Pembaron: An East Javanese Rite of Priestly Rebirth

Abstract

Although courtly literature provides insight into the high tradition of Old Javanese Hinduism, the nature of popular Javanese religion in former times remains a topic of considerable obscurity. In his voluminous masterpiece on pre-Islamic Java, the Dutch historian Th. G. Th. Pigeaud identifies some 218 clerical estates that existed in rural east Java in the fourteenth century, speculating as to the nature of their social and religious organization. But none of these Hindu and Buddhist clerical communities survived into the modern era, and as a result we know little of their relation to popular Javanese religion. For years scholars have lamented the dearth of primary materials on popular Javanese Hinduism both during and after the fall of the last of Java's major Hindu-Buddhist courts, Majapahit. At the height of its power during the second half of the fourteenth century, Majapahit was conquered by an alliance of Islamic principalities in the early sixteenth century.