Tuan Siti, also known as Pochut Siti, is the woman whose grave at Lam Bada in the XXVI Mukims is revered as the resting-place of a famous burong. In Achehnese superstition a burong is a spirit inimical to women in childbed — analogous to the kunti or kuntianak of the Sundanese and the sundel bolong of the Javanese — and the more celebrated of these spirits are each credited with an individual history. The legend of Tuan Siti is one of the most notable of these burong biographies, and her grave remains a pilgrimage site for those whom the spirit has afflicted or threatened.
The Legend
Tuan Siti was, by the account Snouck Hurgronje recorded, a woman of good lineage. She allowed herself to be seduced, became pregnant as a result, and was in the end treacherously drowned by her lover while on a pleasure trip to which he had invited her. After death she became one of the burongs, the malignant spirits whose number is added to, in Achehnese belief, by the ghosts of women slain by a burong in childbed, and who themselves become burongs in their turn. The structure of the legend — seduction, pregnancy, treacherous murder at the hands of the seducer, and post-mortem transformation into a vengeful spirit — is typical of the cycle to which it belongs, and explains at once the moralised origin of the spirit (she is burong because she was unchaste) and the particular form of her malignity (she attacks women in childbed, the very condition in which she herself was destroyed).
Veneration of the Tomb
The circumstance that these spirits which torment women in childbirth have definite names, and especially the fact that they have tombs which are revered in the same manner as those of departed saints, is, in Snouck Hurgronje’s view, peculiar to Acheh — at least in contradistinction to Java. The mother of a sick woman, in the grip of a burong, will sometimes make a vow to visit the tomb of the evil spirit in case of her daughter’s recovery. She promises “to go and fulfil her vow at the tomb of her grandmother” (ja peuteuron kaoy ba jeurat ne), thus euphemistically describing the ill-omened burong. The vow is performed, after the forty-fourth day, in the company of a large party of friends; goats or fowls are killed as the occasion may require, and a piece of white cloth is brought as a covering for one of the tombstones. A piece of an existing white covering is then taken away and worn, in strips, as a charm round the neck and wrists of mother and child until the strips wear out. The grave of Tuan Siti at Lam Bada is one of the principal tombs at which such vows are performed; and the cycle of belief, vow, and pilgrimage which centres on her name is a striking instance of the way in which Achehnese popular religion has woven the figures of legend into the fabric of domestic life.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.
Tuan Siti, also known as Pochut Siti, is the woman whose grave at Lam Bada in the XXVI Mukims is revered as the resting-place of a famous burong. In Achehnese superstition a burong is a spirit inimical to women in childbed — analogous to the kunti or kuntianak of the Sundanese and the sundel bolong of the Javanese — and the more celebrated of these spirits are each credited with an individual history. The legend of Tuan Siti is one of the most notable of these burong biographies, and her grave remains a pilgrimage site for those whom the spirit has afflicted or threatened.
The Legend
Tuan Siti was, by the account Snouck Hurgronje recorded, a woman of good lineage. She allowed herself to be seduced, became pregnant as a result, and was in the end treacherously drowned by her lover while on a pleasure trip to which he had invited her. After death she became one of the burongs, the malignant spirits whose number is added to, in Achehnese belief, by the ghosts of women slain by a burong in childbed, and who themselves become burongs in their turn. The structure of the legend — seduction, pregnancy, treacherous murder at the hands of the seducer, and post-mortem transformation into a vengeful spirit — is typical of the cycle to which it belongs, and explains at once the moralised origin of the spirit (she is burong because she was unchaste) and the particular form of her malignity (she attacks women in childbed, the very condition in which she herself was destroyed).
Veneration of the Tomb
The circumstance that these spirits which torment women in childbirth have definite names, and especially the fact that they have tombs which are revered in the same manner as those of departed saints, is, in Snouck Hurgronje’s view, peculiar to Acheh — at least in contradistinction to Java. The mother of a sick woman, in the grip of a burong, will sometimes make a vow to visit the tomb of the evil spirit in case of her daughter’s recovery. She promises “to go and fulfil her vow at the tomb of her grandmother” (ja peuteuron kaoy ba jeurat ne), thus euphemistically describing the ill-omened burong. The vow is performed, after the forty-fourth day, in the company of a large party of friends; goats or fowls are killed as the occasion may require, and a piece of white cloth is brought as a covering for one of the tombstones. A piece of an existing white covering is then taken away and worn, in strips, as a charm round the neck and wrists of mother and child until the strips wear out. The grave of Tuan Siti at Lam Bada is one of the principal tombs at which such vows are performed; and the cycle of belief, vow, and pilgrimage which centres on her name is a striking instance of the way in which Achehnese popular religion has woven the figures of legend into the fabric of domestic life.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.