Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? Read online

  The day after I arrive on the island is the festival of sharp objects, including motor vehicles as well as knives. Dazzling flower arrangements drape motorcycles. A large ceramic bowl filled with a dozen bananas and other exotic tropical fruits, flowers, and a well-cooked split chicken breast surrounded by smoking incense sticks sits on the hood of a parked car. The Balinese universe is a riotous mix of demons, nature spirits, ancestors, and gods and goddesses all clamoring for attention. Humans communicate with this world—a sort of spiritual extended family—via ceremonies designed to address the needs of a particular spirit or deity. Maintaining harmony in this system is the paramount goal. To do so, sacrificial rites may be made to an individual person, a deity, an ancestor, a priest, or a demon. Each offering is a gift or an appeal.

  Later that afternoon, Windhu Sancaya takes me to visit a high priest at a nearby temple. The Brahman comes out to greet us in his stone courtyard. A lean older man with a weathered brown face and kind eyes, he invites us to sit cross-legged on a marble cushion-­strewn platform in the center of the courtyard. Ida Pedanda Made Manis is fifty years old and comes from the priestly caste that lives on the gifts of villagers. Pedanda means “bearer of the staff” and Made Manis can be loosely translated as “second-born sweetie pie.” When I ask if he enjoys a good cockfight, he chuckles with glee. “To be involved in gambling of any kind will keep us from our spiritual goal of mastering our attachment to the senses,” he explains, turning serious. Then a smile returns. “Well, when I was young I would have liked to bet, but I couldn’t afford it.”

  When I ask why chicken is the sacrificial animal of choice, he pauses. No one has ever posed such a question to him, the priest says, so he must seek permission of the gods before responding. He closes his eyes. In the silence, a warm tropical breeze swirls through the open space. Then he murmurs to an assistant. Moments later, a woven palm leaf tray piled with flowers, a few Chinese coins with holes in the center, and smoking aromatic incense appears. The priest gestures at me. “Take a coin,” prompts Winhu Sancaya. I tentatively reach out, choose one, then place it gingerly into the open right palm of the Brahman. He squeezes his palm shut and once again closes his eyes, murmurs a prayer, and goes silent. Then he looks into my suddenly anxious face. “This question comes from your heart,” the priest finally says with evident satisfaction. “And not just from your work. You are free to ask.”

  Chickens are favored, the pedanda begins, because they scratch around in the earth and will eat anything they can find. This makes them suitable for feeding demons but not heavenly deities; for those, duck and other animals are required. Then he explains Tabuh Rah, the concept of a sacred cockfight. “Rah means blood,” the high priest says, leaning his slim frame slightly forward. “Tabuh means to purify so that the Bhuta Kala don’t create disruptions,” he adds. Bhuta Kala are negative forces or evil spirits that bedevil humanity, causing physical disease, mental illness, and societal havoc. Spilled chicken blood provides nourishment for the Bhuta Kala, keeping evil forces in check.

  Sacrifice is at the core of Balinese beliefs. Though they enjoy a reputation for gentleness and compassion, islanders immolated multiple young women on pyres as recently as a century ago. A Balinese king told one early Western visitor that as many as 140 women would be taken by the flames when he died. Human blood is still used in some rituals in villages of eastern Bali, where it is drawn using a dagger, sharpened rattan sticks, or thorny leaves. The focus today is on animal sacrifice, and there is no other society on earth that practices in such numbers and with such regularity.

  Terrorist bombings at a packed nightclub killed two hundred locals and tourists in 2002. To redress the imbalance created by the carnage, Hindu priests in white-and-gold robes slaughtered scores of water buffaloes, monkeys, pigs, ducks, cows, and roosters, and then placed their heads on altars to purify the devastated site. A celebrant drank pig blood drawn from a dead animal’s throat while, in a boat offshore, priests weighted down two calves and threw them overboard. Most of Bali’s 3 million residents took part in similar ceremonies around the island, which is half the size of Hawaii’s big island. That ritual paled in comparison with a once-in-a-century ceremony in 1979 in which more than fifty water buffaloes, their horns covered in gold, were laden with precious goods and a large stone tied around their necks and then drowned in the sea while thousands of other animals, including chickens and ducks, were sacrificed to feed the Bhuta Kala.

  The word for cockfight in Balinese is tajen, derived from the term for a sharp knife. It has been practiced here for at least a thousand years. “Night and day, you should hold cockfights” in the temple vicinity, according to one stone inscription carved in Old Javanese in AD 1011, one of the oldest known inscriptions on the island. A slightly later one states that “if you should hold cockfights within the sacred precinct” you are not subject to certain taxes.

  The pedanda explains that the cockfight itself is not sacred, which is why the contest that I witnessed was held across the street from the temple. The cockpit traditionally is an elaborate open-air building called a wantilan that dominates a village or it is simply an open bit of ground. “If tajen is carried out in a holy place, human greed and passion will be there too,” he adds. “It involves human greed; it is about accumulating funds, about winning and losing.” But with the correct outlook, one of detachment from such worldly concerns, “Tabuh Rah is there.” The separation between cockfighting and Tabuh Rah still seems fuzzy to me. Windhu Sancaya and other scholars of the complicated world of Balinese culture assure me later that such subtleties and paradoxes are rife in their ritual universe. The constantly changing world requires constant rebalancing, and Balinese rituals and beliefs must adapt accordingly. The Balinese universe would go awry without chickens. Few rituals of note take place without the death of the bird; only some die in a cockfight.

  Dusk is falling quickly when we leave the pedanda’s compound. Windhu Sancaya takes me just down the road to a large religious complex where villagers are participating in an annual four-day celebration of the temple’s founding. Festive coral and pink clouds, lit by the setting sun, hover above the stone courtyards, elegant pavilions, and tiered pagodas shaded by high-branched trees. Pura Penataran Agung Taman Bali, which means the great temple of the Balinese garden, resonates with the sounds made by the gamelan orchestra that plays under a stone-roofed arcade. Xylophones, drums, gongs, strings, and bamboo flutes bang and shimmer in the evening breeze. The atmosphere resembles that of a Midwest church picnic. Children play with red laser lights and SpongeBob balloons on the grass as women in gorgeous silks prepare a buffet dinner.

  After the meal, there are prayers and a series of processions to honor the upper, middle, and lower worlds. Women carry massive offering bowls crowded with flowers and fruits as priests chant. After dark, the hundred or so participants troop down the worn stairs to the small courtyard at the temple entrance. The rising moon washes the stone in milky light. Dogs bark and bells ring, and incense smoke wreathes its way into the tropical sky. When everyone has gathered, the chatting stops and drums and pipes begin to play.

  A clutch of a dozen young girls dressed in long gowns—­premenstrual virgins, Windhu Sancaya explains—slowly begin to circle around an enormous oval of fruit and flower offerings laid in intricately shaped palm-leaf containers. The girls’ stylized, birdlike dance reminds me of the female dancing spirits called asparas carved on the stone friezes of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat temples. Attendants twirl huge black-and-white parasols. As one seated priest chants, another holds a chicken in his right hand and a bell in his left that he rings rhythmically. He takes up a short knife, slits the animal’s throat, and pours the gushing blood into white bowls that are then emptied over the offerings. The two men kneel beside the mass of fruit and flowers and blood and play a game of egg toss until two eggs smash against each other and break. Everyone cheers.

  The ritual complete, the asparas turn back into giggling pr
eteens, mothers collect their tired children, and the men light up cigarettes. As the crowd disperses, Windhu Sancaya introduces me to two smiling priests. One wears brass buttons and a gold badge on his shirt like that of a Western sheriff and another is elderly with no obvious teeth. The chicken’s blood, explains the one with the sheriff’s badge, will feed the bodyguards of the gods who were invited from heaven to take part at the start of the ceremonies four days ago. These troops are earth demons that feed on blood and therefore must be satiated at the start and conclusion of the ritual.

  The bird’s blood is considered rajas—that is, endowed with activity and movement—while pig’s blood, for example, is associated with inertia. Demonic bodyguards of heavenly deities, naturally, want the power of activity and movement that comes from the chicken’s veins. The blood may be poured on offerings or used to mark crosses at cardinal points of a temple’s boundaries. When I press him on why the chicken must be the source of blood, he says that it must be an animal with a close relationship to humans, part of our everyday life. “We have to sacrifice something we love,” the sheriff says with a laugh, as if stating the obvious. “If you don’t love it, then it is not a sacrifice. And the chicken is a symbol of the human family, because it comes in all colors.”

  White, red, and black chickens are much in demand for Balinese rituals, since each color represents a direction. But in the constantly shifting currents of Balinese theology, they also have come to represent the three human races. The killing is not simply to feed hungry demons. “Before we were human,” the priest continues, “we were animals. And we hope that through sacrifice the animals can become human in their next incarnation.” But along with this classic Hindu explanation, he offers another reason. “Long ago, humans were sacrificed,” the priest adds. “Now, every blood sacrifice is done so that we don’t have to use human blood.”

  This shift from human to animal sacrifice took place in many cultures. Ancient Chinese and Romans made the switch. In the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, God orders Abraham to make a ram rather than his son the victim. But not just any creature will do. “We appear to substitute animals that are somewhat close to our social worlds,” says Yancey Orr, a young American anthropologist at Australia’s University of Queensland who studies Balinese culture. In the Abrahamic traditions, for example, God enjoyed Abel’s gift of lamb blood but rejected Cain’s hard-won offerings of vegetables and grain. They are too unlike and distant for human beings to use as a credible substitute.

  Indonesia outlawed cockfighting in the 1980s to limit gambling and encourage sobriety and productivity in its citizens. Hindu Balinese were granted an exception. Technically, only three matches are allowed at a time and all gambling on birds is prohibited. I visited dozens of cockfights, large and small, around the island, where Balinese men delight in regularly breaking those rules.

  But if their devotion to their game fowl is any measure, they sacrifice creatures that they dearly love. Men cradle their birds like children and fuss over their food and housing. “To anyone who has been in Bali any length of time,” writes the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz, “the deep psychological identification of Balinese men with their cocks is unmistakable.” The word for cock, sabung, can also mean anything from warrior or champion to lady-killer and tough guy. It is always a compliment.

  It could be a Brooklyn block party, complete with a stage, concession stand, and milling late-night hipster crowd in a street closed off to cars by police barriers. But the stage on this balmy September evening is actually a two-story wall of blue and yellow plastic poultry crates. The concession stand is a slaughtering booth manned by expert butchers in blood-soaked yellow slickers and boots. The crowd is made up mostly of men with pale complexions above black beards and below black hats. They are waving live chickens over their heads.

  It is nearing midnight on the eve of Yom Kippur, and the throng is here not to party but to expiate their sins. Here at the corner of Kingston Avenue and President Street, in the gritty neighborhood of Crown Heights, hundreds of Hasidic Jews are playing out a ­thousand-year-old ritual. At the center of this ceremony of kapparot, or atonement, is the pale-yellow bird. It will fortify their spiritual health for the Jewish New Year. The ceremony’s ideal time is the hours before dawn of the day that marks Yom Kippur’s start. In the quiet and dark of night, a calm that Hasidim call “divine kindness” is more easily accessible. On this night, here and in Hasidic communities around the world, the chicken’s power to heal the spirit as well as the body is as alive as the dazed birds blinking in the spotlights set up on the sidewalk that illuminate the crowd.

  Participants pay twelve dollars for a ticket and walk over to the wall of chicken crates that towers above the pavement, housing thousands of birds. Men get a rooster and women a hen. A pregnant woman buys three birds, two hens and a rooster, to cover herself as well as a baby girl or boy. Most hold their bird uneasily in their left hands, grasping the area between the wings, while balancing a prayer book in their right. Many young fathers conduct the ritual for their nervous and giggly sons. “Children of men who sit in darkness,” the Hebrew chant begins, recalling the bird’s ancient association with light. The worshipper waves the chicken around his or her head while saying, “This is my exchange, this is my substitute, this is my expiation.” Each person repeats this act three times, for a total of nine chicken circles. Then the worshipper acknowledges that while the cock or hen is about to die, “I shall enjoy a long and pleasant life of peace.”

  Once that is done, the overwhelmingly male congregants take their chickens to the slaughter line. The booth is brightly lit and staffed by two burly men. They grab each proffered bird and swiftly and expertly slit its throat using a long and extraordinarily sharp knife. By kosher law, death must be swift and with a minimum of suffering. If the knife becomes dull and the animal is denied a quick demise, the bird is no longer considered kosher. Once butchered, the men toss the birds behind them as assistants in bloody yellow slickers scramble to shove the carcasses into large green plastic bags. Each bag then goes into a plastic trash can and is dragged to a van parked a few yards away. From there, they are taken to a soup kitchen; by tradition, the birds go to feed the poor.

  Chickens are not mentioned in the Hebrew Bible and therefore are neither proscribed nor permitted as food. This posed a theological problem when the bird appeared in the Middle East. The Roman Jewish writer Josephus says that early rabbis were divided over whether the bird was kosher or unclean. Some scholars believe it was accepted and eaten in Galilee in the north, but forbidden in the sacred precincts of Jerusalem. At least one rooster lived close enough to the temple that the apostle Peter could hear it crow on the morning of Jesus’s death. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you,” Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew, perhaps reflecting an upbringing among Galilean birds. “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”

  The Mishnah, an older part of the Talmud compiled around AD 200, refers to chickens as tarnegol, or king’s bird, a word derived from the ancient Akkadian term that reflects its earlier royal origins as an elite and exotic gift. A later portion of the Talmud praises the chicken as “the best of birds.” The Hebrew word for rooster, gever, is the same as that for man, a curious fact that bolsters its status. The practice of kapparot, however, is mentioned neither in the Torah nor the Talmud, and has been controversial since it was first described in the ninth century AD by Jewish scholars at the Sura Academy south of Babylon, in today’s Iraq.

  A nineteenth-century historian reports that it was “a custom of the Persian Jews at an early date.” That points to a ritual originating among the cock-adoring Zoroastrians who dominated today’s Iran before Islam arrived in the seventh century AD. Mystics and common people embraced the ritual, while more bookish sorts tended to abhor it. Thirteenth-century rabbis dismissed it as a “fooli
sh custom” derived from pagans, while a member of the Israeli parliament recently criticized it as “deplorable.” The practice never gained many adherents in medieval Egypt and Spain. A small minority of orthodox Jews practices it today. Many of those are in New York City, and tens of thousands of birds are trucked in on the day before Yom Kippur.

  The late-night Crown Heights gathering is rife with rabbis and scholars, and I ask several in the crowd to explain why the chicken is the favored animal. Rabbi Beryl Epstein, a Chattanooga-born Hasid with a ZZ Top beard, tells me that you could swing a potted seedling, a fish with fins and scales, or a white cloth filled with money destined for charity and achieve the same results. Like almost all the other pedestrians on the crowded sidewalk, he is wearing the high black hat and long black coat popular in eighteenth-century Poland where the mystical Hasidic movement began. “Here everyone does a chicken,” he adds. Though swinging money is gaining popularity among other Hasidim, Lubavitcher Hasidim like Epstein prefer sticking to tradition.

  Another rabbi tells me that since roosters and men share the same name, they are a good substitute for humans. A white-bearded scholar disagrees. He explains that any undomesticated four-legged animal—such as a deer—would do as well, but that chickens are simply easier to come by in New York City than wildlife. Yet another insists that it was the fowl’s very absence from the Jerusalem temple that makes it the animal of choice. The ritual is not technically a sacrifice, since it involves use of a live animal. The killing part comes after the ritual. This matters to traditional Jews, since they are forbidden by rabbinical law from offering sacrifices in the wake of the temple’s destruction in AD 70. Since the chicken never was a sacrificial animal, there is less chance that kapparot practitioners will confuse it with a sacrifice.