The Ritual Drama of the Sanni Demons: Collective Representations of Disease in Ceylon

Abstract

In this paper I shall analyse the rituals for Sanni Yaka (‘the demon of Sanni’). Sanni Yaka is also known as Kōla Sanniya and is a pantheistic deity who incorporates eighteen other demons known as Dahaaṭa Sanni (eighteen Sanni) or simply as Sanni Yakku (Sanni demons; Yakku is plural of Yakā). The rituals performed for the Sanni Yakku appear in a large-scale ceremony known as the Sanni Yäkuma, ‘the demon ceremony of the Sanni’. In my analysis I shall emphasize the dramatic aspects of the rituals, where the demons appear on stage in masked representations. In these rituals a great deal of comic dialogue and obscenities prevail. Their significance has been missed by Wirz who describes one of these rituals, the dolaha pelapāliya (spectacle for the twelve gods) in the following terms: ‘This scene is called simply ‘pelapāliya’, which may best be translated as ‘dance suite’, or ‘musical show.’ … In reality, it is only interposed for diversion and has no deeper meaning’ (1954: 59). A highly sophisticated anthropologist presumably refers to similar comic humour when he says that ‘after more hocus-pocus, Riri Yaka is eventually told that by the orders of the Buddha (Budu anin) and the power of the gods (deviyangē balē) he must accept the dola (offering) and remove his curse from the patient' (Ames, 1964: 42). Almost identical words are spoken to Kōla Sanniya in the Sanni Yäkuma ritual, but we shall interpret and unravel the symbolic meaning of these humorous ritual dramas and consider their evolution and social functions.