the Blackthorn Orphans
  • B L O G
  • The Blackthorn Orphans: read it onsite
  • The Blackthorn Orphans TRANSLATIONS PAGE
  • Lovely R BLOG
  • PHOTOESSAYS
  • SELECTED RAVINGS: essays & opinion
  • RUBYHUE Lipstick Review
  • blackthorn ROSE REVIEW
  • KITCHEN BITCH: Recipes etc.
  • verse
  • Hostile Witness FILM REVIEW
  • ALOES & SUCCULENTS
  • Blackthorn Perfume Review
  • B I O
  • C O N T A C T

Maximum Respect:  Rangda

4/5/2013

 
Picture
pic- our own. Rangda mask, mid 20thC, Bali. Wood, gesso, hair, teeth, leather, glass.
PictureKālī, Chromolithograph by R. Varma (PD).
Brushing up on the Celtic mythos (as I've been doing lately) confronts us with the story of Cú Chulainn .  And a strange one it is, dragging the skull bag out of preRoman obscurity and pinning its contents like sticky fluffy dice to a suspiciously medieval chariot.  So many of the Irish oral traditions entrusted almost wholesale to monastic scribes have since been bowdlerized by the Victorians and systematically cleansed of the Celts' less romantic proclivities that you think of farthingales before arterial spray.  But make no mistake, they were all about the cranial bling and there's not enough vaseline in the world to soften up that little detail.

To be confronted with the extent to which your ancestors were headhunters and obsessive skull collectors is a strange sensation.  It is stratified; into academic acceptance, psychological rationalization and then personal reflection, the latter process enlivened by looking around at the number of masks lining the walls and realizing they are rolling their eyes and saying duh- you have a thing for heads.  There is even a medical skull, Laxshmi, sitting on the dresser in the bedroom in her place of honor.  In my own work, Kãla'amãtya exhibits the itchy recidivist need to truncate provocateurs and I've always given him a pass for pruning the deserving.  Hey- maybe it's genetic.

I do not personally assign any religious or superstitious significance to the head per se; it is the seat of speech, that most overrated human quailty, and the thoughts that drive the yapping.  Visitors have occasionally expressed discomfort at having to sit in a nest of staring faces but I don't redecorate due to popular demand.  The only mask that really gives me pause or expresses discreet energy is our most serendipitous acquisition; Rangda, the Balinese bitch, the ür-witch strutting on the margins of pagan consciousness in her various guises.

Rangda is queen of the leyaks in Balinese mythology, a class of vampiric demons that leave their otherwise unremarkable bodies at night and fly in the form of gut-trailing heads, seeking childrens' blood for nourishment.  Death and illness are attributed to them and local healers will consult the unseen world for intelligence of their activities.  Whether Rangda herself participates in these aerial shenanigans is not really specified; as a widow and outcast, her beat is the graveyard, where her dance masks are housed in dedicated shrines, swathed in muffling white cloth.  She is obviously rooted in Kālī, that cobalt OG imported around 1500 years ago with the Subcontinental Hindu lore that still dominates Balinese life, sifted through the native fabric, gilded, fanged and set against Barong, the resident hero.

As with most institutionalized deities we find in Kālī/Rangda a piece of the original- the femme sacré shoved sideways, her atom split into limited aspects by cultures seeking to plane away the complications and frame woman as the passive emotional provider, the succorer, taking the burden of compassion and engagement from masculine shoulders and enclosing her in the stagnant roles of kenneled honour-object and heir-factory. Kālī has suffered the orthodox knife and swims alone in the crowded Durga Complex of disembodied attributes, but it is still striking to discover that she has retained that most problematic of feminine tendencies - discretion - and does not deliver on demand; no worshipper can expect to be favored or comforted any more than if they had appealed to Zeus or Apollo. In Kālī we find the extremes and volition formerly attributed to the shady ranks of proto-skirts so busily edited by monotheism.  


Rangda's narrative holds onto some of these broader attributes, circling her roles both as traditional wife and independent agency, her rage on behalf of her slighted daughter painted darkly, though there is no real desire to curtail her; it is hard to know who's winning for the best part of her conflicts with Barong and it is not much of a comfort to see her mask stowed for the next campaign.  She is regarded with an almost Tantric fatalism as an essential element of commonplace reality.  She may be hostile, but she has her reasons.  

Our Rangda surprised us when she arrived in a box of newspaper after having been purchased for a pittance in an online auction.  She is older than the tourist versions; mid 20thC, we'd say, cut from softwood to be danced with her enormous horsehair wig and wily eye slits.  Her pigments are faded; she wears a ghostly matte gesso and contours smoothed by endless hours of hand carving and sanding.  Her teeth are gilded pig tusks, her great tongue formed from an intricate lattice of leather and velvet and mirror.  By day she oversees us with a stare both fixed and avid but it is at night that she seems inhabited, a quality we failed to capture even with candlelit images.  To see Rangda in the round you'll have to watch the excellent recordings Sir David Attenborough made in 1969 of their ouvre, including the mesmerizing sanghyang possession dances.  Or take a trip to Bali.  There are worse things you could do.




Picture
Picture
Picture


Comments are closed.

    RSS Feed

    Picture

    Independent Creativity
    Hi-Fi Introversion

    ORIGINAL CONTENT
    HONEST REVIEWS
    VELVETEEN VERBIAGE
    VISUAL LUXURY
    MORBID IDLING
    THE NATURAL WORLD
     
    ​photography  
    film
    flora  fauna  culinary
    ethnography  objet
    ​

    modest living
    ​vintage shit

    A U T H O R
    Picture
    K ✂︎ l l y
    congenital delinquent
    Human Durian
    celebrating
    glorious deviation in the land of
     the long white cloud

    -  New Zealand  -


    - T h e   B o o k -

    Picture
    T H E  
    B L A C K T H O R N
    O R P H A N S


    What is freedom, when it is
    all that remains to you?
    In exile two brothers pursue an anarchist's trajectory,  from an old world into the new, from East to West, subject always to the pleasures & horrors of an enduring flesh, to the ironies of karma & impunity. Love bears thorns, the lost return & the dead are haunted by the living. 
    ​

    E P I C   D A R K   F I C T I O N
    *   R E A D   *
    T H E
    B L A C K T H O R N 
    O R P H A N S
     O N S I T E  

    H e r e



    Picture

    Selected
    ​Ravings

    opinion essays observation private regret public 
    exaltation semicoherent speculation 

    Picture

    Photoessay​

    epic undertakings
    documented

    ​
    Picture

    Hostile Witness FilmReview

    Cruel but fair

    Picture

    RubyHue 
    ​
    Lipstick Review

    Lipstick: love it
    ​

    Picture

    Our Photography​

    we've seen worse
    ​

    Picture

    Port Chalmers​

    Dunedin, New Zealand
    ​

    Picture

    Blackthorn ​
    ​Rose Review

    Garden Hoe Wisdom
    Picture

    Verse​

    Loss, love, truth, beauty everything, everything
    ​
    Picture

    The  Lovely R's Blog​

    Likes photography  Knows a bit about it

    Picture

    We Liked This​

    Amazing things from other people
    ​

    Picture

    Cacti, Aloes
    ​&
     
    Flora​

    Our garden & general vegetal splendours
    ​

    Picture

    KitchenBitch

    Home cooking
    & raw ingredients
    ​
    Picture

    Ethnographic​

    Strange wonderful things from elsewhere
    ​

    Picture

    Jewellery
    ​

    Picture

    Tiny Little 
    Dinosaurs
    - a book for children -


    All images & text property of the authors 
    ​
    unless stated

    © us
    & original sources
    All Rights Reserved



    Picture

    Privacy Policy
    ​This is a noncommercial site.
    No ads. No shady data jacks. 
    No interest in your bizniz.

    ​We don't personally view, utilise or sell your data, apart from occasionally checking totally anonymous + super basic site view stats. We don't even know how to monetise that stuff, so don't worry.  Everyone's privacy is important to us.

    Our platform is probably harvesting your data, though, via their cookies. Look at their privacy page so you can see what they're up to.

    Please use Adblock or something similar.
    ​
    Google et al superimpose ads that we never see a penny from so fuck them.

    Picture

    Archives

    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    September 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013


    Picture

    Categories

    All
    A Thing Of Beauty
    Blackthorn Orphans
    Blackthorn Rose Review
    Cacti & Aloes
    Ethnographica
    Flora
    Hostile Witness Film Reviews
    Jewellery
    Kitchen Bitch
    Make Up Review
    Maximum Respect
    Perfume Reviews
    Photo Du Jour
    Photo Essay
    Places & Things: A Blackthorn Review
    Port Chalmers
    Remembering Dreams
    Roses
    Selected Ravings
    Softcore Rendition
    Sweetmeat
    Textiles
    The Lovely R
    Verse
    We Liked This

    Picture
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.