Candi Sukuh carving, keris mythology

[David]

Pusaka, perhaps you are familiar with Niels Mulder's book Mysticism in Java. If not you might find it a very good read.
http://tinyurl.com/jlhpd6w
"Kebatinan mysticism, as we know it, is clearly the product of late colonial society as it existed in the principalities, or sultanates, of South Central Java."

Here is another account from an article in New Dawn Magazine that clearly places the development of Kebatinan in the late colonial period of Java.
"The Javanese Science is a syncretic blend of Hindu-Buddhist, Sufi, Taoist and ancient animist strands, and evolved in the royal courts of Solo and nearby Jogjakarta in Central Java as a system of self-transformation confined solely to the aristocracy. But since the Revolution that ejected the Dutch rulers from the country after the Second World War, the Science emerged into the popular culture in the form of hundreds of kebatinan (or inner-being) sects, each one of which celebrates some aspect of the royal mother tradition. These esoteric sects have drawn a very large minority of the Indonesian population into their sphere, forming an immensely creative and diverse subculture at the leading edge of national life, very much as happened in Japan after the Second World War."