When we move from the externals which could be observed by outsiders to the belief systems of individual Austronesians, it must be immediately acknowledged that the sources are inadequate to allow us to confirm or deny any of the great hypotheses about religious change. Yet to dodge it is in a sense to trivialize one of the most momentous intellectual passages for an individual or a society into a matter of outward social conformity. I have little doubt that there was a large-scale movement towards a more modern mentalité in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,^[1] but it is almost impossible to explicate this without frequent reference to religious change at a much later period when there were ethnographers to record it.

The religions of the Austronesians were characterized by a baffling diversity of spirits and practices. When the Dutch attempted to investigate the religion of Seram (central Maluku) in 1684, their conclusion was that “the informants differed so widely that it was impossible to describe the system, and moreover they are so superstitious that it would almost take a book of paper to note the details of each negeri” (cited Knaap 1987:71). Modern ethnographers have faced similar difficulties. Conklin discerned 1500 distinct spirits among the Ifugao (Luzon), and Volkman (1985:34) “perhaps thousands” among Toraja. This has not prevented either contemporary missionaries and observers or modern scholars from identifying an underlying pattern of Austronesian or Southeast Asian belief.

As in other pre-modern traditions, there was no distinction between a religious and a secular dimension. The material world was suffused with spiritual forces, and to survive and flourish in it everybody had to know how to manipulate them. In a sense it is modern religions, notably Christianity, Judaism, and modernist Islam, by largely abandoning their “functions of explanation, prediction and control” of everyday events, and withdrawing to an other-worldly personal piety where they do not compete directly with scientific understandings of nature (Horton 1971:104), which created the category “primitive religion”. The older religious systems of the Austronesians, on the other hand, can only be understood as intimately involved in every significant event of daily life (for modern explanations, see Hoskins 1987:139; Volkman 1985:33). Ritual and shamanistic activity was usually designed for immediate practical ends. Spiritual forces had to be manipulated to cure illness, ensure fertility, increase power, safeguard the living particularly at dangerous life crises, and ensure that the dead were assisted through the most traumatic of all transitions into a contented afterlife. Feasting and animal sacrifice was made to ensure the spirits were on side for every personal crisis, including

the recovery of a sick person, the prosperous voyage of those embarking on the sea, a good harvest in the sowed lands, a propitious result in wars, a successful delivery in childbirth, and a happy outcome in married life (Plasencia 1589:191).

Even when Filipinos wanted to pick a fruit from a tree, plant or harvest rice, cross a stream or pass any major landmark, they would ask permission from the protective spirit and make some appropriate offering (Chirino 1604:298-299; Ortiz 1731, cited Rafael 1988:112). European observers were struck by the feasts and offerings to the spirits of the dead to aid the sick, and the attribution of illness and premature death to incorrect ritual or malign manipulation of the spirit world by some enemy.

In the African context, Horton (1971:101) has described a two-tier cosmology in which “lesser spirits” controlled the affairs of the local community, while a “supreme being” presided remotely over the entire cosmos. The supreme being was of greater interest to Africans who were drawn out of the local society for reasons such as trade, administration or enslavement, but for those immersed in the settled agricultural community had little role. Southeast Asia too had a concept of a somewhat remote creator, often named with reference to Sanskrit terminology — Batara Guru (Betala in Tagalog) or dewata — even though grounded in a specifically local mythology. Muslim and Christian missionaries naturally took special interest in these shadowy notions of a supreme creator god, but declined to use them to translate their own awesome concepts. Arabic Allah and Spanish Dios became the terms for God in Malay and Tagalog respectively. For older uses such as validating oaths, however, older terms seemed to carry more weight, especially in Javanese, Bugis and Makassarese (Noorduyn 1955:279; Andaya 1981:107-112).

Horton (1971) makes the point for Africa that even without new religions larger numbers of people would have directed their attention and ritual to the high god as the expansion of trade, communication and writing rendered local spirits unhelpful. The religion of spirits was not readily portable, and those who moved into the cosmopolitan trading cities had need of a personal faith which was universally valid. A similar point has been made for northern Thailand by O’Connor (1989), and for Sumba by Hoskins (1987:146).

The way in which the rulers of Wajo and Tallo’, the two most commercialized states in South Sulawesi, moved towards monotheism before they accepted Islam (Noorduyn 1955:262-263; Reid 1981:14-15) suggests a similar kind of interpretation.

In a period of dynamic commercialization and urbanization, the consistency of scriptural monotheism was as much an advantage as its portability. Christian missionaries presented overwhelming evidence of the real terror in which many Austronesians lived because of the demands of malevolent spirits, and saw their task as the casting out of these demons in the name of Christ (Chirino 1604:300; Velarde 1749:71). Islam did not share this desire to make war on the spirits, since good djinn as well as bad were familiar themes. But Islam offered a refuge from the domination of these demanding spirits in a different vision of the cosmos. This was a predictable, moral world, in which the devout would be protected by God from all that the spirits could do, and would eventually be rewarded by an afterlife in paradise. Even the poor and the powerless, whose suffering at the hands of the spirits might not end with death, could hope to be rewarded in a Muslim heaven if they lived lives of personal virtue.

This new vision must have encouraged what Weber characterized as a rationalization of religion, or an “increase in distance … between man and the sacred” (Geertz 1973:174). It depended on a simple but consistent concept of eternal reward and punishment, graphically illustrated in the Koran and much other Islamic literature. Preachers of both Islam and Christianity rendered into Austronesian vernaculars the torments which awaited in hell those foolish enough to prefer earthly pleasures to their eternal welfare, and those who rejected the true faith for its rivals (see examples in Rafael 1988:179-184; Hamzah Fansuri, Poems 1986:76, 92, 132).

Although the prominence of heaven and hell were new, the concepts may not have been. In their desire to find evocative terms to translate the Muslim and Christian heaven, proselytists made use of already localized words. Malay-speaking Muslims adopted the Sanskrit swarga, the abode of Siva, and naraka for heaven and hell respectively (Malay surga and neraka). The Spanish used Tagalog langit (sky) or other terms implying profound peace and contentment when discussing the joys of heaven.

In a moral universe, individuals provided heroic examples of moral and spiritual eminence. The ascetism of the Muslim sufis was particularly appealing because it shared elements already familiar from Indian traditions. The closeness of the Sufi saint to God was popularly thought to be evident in his supernatural powers and the bright glow (Malay cahaya, personalizing Arabic nur) which suffused him. The writers of Malay histories certainly believed that these self-evident powers were sufficient to convert many (Sejarah Melayu 1612:129; Hikayat Banjar 1968:420), and external sources confirm that at least such outstanding Sufi masters as Hamzah Fansuri, Syamsud-din as-Samatrani and Abdurrauf of Singkel in Aceh, and Shaikh Yusuf in Makassar and Banten, were popularly revered even during their lifetimes.

There must have been few if any Austronesians who doubted that spirits continued to interfere with the living. But Islam and Christianity provided predictable channels to tame them and scholarly traditions within which to pursue explanatory problems in a rational framework.