Leyak

Also Known As: Balinese léyak, also spelled leak
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Indonesian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: A leyak is a living person who has studied pangiwa, the left-hand path of the Balinese magical manuscripts, and who leaves human shape at night to hunt.
Role in Mythos: The leyak is the human face of black magic in Bali, the neighbour behind an unexplained illness and the pupil behind the witch-queen Rangda.
Relation to Humans: Balinese who fall sick without cause may take the case to a balian, a folk healer, whose diagnosis and trance turn suspicion toward a leyak living among them. Protection is domestic rather than heroic, consisting of charmed drawings buried in the yard, inscribed on bamboo, or hung at the gate.

The flame comes over the graveyard wall at the seaward end of the village, where the death temple stands and the ground is coldest. It moves at the height of a man’s head, blue at the edge, and it does not behave like a lamp. Dogs start somewhere behind the compound walls and keep going. In the morning nobody will mention it directly, and everyone will know which house it came from.

That is the essential thing about the leyak, and the thing the postcards get wrong. It is not a creature that lives in a cave and waits for travellers. It is a person. By daylight the leyak buys rice, attends the temple festivals, has children and grandchildren, and is greeted politely in the lane. The transformation is a technique, not a species, and the word covers both the practitioner and the shape it takes.

The technique is written down. Bali keeps its knowledge on lontar, palm-leaf manuscripts inscribed with a stylus and blackened with soot, and in the Balinese library the categories that Europeans separate are braided together. Manuscripts of medicine, sorcery and almanac divination flow into one another, and a healer’s usada text for children’s fevers can sit a few leaves away from instructions for causing them. Miguel Covarrubias, who lived in Bali in the 1930s and had copies of these magic books made for him, translated one that announces itself flatly: this is the pangiwa, the left-hand path, of thirty sorts and of all kinds. If the owner is not prepared enough to use it fully, the text says, he can at least use it to guard the house, and then no leyak will dare to come in. The drawings that follow, the rerajahan, are described as the weapons of the nine gods of the directions. A few lines later the same manuscript explains how to make a person ill.

The same book that shields the house teaches the sickness.

What the leyak looks like depends on how far it has gone. The image every Balinese child knows, carved in wood and hung on walls, is a head with a great fanged mouth and a tongue hanging down like a wet strap, lifted away from the body with the heart and lungs and liver still swinging beneath it, wet, warm, trailing. Lower on the ladder are the animal forms, the pig that trots out from behind a shrine, the monkey with a bad expression, the ball of fire drifting where no fire should be. Covarrubias reproduced a leyak drawn from a Balinese manuscript, and the tradition of picturing the creature is at least as old as the tradition of picturing the charms that keep it out. Balinese ethnography, though, keeps returning to the plain fact underneath the iconography: whatever shape is seen at night, someone in the village is missing from their bed.

The origin story runs through the most powerful play on the island. Calon Arang, the widow of Girah, held two books of tremendous magic, and no man in the kingdom would marry her daughter for fear of the mother. Insulted, she resolved to destroy the realm with plague, and she taught her pupils in the graveyard. The king sent his chief minister against her. When he came, she took her furious form, Rangda, and the fight was on. Balinese historians preserved a colder version of the same event, in which the plague that emptied the villages in the eleventh century was sent by a witch who was, by some accounts, King Erlangga’s own mother.

The Calonarang drama has been performed since the 1890s, and it is not staged for entertainment alone. The widow is played by a priest, in trance. Scenes are taken out of the temple to the crossroads and the cemetery, which along with the seashore are the most spiritually dangerous ground the Balinese recognise. At the climax the villagers rush Rangda with their kris daggers, she turns her white cloth on them, and the blades come back around against their owners’ chests. Priests move among the collapsed dancers with incense and holy water and bring them back. Sacred masks of Rangda and of the lion-like Barong are kept in the village temples year-round and revered, which tells you how little of this is metaphor.

Rangda is the queen of the leyak, and the leyak are her students. Their powers are the powers of the manuscripts they have studied. They can put on another body, cross the village unseen, and send illness into a chosen house, and the worst of them are said to feed at the graveyard and to hunt for pregnant women and newborns, which is why a Balinese birth is so heavily hedged with ritual. Death and misfortune have a name, and the name has an address.

Their limits come from the same system that grants the power. A rerajahan drawn on yellow bamboo and planted in the yard, a tumbal amulet buried in the ground, a charm inscribed on copper, all of these turn the leyak away, and they are made from the same manuscript tradition that taught it to fly. The counter-move to a leyak is not a hero with a blade but a balian with a text. And a leyak is still a person, which means it can be suspected, watched, gossiped about and named. A recent study of a Catholic Balinese village found the belief thriving there with no rituals or objects to sustain it at all, carried entirely on stories, rumour and testimony, surfacing whenever somebody fell ill and a healer was asked what was really wrong.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Leyak?

A leyak is a practitioner of black magic in Balinese folklore, a living human being who has studied pangiwa, the left-hand path of the Balinese magical manuscripts, and who is believed to leave human form at night. The word describes both the sorcerer and the shape they take. In daylight a leyak looks like an ordinary neighbour.

What does a Leyak look like?

The most famous form is a bald head with bulging eyes, fangs and a long hanging tongue, flying free of its body with the heart, lungs and liver still attached beneath it. Leyak are also said to appear as a pig, a monkey, or a drifting ball of fire. Carved leyak heads with long tongues are a common decoration on Balinese walls.

Who is the queen of the Leyak?

Rangda is the queen of the leyak. She is the terrible form taken by Calon Arang, the widow of Girah, who set out to destroy a Javanese kingdom with plague after no man would marry her daughter. Masks of Rangda are kept and revered in Balinese village temples and appear in the Calonarang dance drama.

What do Leyak do to people?

Leyak are blamed for illness, misfortune and death, and the most feared of them are said to haunt graveyards and to prey on pregnant women and newborn children. When a Balinese person falls sick without explanation, a balian, or traditional healer, may identify a leyak as the cause, and suspicion falls on a living neighbour.

How do you keep a Leyak away?

Protection comes from the same manuscript tradition that produces the sorcery. Charmed drawings called rerajahan and protective amulets called tumbal are inscribed on bamboo, copper or stone and placed at the house or buried in the ground, and one Balinese magic text promises that with them in place no leyak will dare to enter.