“Disreputable Magicians,” the Dark Destroyer, and the Trickster Lord: Reflections on Semai Religion and a Possible Common Religious Base in South and Southeast Asia

Abstract

Recent studies of globalization tend to stress its novelties, especially new patterns of consumption and mediated communication (e.g., Appadurai 1996). But the view from the margins and from the lowest social strata of globalizing states seems less novel. This paper explores the ways in which the impact of anciently emergent slaveholding despotisms and their colonies seems refracted in the cosmology of southeast Asian peoples as a stupid terrorist storm god, whose literally bestial power is available to humans who can surrender to it in an almost erotic ecstasy of yearning and desire. These cosmologies, the paper suggests, constitute a still relevant, nuanced critique of world-conquering globalization. We see them only as eccentrics or as survivors…locked into a religiose fantasy-world; they are quaint historical fossils…But where social or political assumptions or enquiries into value are at issue, then the answer must be very much more complex. The danger is that we should confuse the reputability of beliefs, and the reputability of those who professed them, with depth or shallowness. (Thompson 1993:107, 108) Hinduism was thus a religious accumulation derived from all periods of India's history; primitive cults of fertility, hero reverence, and sun worship were…overlaid with an elaborate system of philosophical speculation. Hinduism countenanced almost every level of religious belief from crude animism to metaphysical monism. Hinduism could be transferred, therefore, only in a selective way…During the development of Hinduism in India, Siva worship absorbed a large number of pre-Aryan spirit cults. It did the same in Southeast Asia…(Cady 1964:36–37)