Nyepi, an island-wide exorcism

Andy Hill

At the New Year in Bali, I was entranced by phantasmagoric effigies, the effluence of cultural panache, and the idea that the entire island might be rightfully cleansed of evil and banality.

As the afternoon lingered on I started to hear more cacophony from outside my bungalow window in Ubud, hunched over my laptop, pecking out more of my manuscript. As the peal of bells, gongs, and wooden chimes from roving Balinese orchestras finally ciphoned away all of my interest in writing for the day, I closed my laptop, locked the ornately-carved wooden doors, and trotted down to the street to see what this thing was going to look like.

It was the day before Nyepi, which is the Balinese New Year. On Nyepi, no one leaves their house, and at night, the curtains are kept shut lest the evil spirits travelling over the island see the light from below, and decide to take up residence thereby for the next year. 

Nyepi is the quiet day. No electricity, no lighting of fires, no cooking, and very little (if any) talking. Even non-Balinese such as myself are gently steered back to their guesthouses in the event that they ignorantly wander outside. At night on Nyepi it is very, very quiet, and very, very dark.

It is oddly similar to the British keeping blackouts so that the Nazi luftwaffen (another kind of evil demon) wouldn’t know where to drop their bombs during WWII.

However, the day before Nyepi is an entirely different set of circumstances. For the weeks leading up to the special day, neighborhood groups construct sometimes meters-high effigies of demons and other evil entities called ogoh ogoh, which are then paraded about the villages and towns, to be finally destroyed by fire at the end of the night in a chaotic and feverish island-wide exorcism. 

On my recent daily roaming and rambling through town I had been seeing these macabre and masterfully-created creatures, some small, some large, but all equally pored over by the young and old charged with their rendering.  

So it was with baited breath that I had been waiting until that evening, at around dusk, when these monuments of malevolence would be ushered about town in a literally magical parade.

Hundreds of tourists were already beginning to line up and down each street, iPhones in hand, charged for the spectacle. I found a well-placed perch in front of a shop and made excited conversation with several others around when the clanging of various gamelans came into earshot, and the throngs of witnesses began to cling tighter to the edge of the street.

It could first be seen over the heads of the crowds, approaching from over a hundred meters down the main road- a three meter high, flying, bearded, red-faced, furious, snarling demon bouncing gently back and forth as the lumbering teenage boys carrying it on a cross-hatched bamboo platform struggled to keep it straight. A fully mobile gamelan orchestra marched in front, announcing the approach of this foul-faced malignity.

The energy in the crowd was palpable, fun, expectant. As the being approached, looming ever larger, children quieted, adults held glowing cameras in the air, and applause erupted as it passed in front of us. There were more to be seen on the horizon down Jalan Raya, and I crouched and watched as several others bobbed and menaced past the mesmerized crowds.

The sun was beginning to creep past that liminal and strange stage of twilight into darkness, and I hopped to my feet to see what was going on in the football field in the center of town, where many ogoh ogoh were to be eventually gathered.

I grabbed a bottle of Bintang off of an old toothless woman selling them from a cooler on the sidewalk, jog-walking through the crowd’s crevices towards the pitch. Many more of the beastly figures with their attendant walking orchestras were slowly lumbering down each street big enough to fit them, with several men on either side carrying long, upright bamboo poles in order to escort each ogoh ogoh under each low-hanging tangle of power lines strung across the road.

When I got close to the football field, the crowds had gotten dense, and I could see that many of the evil effigies I had seen travelling down Jalan Raya had ended up there. Thousands of people milled about, aghast at the towering implements of this ceremonial seance, under the lapis-lidded South pacific sky.  

My favorite ogoh ogoh was a gigantic slobbering bull, standing perhaps four meters high, replete with speakers bellowing horrific snorting and squealing sounds, flashing red eyes, paper-maiche ejaculate dripping between its legs, and steam pouring out of its snout in petulant bursts. It was a symphony of psychosis sent south- the demonic direction towards which the evil spirits were being coaxed.

After many of the ogoh ogoh in the village were arraigned in the football field, they were impossibly herded back out through the packed streets, twenty-piece gamelans and all, towards another large open area across Jalan Raya where they were ritually destroyed in a pyre while thousands cheered and jeered their symbolic cleansing from this small, peaceful island.

It was with exponentially more fascination for Balinese people and culture that I finally wandered back to my room, made sure to extinguish every light, and slumbered off to a expectantly evil-free New Year.