The day Syahdan Mangunwidjojo stepped out of Wiragunan
Penitentiary, something had changed in his eyes. The guards noticed it, though
they couldn’t put their finger on what exactly seemed different. He’d gone in a
broken man—just another washed-up revolutionary from the Indonesian Republic
Meditation Front—but he’d come out… touched. That’s what folks in Cold Creek
might’ve called it. Touched.
(And maybe not by the hand of God, either.)
The revelation had come to him on the seventeenth night of
his imprisonment, when the moonlight sliced through the barred window of his
cell like a silver blade. He would later tell his followers—and there would be
followers, oh yes—that he’d felt the ancient Javanese concept of “manunggaling
kawula gusti” flow through him like electricity. Unity between servant and
lord. The Big Cosmic Connection, you might say.
Only this wasn’t some peace-and-love hippie bullshit. This
was old. Dark. The kind of revelation that sinks its hooks into your brain and
never lets go.
And that’s when the voice spoke to him.
Every prison has its ghosts, just ask anyone who’s done time
at Devil’s Hollow or Ironwood Pen. Wiragunan was no different. The voice told
Mangunwidjojo to go to Pasareyan Imogiri, where generations of Javanese kings
lay moldering in their tombs. Told him to kneel before the sepulcher of
Pakubuwono IX and wait for further instructions.
So he did.
Jesus Christ, he actually did.
The tomb of Pakubuwono IX was the kind of place where the
air feels ten degrees cooler than it should, where your breath catches in your
throat for no good reason. Mangunwidjojo kneeled on the stone floor for three
days, his knees bleeding through his pants, whispering words that no sane man
would understand. On the third day, the voice returned, and this time it had a
name for what was about to be born.
“Agama Djawa Asli Republik Indonesia,” Mangunwidjojo
whispered, testing the words on his tongue. The Original Javanese Religion of
the Republic of Indonesia. ADARI for short.
(Acronyms were always a hit with cults. Just ask the NKVD or
KGB or, hell, even the PTA.)
Imam Thalhah, who wrote about these events years later,
insisted ADARI wasn’t an organization but a teaching—a “paguron.” But that’s
what they always say, don’t they? That’s what Jim Jones said about Peoples
Temple, what David Koresh said about the Branch Davidians. It’s never a cult.
It’s a family. A teaching. A way of life.
Indra Harahap filled in some of the blanks about our boy
Mangunwidjojo. Born in 1829 in Surakarta. Volkschool education, finished up in
1922. Did the math on that? Something ain’t right—but in the realm of ADARI,
time became as flexible as logic. They called him “Djoyowolu,” and later “Ki
Mangunwasito.” Names have power. Changing names has even more.
After school, Mangunwidjojo wound up working at a railway
workshop in Yogyakarta. Picture him there, arms black with grease to the
elbows, the rhythmic clang of metal on metal echoing through the yard like a
heartbeat. Like a summoning.
Eventually, he hooked up with Ki Tjokrowardojo, the big
cheese behind BASRI. This Tjokrowardojo fella was already something of a
celebrity in Surakarta, where the veil between worlds has always been thinner
than most places.
During the revolution—the real one, with blood and bullets,
not the spiritual mind-fuck that was brewing in Mangunwidjojo’s gray
matter—BASRI members fought like demons against the colonial occupiers. They
joined militias, killed invaders, became heroes in the traditional sense.
(The kind that bleed red, not black.)
So when Mangunwidjojo came back to Surakarta preaching this
new gospel of ADARI, with its roots tangled up in BASRI’s teachings, folks were
inclined to listen. Heroes get a hearing, that’s a universal truth from Jakarta
to Jonesport, Maine.
The “Djawa Asli” part of his new religion’s name was key.
Original Java. The old ways. None of that Abrahamic nonsense with its fixed
prayer times and holy books. ADARI didn’t truck with scriptures or printed
prayers. Everything was oral, passed from mouth to ear, like a secret or a
virus.
As Mohammad Rasjidi put it in his 1967 book—and I’m quoting
here, because some things are too perfect to paraphrase—“Secret knowledge is
transmitted without documents or archives, through oral means within limited
circles, and with special secret intermediaries.”
(Sound familiar? It should. It’s how the nastiest ideas have
always spread, from the recipes for making napalm to the words that, when
spoken backward at midnight, might just open doors better left closed.)
This kind of occult knowledge transfer wasn’t unique to
Indonesia. You see it in Kabbalah, in modern paganism, in those groups that
meet in the basements of Masonic lodges after the regular members have gone
home. Artawijaya drew the connection in his book on Freemasonry and Theosophy,
pointing out that all these traditions share the same ambitious goal: creating
a “super-human-being.”
Making gods out of mortals. Old as dirt, that idea. Old as
the serpent in the garden.
Where Mangunwidjojo zigged when others zagged was in his
choice of deity. He didn’t nominate himself for godhood—an unusual display of
humility in the messiah business. Instead, he chose Sukarno—Bung Karno, the
first president of Indonesia—as his superman, his Übermensch, his Hyang Wasesa
Ning Tunggal.
Only one problem with that plan.
Sukarno wasn’t buying what Mangunwidjojo was selling.
“Many believe that I am a god, possessing magical healing
powers,” Sukarno said in his autobiography, his voice practically dripping with
disdain from the page. When the rumors about his divine status really started
picking up steam, he had a journalist from Kedaulatan Rakyat publish his
official “thanks but no thanks” to the whole prophet gig.
(Gods don’t usually deny their divinity. That’s how you know
the real ones from the pretenders. The real ones never have to insist.)
To survive in Indonesia—as Simuh pointed out in his book on
Sufism—mystical movements like ADARI learned to cozy up to the government. They
became like those remora fish that attach themselves to sharks, feeding off the
scraps without getting eaten themselves. ADARI followers popularized the phrase
“sepi ing pamrih, rame ing gawe”—don’t focus on worldly rewards, but always
support positive action.
Translation: Don’t rock the boat. Don’t challenge the powers
that be. Blend in.
So ADARI got itself officially recognized in the Broad
Outlines of State Policy, tucked safely into Article 29, paragraph 2.
Legitimacy. Protection. A blind eye turned to what happened during their
ceremonies.
Joining ADARI wasn’t like signing up for the Rotary Club.
You had to fast on white rice for seven days—nothing else, just rice, until
your mind started to slip sideways and the voices got louder. You had to accept
Sukarno as a prophet (whether he wanted the job or not) and Pancasila—the five
principles of Indonesian national philosophy—as your scripture. Government
regulations became divine law.
(Not so different from any other religion, when you strip
away the fancy language.)
Mangunwidjojo collected Sukarno’s speeches like holy relics.
Radio broadcasts, newspaper articles, ministerial publications—all became
sacred texts in his peculiar gospel. ADARI taught “theosophy toward the One
Almighty God,” whatever the hell that meant, and promised the “perfection of
life.”
They even conducted their own marriages. Picture the scene:
a bride and groom dressed head-to-toe in black—because black, they believed,
was the original color of Javanese culture—standing before an ADARI elder,
exchanging vows that had nothing to do with any god recognized by the
mainstream religions. The marriage certificate cost 8.50 rupiah. Cheap at twice
the price, if it meant your soul belonged to ADARI.
Every Sunday, they held what they called a “rasulan”—part
feast, part community service project. They’d clean the streets, sweep the
temple grounds, cook together, eat together. Just like any small-town church
social back in the States. The Ladies’ Auxiliary of the First Baptist Church of
Harlow would’ve recognized the format, if not the content.
And Mangunwidjojo himself? The prophet conducted his own
rituals. Every 35 days—not 30, not 40, but precisely 35—he would immerse
himself in the Opak River in Yogyakarta. He even wrote to President Sukarno
about these baptisms, as if the president would be impressed by his devotion.
ADARI followers had their own prayer schedule, too. Morning
facing east, noon facing up (toward what, exactly?), afternoon facing west,
night spent in meditation. No bowing or prostrating like Muslims. Just standing
still, staring, concentrating until the visions came.
(And they did come. Oh yes, they came. That’s the thing
about staring into the abyss. Eventually, it starts staring back.)
They celebrated their holy days—the 1st of Ashura as their
New Year, and the 17th of Ramadan as their independence day, mirroring both
Indonesia’s actual Independence Day (August 17, 1945) and some date in the
Islamic calendar that held significance for reasons known only to Mangunwidjojo
and whatever whispered to him in the dark.
From the outside, ADARI might have looked like just another
harmless spiritual movement in a part of the world where such things sprouted
like mushrooms after rain. But underneath the bland bureaucratic language of
official recognition, beneath the community service and the black wedding
clothes and the rice fasts, something older was stirring.
Something that had been waiting in the tombs of Javanese
kings for the right vessel to come along.
And in Syahdan Mangunwidjojo, touched by whatever spoke to
him in Wiragunan Prison on that moonlit night, it found exactly what it needed.
God help us all.
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