Bugis Traditional Religion

Pre-Islamic Bugis cosmology, as preserved in the Sureq Galigo cycle, describes three connected realms: Boting Langi, the upper world of the sky, Peretiwi, the underworld beneath the sea, and Ale Lino, the middle world where humans live. The cycle's opening movements tell how the high god Patoto'e sent his son down from Boting Langi and a daughter of the sea-realm rulers up from Peretiwi to marry and found the first Bugis kingdom, Luwuq, making the ruling lines of Bugis society descendants of both sky and sea. Composed in a formal poetic meter over centuries and first written down between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the cycle is often described as the longest single literary work in the world, running to hundreds of thousands of lines across dozens of manuscripts, no complete version of which survives in any one place.

Islam arrived in South Sulawesi's Bugis kingdoms in the early seventeenth century and became, within a few generations, the religion of the great majority of Bugis people. The older cosmology did not simply disappear: it persists inside Islamic practice as pangngadereng, the customary law and etiquette that still shapes Bugis social life, in the person of the bissu, ritual specialists once attached to the courts of Luwuq and its neighbors, and, most completely, in the To Lotang community of Sidenreng Rappang, who maintain the pre-Islamic religion as a distinct practice today, registered for legal purposes under Indonesia's recognition of Hinduism since 1966.

Bissu are ritual specialists of the Bugis courts, drawn from a fifth gender category alongside men, women, calabai and calalai in traditional Bugis reckoning, who kept and cared for royal regalia and gave blessings at weddings, at harvest, and for travelers including pilgrims departing for the hajj. Their standing rested on being neither fully male nor fully female, a state read within the tradition as uniting qualities the ordinary genders hold separately and so fitting them to mediate between the human world and the spirits of Boting Langi and Peretiwi.

The bissu priesthood survived the seventeenth century arrival of Islam and centuries of Dutch colonial rule largely intact, attached to South Sulawesi's surviving royal courts into the twentieth century. What did not survive was the Indonesian state's campaigns of forced religious and social conformity in the 1950s and 1960s, when bissu were targeted for both their pre-Islamic ritual role and their gender status; many were killed or forced to abandon the priesthood, and the courts that had sustained them lost most of their remaining authority in the same period. Sharyn Graham Davies's ethnographic study of Bugis gender categories documents a priesthood reduced from an order that once served every Bugis kingdom to a small number of surviving practitioners, its transmission to a new generation now uncertain. What is described here follows the published ethnographic record; no ritual formula or regalia practice is reproduced.