Rangda, Bali’s Child Eating Demon that can Heal?

Today’s Bali Photo of the Day is of a beautifully carved and painted mask of Rangda. We recently took our Wellness Retreatto The Mask and Puppet Museum outside of Ubud, Bali. We highly recommend a visit and future blog posts will cover much more from one of Bali’s newest and most interesting museums.

Rangda is a very important figure in Balinese mythology and healing traditions. She is the dramatic manifestation of the Goddess of the underworld, Durga and is the demon queen of the leyaks. Leyaks are ghost like figures in Bali that appear as humans during the day, but at night their head and entrails break free from their body and fly around cemeteries and villages.

An important, but difficult, thing to remember about Balinese religion and mysticism is that no god or demon is all good or all bad. In fact, the words demon and witch are a poor translation in English. Of course that is hard to tell from the description above. Can there be a good which whose head and entrails fly around and haunt villagers? Well, she also eats children and leads an army of evil witches that are forever in battle against the forces of ‘good’ represented by Barong. But that can’t be all bad, right? Sounds like a nice lady. I don’t mean to make light of the heavily layered Balinese rituals as I am a student of these disciplines and enjoy them greatly. It is simply quite difficult for a Westerner to wrap their heads around these dichotomies.

Rangda is a word from ancient high Balinese and the old Javanese language called Kawi that means widow. Rangda is the female embodiment of divine negative energy. As much of the artwork in Bali, the Rangda mask is layered with symbolism. The large protruding eyes represent anger, cruelty and self-centeredness. The long white boar-like fangs remind us she is a merciless wild beast. And her meter-long blood-red tongue of fire represents her eternal insatiable hunger.

As a basic element of the Balinese Hindu cosmology, Rangda is linked in eternal battle with her counterpart, the male embodiment of positive and constructive forces called Barong. He is a fun-loving shaggy four-legged dog-like creature. The two fight in traditional dances in a struggle for spiritual equilibrium that is at the core of all Balinese ceremonies. They appear in many ceremonies and dances including Barong, Legong Semarandana, Calonarang, Wayang Calonarang, Barong Landung and several others.

The eternal conflict between Rangda and Barong is not as simple as my feeble attempt to explain this complex concept. As mentioned above, this extends far beyond a simple battle of good and evil. Although they represent rival ideologies that can be viewed as positive and negative, they are portrayed by the Balinese as inseparable and symbiotic forces that could not exist in isolation from one another. Like Yin and Yang, each contains elements of the other: Rangda can heal as well as to destroy, and Barong’s protective power has the potential to be misused as well. There is never a winner in these battles as the state of equilibrium is an ongoing struggle.

To learn more about Floating Leaf Eco-Resort’s Wellness Retreats please click here. To learn how you can bring your own group to Bali and take part in yoga, meditation, cultur tours, photography, organic gardening and much more, click here.