No, I'm just kidding you. What he did was throw the dust in her face as she swayed past him at a dance. Of course, she was furious, but that evening they copulated in the forest, and two days later he fetched her home. However, as the journalist put it: "Doubtless a deeper magic than Maman Célie's was also at work."
But what happens if a white person gets involved in this sort of business? The Mexican Indians claim that magic does not work on foreigners. In other places, perhaps things are different. Nine years ago I told of the experience of Harry Wright, a Philadelphia dentist who used to travel the world investigating witchcraft in primitive societies. At that time it involved the collective hallucination of leopards in Africa. Now allow me to recount a couple of his experiences in the far east.
It would have been in 1952 or perhaps early 1953, when he found himself in the airport at Manila, preparing to fly to Java, and he came across an apparently distracted young man who definitely looked like he was in some sort of trouble. Eventually he pried the history out of him. "I think I'm under a spell," he said. "It is the guna-guna."
He was a Dutchman, recently employed for six years as clerk or assistant manager in a hotel in Yogyakarta. (This would have been during the Indonesian War of Independence, and shortly afterwards.) He had fallen in love with a high class Javanese girl called Sadja, something that would be considered outrageous in the racial environment of the time. Unable to bring her to the hotel, he would visit her at her own home, and it was there he met her uncle, a dukun or witchdoctor, who specialised in putting spells, or guna-guna on people.
Remember, this was seventy years ago, and we would expect a bit of sophistication to have intervened since then. But old habits die hard. According to the January 2008 issue of the National Geographic, they still worship the volcanoes. Although Islam is the official religion of Java, it really serves as a thing veneer. The great mass of the people follow the Agami Jawi, or Javanese Religion: a potpourri of Islamic folk beliefs, pre-Islamic gods and demigods, elemental spirits, and magic.
One day, when the Dutchman had just had a haircut, he saw Sadja's uncle scamper in and retrieve some of his hair as useful guna-guna material. A day or so later, Sadja arrived at his hotel and told him she was expecting a baby, upon which he informed her that he had no intention of marrying her. When she returned with her uncle, he had them thrown out. Shaking his fist at him, the uncle threatened revenge.
Some days later, he saw the girl and her uncle again enter the hotel. At that point, he assaulted the old man, only to discover it was really a prominent Dutch official who was accompanied by his daughter. With no reasonable excuse for the assault, he was promptly fired. Wright was able to confirm this part of the story when he himself visited Yogyakarta.
The strange thing, the Dutchman explained to Wright, was that now every time he saw a man with a young woman, he was deluded into thinking it was Sadja and her uncle. At that point, the dentist asked him to look around the bar room and see if there was anybody who resembled them. There was indeed, and he pointed out an American army officer and a young lady sitting at a table.
The author had no explanation for this bizarre hallucination, except that the dukun may have slipped him some drug which lowered his resistance to suggestion. It seems long odds to me.
Now for Part 2. Wright was in the national capital, Jakarta, discussing the matter with a well-educated Indonesian sub-official, who was acting as his interpreter and guide, and mentioned that he would like to meet a dukun. A string of events resulted in his encountering an English teacher from Canada, who had fallen in love with Nusona, his attractive Eurasian pupil, but she had spurned him. The upshot was that his guide agreed to take both Mr. Wright and the Canadian to a special dukun in order to acquire some love magic.
The lovelorn swain insisted on walking on foot into the "native quarter" instead of hiring a native carrier, so that no gossip would get back to Nusona. Of course, it was an exercise in futility. Westerners are the only people who teach their children it is rude to stare at strangers. In the rest of the world they become the centre of attention. I myself have strolled through Indonesian towns with a companion, and found ourselves followed by troops of curious children, admittedly well behaved, who would even park themselves at the door of our restaurant to watch us eat. The same thing occurred, naturally enough, to the intrepid three.
The dukun turned out to be an old woman called Gemplakanapos, who listened attentively to his problem, and accepted a guilder for the proposed service. She then produced on a banana leaf, "some jasmine and frangipani blossoms - two large white flowers and two buds; and also two red flowers, known as melati, with two buds." (My Indonesian dictionary defines melati as jasmine, so I presume it was the red beesianum jasmine.) After that, she went into another room, from whence they started to smell something like a mixture of embalming fluid and incense. She returned about half an hour later, expressionless, and began mumbling something until her voice rose almost to a scream. The fumes produced on Wright a feeling of light-headedness, half exultation and half nausea.
Gemplakanapos then wrapped the two white buds and one red flower into a compact shape, and told the Canadian he must keep them with himself at all times, except when he was in the company of a woman other than Nusona. The other flowers she wrapped in a newspaper and told him to drop them at the doorstep of Nusona's home, so that she would step on them as she came out. She then told him:
"The girl will know that you have come to me. She will see the flowers and become alarmed. Out of fear she will come to me. I will tell her she must return your love or she may have an evil guna-guna."
In other words, she was essentially confirming that it was all hokum, and it worked only because the victim believed in its efficacy.
Later, Wright's guide told him he now had second thoughts about what he had set in motion. As he explained, the residents would know that the lover had seen the dukun. They would stay away from Nusona. If he failed to marry the girl, she might well become an outcast. Or she may go to another dukun and retaliate against him.
So what happened? The author found out once he had returned from a visit to Bali. The Canadian had not taken the flowers to the girl's place, but she knew about his visit to Gemplakanapos, and she did in fact do as predicted, and consulted her. Then it turned out there was a good reason why she had spurned him: she was already married! Her husband returned at that stage, and also consulted the dukun. Suddenly, the young Canadian took ill, without any cause that his physician could identify. With his illness getting worse, the Government official put him on a boat to Singapore. As Mr. Wright summed it up:
It seemed to me the guna-guna had a habit of reaching into the lives of white men who transgressed its mysterious laws; and where primitive belief did not exist, some kind of sickness took its place.
I have written elsewhere how meddling with the occult can have even worse consequences.
References: W. B. Seabrook (1929), Magic Island, chapter 4, edited and abridged as Voodoo Island in 1966 by the New English Library.
Harry B. Wright (1957), Witness to Witchcraft (pp 145-155 of the 1964 Corgi edition)
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