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 This week's Sanur Weekly tells the story of a traditional dance ceremony gone terribly wrong, although perhaps not so terribly surprisingly so. The incident took place during a traditional ritual called Napak Pertiwi, also known as the Rangda Dance. The Rangda is the terrifying demon queen of the Leyaks in Balinese mythology, a child eating monster who leads an army of evil witches against the forces of good. 

Now, the participants in these rituals are very serious about their roles indeed, known even to go into a trance while performing their parts. The young man, only 16 years old, performing the part of the Rangda was said to have been in just such a trance during the height of the performance, and his counterpart, holding a ritual knife called a keris, thrust the knife into the Rangda's chest. The boy was rushed to a nearby hospital but was declared dead on arrival.                          

Was the boy with the keris in a trance as well, or was the first boy's performance of the Rangda simply so authentic that his counterpart overreacted? This is not reported. 

The psychologist Carl G. Jung tells the story of a certain witch doctor in an African tribe who had inspired such fear in the tribe that a member could actually fall dead at the point of his finger. Faith is powerful indeed, but not always in a positive way. 

I know a girl here in Bali who was once attending one of these Rangda ceremonies, and when the man playing the Rangda crept up behind her as a joke, the poor girl shrieked wildly in utter fear and ran headlong perhaps a half mile before stopping to catch her breath. And she is still terrified of the Rangda to this day. Of course she knows that this was merely a man in a costume. And yet, part of her doesn't know this at all. 

Other news of the day described the ongoing COVID vaccine plans, this being the Chinese vaccine approved in Indonesia. Oddly, as it will seem to we Americans, elderly people and/or people with preexisting conditions have been judged not eligible to receive the vaccine. A bit counterintuitive, it would seem, and the direct opposite of the western programs, but there you have it. In any case, given the extraordinarily low vaccination rate in Indonesia, nothing much is likely to happen before the middle or the end of this year.