We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
FAR EASTERN SHADOWS
Unlike the Indian, Siamese, and early Balinese figures, which are often shown full-face or in half-profile, and are rendered with convincing realism even when they wield four arms, the heads and feet of the Javanese puppets are always in profile, while their bodies, and very often their eyes, are frontal; and these bodies are transformed into decorative curves and spirals. The convention is due in part to the fact that the Javanese, as Mohammedans, were prohibited from making direct likenesses of human beings. And the use of shapes suggesting birds' heads may have originally been a deliberate allusion to the belief that the souls of the departed took the form of birds; this seems all the more likely when it is remembered that the shadows were at first associated with the dead.
The earlier the figures, the more stylized they tend to be. Although there is mention of the wajang or shadow show in the eleventh century in Java, the earliest known shade, now in the Munich Ethnographical Museum, dates from the seventeenth century and came from the collection of a Jesuit priest who died in 1732. It represents Banuwati, the consort of Duryodhanas, but bears scarcely any relation to the human form. The body is cased in the most intricate filigree work from which the forward-jutting sharp black profile on its snaky neck and the thin expressive arms emerge like the head and limbs of a beetle.
The later and more frequently encountered figures are naked to the waist, and the ornament is confined to the head and clothing. They all conform to distinct types moulded by tradition. A thin nose, flat brow, narrow slanting eyes, and compressed lips indicate high rank and intellectual power; a short thick nose, a rounded brow, and broad mouth signify physical strength and nobility of spirit; half-closed eyes suggest the peace of fulfilment; monsters, demons, and monkey-figures are all shown with snarling open mouths and pointed teeth, while the hair is coiled into a crescent-shaped horn. But there are endless subtle variations on each prescribed type; each vigorous shade impresses its own strong personality on the spectator, and together they form a bewildering, intensely vital assembly of gods and goddesses, heroes, ancestors, chieftains, warriors and hunters, kings and princes, fearsome giants, twice the size of both men and gods, sorcerers and legions of demons; and all are mocked, when the power and passion of the action are too great to be borne, by the grotesque clowns, Semar and his sons, Gareng, Petruk, and Bagong. The stories they enact are taken, like the Indian shadow plays, from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and also from the purely Javanese Manik Maja,
55