Leyak

Also Known As: also written léyak and leak; a person who practises pangléyakan, Balinese magical power
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Indonesian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A leyak is a living Balinese person who has taken pangléyakan down its left-hand road, where the same knowledge that heals is turned instead to disease, ruin and death.
Role in Mythos: The leyak is the human end of Balinese black magic, the pupil of the widow-witch Rangda and, through her, of the goddess Durga in the graveyard.
Relation to Humans: Illness that arrives without a cause is the situation in which a leyak is suspected, and a balian, a Balinese healer, is the person who says so. Because the suspect is a neighbour rather than a monster in a cave, the defences are domestic ones, drawings cut into bamboo or copper and buried in the yard.

The performance happens outside, at night, on the ground beside the village cemetery, at the temple the Balinese call the pura dalem, where Siwa and his consort Durga preside in her terrible form. A masked figure walks out and begins to call. The voice is low and gravelled and it is not addressed to the audience. It is a taunt thrown into the dark, daring whatever is out there to come and be looked at. It works because the leyak cannot let it pass. They crowd into the temple courtyard, and the dancer wearing Rangda’s mask draws all of that fury onto herself and away from the houses behind her.

Which is the first strange thing about the leyak. It can be provoked by insult, because it has a temper, because it is a person. The word covers a living human being who has taken up pangléyakan, the Balinese practice of magical power. Turned to the right, that knowledge heals and protects. Turned to the left, kiwa, it produces sickness, bad fortune and death. A leyak is what a student of the left hand becomes.

The shape the name brings to mind now is a head cut loose at the neck and hovering, fangs in the upper jaw, a tongue down to the chest, the heart and lungs and liver swinging beneath it on a wet rope of gut. Balinese wood-carvers have been selling that head to visitors for a long time and it hangs on walls all over the island. The oldest written scene of leyak at work is stranger, and closer to the bone, because it contains no monster at all. It is a group of people dancing in a graveyard at midnight, eyes red and bulging, hair hanging loose, half bent and naked, leaping, one of them moving like a tiger about to go, every tongue out and vibrating.

That scene comes from the Calon Arang, a manuscript of the Majapahit centuries written mostly in Old Javanese, kept in Bali in Balinese script, and put into Dutch in 1926. It is still the spine of everything performed since. The widow of Girah has a beautiful daughter, Ratna Manggali, whom nobody will marry because of what the mother is known to do. So the mother takes her book and her students to the cemetery at midnight and asks the goddess Durga for permission to destroy the population of the kingdom. Durga grants it with one condition, that the attack is not to reach too far into the centre of the city. Small hand instruments, the kamanak and the kangsi, sound at the crossroads while they dance. Then people start dying in the villages.

King Airlangga sends soldiers. They get into the house in the dead of night and find her asleep, and one of them takes her by the hair and raises his dagger, and his hand becomes too heavy to move. She wakes. Flame comes out of her mouth and her nose and her eyes and burns two of them where they stand, and the survivors carry the bodies home. Afterwards she returns to the graveyard, divides the ground beneath a banyan into five quarters and gives each student one quarter of the kingdom to empty. Then she picks out a corpse that has died recently and breathes it back to life, and while it is still thanking her for the favour a student opens its throat. She washes her hair in the blood, hangs the intestines round her neck as ornaments, and offers the body up.

Durga’s address is the cemetery, and that is not incidental. The Balinese name for the mythical burying ground is Setra Gandamayu, where ganda means sweetly scented, because the smell of fresh corpses is said to be the thing that draws her. Power on this island is something you go and ask for, in the right place, with an offering large enough, and a leyak’s whole apprenticeship is a run of increasingly expensive requests.

The knowledge itself lives on palm leaf. Balinese lontar carry medicine, divination and sorcery without much of a wall between them, so a healer’s collection can hold a text for children’s fevers, another for smallpox, another for aching joints, and beside them the drawings that harm and the drawings that keep harm out. The protective ones read as small practical instructions. Take yellow bamboo, cut the figure into it, set out three handfuls of yellow rice and the yolk of a duck’s egg, and make the offering twice; that is the charm for when illness attacks. Put the figure on a piece of copper and bury it in your grounds, and to anyone who arrives meaning you harm your land will look like open sea. There is one for cleansing a house where somebody has hanged himself and one for a place where a sudden epidemic has emptied the street. A leyak is somebody’s neighbour. The defences are therefore domestic, and they come out of exactly the same tradition as the attack.

What a leyak can do follows from where the power was obtained. It can move at night in a shape that is not its own and cross a village unseen. It can put sickness into a chosen house, and in ordinary Balinese life an unexplained illness is one of the things a healer may trace back to a living person. Rank matters, since a beginner is not a Calon Arang, and the strongest of them are credited with setting a sacred tree alight using nothing but a look.

The limits are built into the same machinery. Permission can be capped, as Durga caps it. A charm buried in the yard turns the power aside. And the sorcerer’s own book is the fatal object. In the story the sage Mpu Bharada marries his student into the household, has the book read through and commits what matters to memory, and after that nothing she throws lands. She burns the banyan and he restores it. She dies at the moment he names. Then, because he has not given her the chance to clean her soul, he brings her back, and she dies a second time with nothing left on her account, and is cremated. Her students are refused that mercy. They are made to wait for their ordinary deaths and carry what they did into whatever comes after.

The belief has outlasted its setting. In Palasari, a Catholic village in the west of the island with no rites and no ritual objects to prop such a thing up, léyak talk is alive anyway, sustained on stories, gossip, rumour and the testimony of people who say they have seen. It surfaces when somebody falls ill and a healer is asked what is really wrong. In the shadow theatre, puppeteers have begun bringing a live actor onto the screen among the flat leather figures as a watangan matah, a living corpse, and the point of it is a contest: the dalang is telling the unseen that he is not afraid of it. Nobody in Bali is treating any of this as a story about the past.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Leyak?

A leyak is a living human being in Balinese belief who practises pangléyakan, magical power, and turns it to its left-hand use for sickness, misfortune and death. The same body of knowledge, turned the other way, heals and protects. By day a leyak is an ordinary member of the village.

What does a Leyak look like?

Balinese carving shows the leyak as a severed head with fangs and a long hanging tongue, flying with the heart, lungs and liver still attached beneath it, and those heads are a common wall decoration on the island. The oldest written description is different and shows no monster at all, only sorcerers dancing in a graveyard with red bulging eyes, loose hair and protruding tongues. Both images belong to the same tradition.

Who is the queen of the Leyak?

Rangda is the widow-witch who commands the leyak, and in the Calon Arang manuscript she is the sorceress of Girah who begs the goddess Durga for permission to destroy King Airlangga’s kingdom with plague. Her pupils are the leyak, and they are kept under her control and through her under Durga’s. When the masked Rangda calls the leyak to a temple courtyard, she pulls their power onto herself and away from the villagers.

What do Leyak do to people?

Leyak are blamed for illness, misfortune and death arriving without an ordinary explanation. When somebody in Bali falls sick in a way that cannot be accounted for, a balian, a traditional healer, may identify a leyak as the cause, which means the suspicion lands on a living neighbour rather than on a creature. In the Calon Arang the sorceress and her students spread an epidemic across a whole kingdom.

How do you keep a Leyak away?

Protection comes from the same palm-leaf manuscripts that teach the sorcery. Balinese magical drawings are cut into yellow bamboo or inscribed on copper, paired with offerings such as yellow rice and duck egg, and set at the house or buried in the grounds, one of them promising that a hostile visitor will see open sea where your land should be. The Calonarang performance at the village death temple works on the same principle at village scale.