminist issues. By the middle of the next decade, it had about 3 million members.
Gerwani was founded during the autocratic rule of Sukarno, the first president of Indonesia, who led the country’s struggle for independence from the Dutch. Although not a communist himself, Sukarno maintained a close alliance with Indonesia’s largest communist organisation, the PKI.
Gerwani, too, had close ties to the PKI, and over the years, those ties became even tighter. By the 1960s, Gerwani was less focused on feminism and more focused on uniting women to support the new, independent Indonesia’s sense of nationalism, something important to President Sukarno.
Meanwhile, Sukarno was playing a dangerous game where he pitted the PKI against the military. When the military lost some political influence to the communists, tensions – already high – boiled over.
Remember “allegedly” territory? We’re heading back in.
In the early hours of October 1, 1965, six high-ranking generals of the Indonesian army were brutally executed, along with other military personnel and civilians, allegedly by members of the PKI. This was, allegedly, the first step in an attempted coup, allegedly backed by the CIA, to remove Sukarno from power.
Allegedly, before being killed, the generals were tortured, mutilated, and exposed to obscene sexual behaviour by loose, immoral communist women, all members of Gerwani.
In response to these alleged events, an army general named Suharto took control of Jakarta and used the military and anti-Communist sympathisers to begin a violent purge of Indonesia’s communists. Unfortunately, we’re no longer in the land of allegations. What happened next really did occur.
The women of Gerwani were officially labelled sexually depraved, immoral, and murderous. They were accused of trading sex for weapons, and then castrating and killing the men they slept with. Gerwani was destroyed and many of its members were among the half a million people killed in this purge. They weren’t just killed, though – in some cases, the Gerwani women were imprisoned without trials for years first. Others were raped and then beaten to death or executed, along with their entire families.
Surprising no one, the alleged coup was probably a set-up that became the excuse to launch an actual military coup. When the generals’ bodies were found, the only injuries they’d sustained were fatal gunshot wounds. As the subsequent events unfolded, Sukarno was forced to give more and more power to General Suharto, and in 1968, he was formally appointed president. Sukarno was put under house arrest until he died in 1970.
Suharto ruled the country as an authoritarian dictator. Under his so-called “New Order”, women were culturally pressured to remain submissive and domestic, which I talked about in a bit more detail in episode seven, “The Pontianak”.
Suharto remained in power until 1998, and things have improved a bit for women in Indonesia since that time. The country’s fifth president, elected in 2001, was a woman. Indonesia has only been independent since 1945. Are you listening, America?
Things are far from perfect, though. Here’s some bad news, as told by Dr Ariati:
“In modern Bali, it is still true that if a woman is successful in her life, whether in terms of financial or career success, many people will say, “bisa ngeliyak”, meaning that she can take on a powerful and dangerous magical body through the practice of black magic and the blessing of the goddess Durga. Being labelled as someone who can ngeliyak is a serious matter; one can easily be isolated by one’s fellow village members or even killed, if it is believed that disasters that befall neighbours or even family members are part of a woman’s ‘drive for power’ through practising black magic.”
Dr Ariati was told that an academic at Udayana University who found a new method of using earthworms to produce organic fertiliser was called ‘a Rangda’ due to her success.
On the other hand, in recent years, Rangda – and therefore Durga and Mahendradatta – have received greater attention from artists and scholars, especially female ones, who have begun to recast them in a new light. Rather than an example of the horrors of unchecked female power, Rangda has started to shift into a symbol of female oppression under the patriarchy. At its root, Calon Arang’s story is about a socially helpless widow trying to achieve a good future for her daughter and defending herself from attack as she pursues that goal.
Of course, then there are the plagues and the corpse sacrifice. Maybe I don’t have to decide if Rangda is good or bad. Maybe I need to accept that Rangda simply is. She’s the physical representation of destruction – and we can’t have any creation without her.
[Music]
Steph: It’s time for lights out at the Paranormal Pajama Party. I gotta get out of here because I need to book some tickets. Finally gonna see what all these Australians like so much about Barley.
To learn more about Rangda, Durga or how things are slowly changing for the better for Hindu widows, check out my sources in the show notes.
Follow @ParanormalPJParty on Instagram to see visuals from today’s episode.
I’ll be back next week with more spine-tingling tales and critical discussion. In the meantime, don’t forget: Ghosts have stories. Women have voices. Dare to listen.
[Music fades out]
