So Molly and I set off with our guide Adi (while the boys opted to go bike riding and get manicures). We first visited a traditional village of the Batak peoples who are descended from Mongols via Burma, and until the early 19th century lived in perfect isolation thanks to rumors of their cannibalism. They were indeed cannibals who worshipped many spirits. Our guide explained that criminals were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by beheading. But first the victim was tied and his body scratched. If he did not bleed he was considered a powerful spirit and the medicine man was brought in to weaken him. The medicine man would rub breast milk, considered very powerful since it provides life, on the victim and then he would bleed. For further torture, they rubbed lime and salt in his wounds. By this time the victim, unconscious, was dragged over to the chopping block. If the executioner did not cut off his head in one blow, he too was killed.
Charlie receives a blessing from the local medicine man at Lake Toba The head and blood would be collected in a bucket and the council members would drink the blood, believing that it would transfer a powerful spirit. Then the victim’s heart and liver were removed, chopped up and mixed with some chiles and handed out to the attendees. Finally, his flesh was stripped and mixed with buffalo meat and barbequed for the whole village to eat. Yum.
The last execution occurred in 1816 before the Batak converted to Christianity. It was not necessarily the charisma of the missionaries that created all of the conversions, but rather quinine. The island was infested with malarial mosquitoes and when the villagers saw that the missionaries could cure them, when their own medicine men had failed, they easily switched allegiances.
I asked our guide to take Molly and me to a medicine man and he hesitated at first. Why did I want to go? “Just to get a good blessing to protect me from evil spirits,” I told him. This satisfied him and we spent the next hour gathering the necessary items to offer as gifts to the medicine man: two eggs, a kilogram of rice, clove cigarettes, three limes, and beetle leaves. For the beetle leaves we had to climb a tree in a lady’s yard and pay her ten cents.
We then drove 30 kilometres north to Simanindo to find the medicine man. We waited patiently on his front porch since he was already busy healing someone else. Once it was our turn, we took off our shoes, and walked to the back of house where we sat on floorboards that were covered with large plastic woven mats. He vaguely resembled the Veddya chief I met in Sri Lanka, with grey wiry hair and a long goatee. His outfit, however, looked borrowed from a church choir. He wore a long bright red robe with a white cape highlighted with red, black, and white strips braided around his head.
He motioned me to sit beside him. I deposited my rice and two eggs in a woven basket along with 4,000 rupiah (40 U.S. cents) folded in a beetle leaf. He asked my name and placed a long knife flat on my hand. He said I had two children, a girl and a boy. Good so far. Then he asked for the last name of one of my grandparents and repeated it over and over. Next he pulled out a lime, studied it in his hand, and began carving slits all over it. Once satisfied, he stuffed bits of twigs and nuts in the slits. He asked me to look at the ceiling with my mouth open. All of a sudden I was choking on lime juice and he slathered it over my head and face. As I was recovering, he slapped me quite hard on the head and then cuffed my shoulders and slapped my kneecaps. He grabbed both my hands together and blew on me. The blessing was done. Then Molly got her turn.
I feel fully prepared now to take one of those legendary Indonesian ferries tomorrow. Being blessed by the priest of a tribe of former cannibals, what could possibly go wrong?
