Majapahit amulets in Kelantan
Anker Rentse’s short note describes the Pitis Jawa (or Pitis Semar), a coin-like brass or bronze amulet found among medicine-men in Kelantan, and documents its use in main berbagih healing performances and the iconography of six specimens (pp. 302–304).
Summary
Rentse explains that the Pitis Jawa is regarded as keramat and is employed by medicine-men during main berbagih rituals for curing illness, recovering lost property, or expelling evil influences. In one variant of the performance, the amulet is suspended on a turmeric-dyed cord and held over burning incense while the medicine-man chants invocations; the amulet’s movement is taken as a sign that the deity depicted upon it has descended and possessed the practitioner. Rentse recounts a first-hand account of such a performance in which a man believed to be possessed by a hantu (actually the result of a centipede crawling over his face) was cured through this procedure (pp. 302–303).
The note then catalogues six amulets (Plates XVI–XVII), providing identifications of the figures depicted on each, drawing on the expertise of Dr. P. van Stein Callenfels. The figures include pre-Hindu Indonesian deities such as Bagong and Semar, as well as figures from the Javanese Panji and Mahabharata cycles (e.g., Judhishthira, Dropadi, Arjuna, Krishna, Panji, Dewi Sekartaji), with Rentse noting discrepancies between local Kelantan beliefs and Callenfels’s scholarly identifications (pp. 303–304).