When you go chasing myths, sometimes you find them. Like finding constellations in the night sky. Your mind connecting dots, stories from elsewhere coming into focus. Told and retold and passed down through time and space. Origins always questionable. But sometimes when the pieces are too disjointed, you end up stitching them together to create something entirely your own.
The parabola like structures came into view the moment we crossed over into Tana Toraja, located in south central Sulawesi, a nearly three hour drive into the mountains from the coast. The U shaped curve of the rooftops towered over everything. From varying angles, they resembled boats, buffalo horns, a smile on stilts. Clusters of them lined the countryside and villages, all adorned with motifs of buffalo, stars clusters, and suns. Like giant spirit houses overseeing the land.
We asked our driver to tell us about them. The tongkonan are made like boats, he told us. We nudged for more. Like ships? Yes, ships, he said. Our ancestors sailed here from China.
An unlikely story considering what we already knew, but we didn't want to directly ask the question on our mind. We wanted the people of Toraja to tell us their own stories. But getting to the heart of what we really wanted to know, we soon realized, was going to be more difficult than we imagined.
He turned to us and raised his eyebrows. Want to go to a funeral? I can take you to one tomorrow. A common question that we would get asked again and again.
We declined.
I first heard of the Toraja back in 2008 when I first came across the Ring of Fire documentary that got me hooked on Inodonsia. The Blair brothers did a fantastic job of honing in on the mysterious, the tribal, those things that lurk in the shadows of far flung islands. They dug under hundreds of years of colonization, missionary invasions, and tourism and wiped them from their documentary entirely, leaving only the impression that this island nation was something of a black box full of intrigue and wildly undiscovered.
The first thing we did when we reached the village where we were staying was go in search of the library. It had popped up on google maps and wasn't far from where we were staying. Libraries are places of known and hidden knowledge, new and ancient stories and old maps and discoveries in the waiting. A good place to start our research, to probe into the deeper layers of Toraja.
When we first approached, it appeared to be closed. The door latched and locked. The front window lined with a sheer pink curtain flapping in the breeze. Or perhaps, it had been simply abandoned.
The second time we went by, the door was wide open and a young girl stood in the doorway eyeing us as we slowed. Loka Banne, we asked and pointed to the sign. She only smiled. Over her shoulder, I glanced inside the house. It didn't appear to be a library at all, not anymore, but someone's home. Down the pathway that led along the side of the house, we could see old shelves lined against the building. It's not the fact that this was no longer a library that makes this story odd, but how leading up to our visit we had asked a hand full of people about it--our driver, the folks at our guesthouse, the tourist information center--and no one knew of a library or even bookshop that ever existed in this particular village. To add to the strangeness was the fact their Instagram page had only been updated a month prior.
A fact I know all too well is that knowledge well hidden and denied is often the most potent.
Toraja, depending on who you ask, can be translated a number of ways--people from the uplands, the north, or people from above. The Blair brothers first came to Toraja on the tail of a myth that claimed the Toraja descended from the stars, specifically the Pleiades, and that their houses were build to resemble the starships they arrived on. When the brothers asked about the myth, the people nodded. Yes, an old myth, they'd said, a dying one. The story had morphed. But it was true that they had descended from heaven to earth and will return again--the journey illustrated in the shape of their roofs.
Death is a big theme is Toraja--most everything geared toward tourists is about going to a funeral (where, yes, you will see buffalo and pigs being sacrificed), graveyards etched into the side of rock walls, or caves full of skulls and bones. And certain times of year, they bring out the bodies of the deceased to redress them. All very unusual for a region that (according to sources) claims to be mostly Christian. A number of churches scatter the region, but otherwise, nothing about the culture reflects anything remotely Christian. We asked a tour guide hanging out at our guesthouse about it. Oh, he said and smirked. It's just easier to keep our rituals alive if we say we're Christian.
In Indonesia, every citizen must be registered under one of six recognized religions--Islam, Catholic, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, or (more recently) Confucianism. In reality, they choose the one that closest resembles their region's beliefs, or perhaps more accurately, they choose the one that is the most lenient in their rules and practices, the one they can most likely get away with keeping their rituals alive while still hiding behind the veneer of an official religion. When the Blair brothers tried to talk with a tribe deep in the jungle of Papua about who the figures were on their tattoos and in their artworks, they clamped up and said: we only believe in Jesus, deep suspicion in their voices and eyes.
Outside of one of the cave graveyards one rainy afternoon, we finally asked a guide directly: is it true the Toraja people came from the stars, from the Pleiades? He smiled and shrugged. Old myth, he said. That belief died when the last Torajan king died. No one really believes that anymore.
Or do they?
People have had reasons across time and space to hide their origins, to hide the truths they know and fully understand. To hide the fact they are witches, that they travel through dreams to other worlds, that they sometimes glance over their shoulder to lives they've left behind and will never speak of again. To march lockstep into a modern world not meant for them. And so they hide behind layers of prescribed beliefs, ritualistic tourism, or a story told over and over until they start to believe it themselves.
We did not attend a sacrificial funeral. We never figured out what happened to the library though we did find another closed one--that again, no one knew anything about. But we did begin to pierce the layers of stories and piece together a different one.
During our time in Tana Toraja, I happened to be reading The Ten Thousand Doors of January--an epic novel that embraces escapism, portals, and most of all the power of stories. Perhaps the Torajans did come through a Pleiadian portal on ships that landed them in the middle of Sulawesi island. And perhaps they have spent their lives caught between the truth and feeling the repercussions of living in a world that doesn't allow their truth to exist at all. The door to their truth permanently closed. The last of their story lingering in the pages of old books, documentaries, and those who refuse to let stories die.
What are your thoughts on myths and legends, stories passed through time from unknown origins? Have you ever pieced together your own myth from the pieces scattered in the stars and across far flung lands?
