[marto suwignyo]

TUAN CD

Thank you for your apology. It is unnecessary, as even though I did consider that I had been misquoted, I have at no time taken offence at anything you have written. I understand that you are working with a foriegn language, but that apart, there is really nothing in anything you have written that could cause offence to a reasonable person. I assure you, that were some of the meetings that I need to attend conducted with the same level of civility that you and other contributors to this Forum regularly display, the participants in those meetings would be laughed out of the room.

Yes, I am aware of what Martin has written in his Sudamala work.
Martin was the head of a Swiss government instrumentality responsible for calibration and audit of weights, measures and so forth. I forget the name of the instrumentality, but Martin`s professional background and training is in mathematics and statistics. His work on the origin of early keris utilised his professional skills, and the result is , in my opinion, a landmark work in the study of the keris. However, when Martin wrote in other fields, such as he did with the Sudamala work, he regretably did not provide references for the material presented in his text. Thus we are left with anthropological works written by a mathmatician . What Martin has presented may be factual, or it may not, but without the references it will never be accepted by academia as authoritative.
I am not degrading Martin`s work here:- it is good, popular reference material by an experienced collector, and I have said no more above than I have expressed to Martin himself. In fact, I have said much less than I have said to Martin.

In so far as proofs are concerned.
Let me try to explain my position on this by way of analogy.
If I and my wife produce a child, we have the right to give that child a name.
If I and my wife die immediately after the birth of the child and somebody else raises the child, that other person has the right to give the child a name.
If we die after the child has grown a little, and another person adopts the child, depending on circumstances, the adopter may or may not have naming rights to the child.
In any case, the family to which the child belongs will know the name of the child, and it would be quite incorrect for somebody from outside the family to address the child by another name.
However, let us say that a neighbour has a fondness for the child. That neighbour may well give the child his own pet name, recognised by the child, recognised by the neighbour, but not used by the child`s family.
The child`s official name remains the name given it by its parents.
Now, one day a stranger notices the child, and because of certain features that remind the stranger of some other child that he once knew, the stranger decides that the child`s name is different again from the official name.
But this stranger does not have the right to affix to the child the name upon which he has decided .
The child may forever have a particular name for that stranger, but it is not the child`s official name, nor is it the name by which the child is known to those close to him.

So it is with our wadon handle, or for that matter with any object from any culture or belief system of which we are not a part :-
we are strangers to the culture from which the handle bearing this figure comes, if we wish to know the name by which the figure is known within its own culture, we must have somebody from the culture, who posses this knowledge, pass the knowledge to us. If such a person does not exist, then to establish the true identity of the figure we must employ the tools of academic enquiry. To interpret this figure from our own cultural base, from our own understanding of things which are perhaps beyond our understanding, is not acceptable.

However, just as with the stranger who knew not the name of the child, there is nothing to stop us giving this handle, or any other object, our own name for it, provided that we do not delude ourselves into believing that the name we have given is the name by which this object was known in its culture of origin.

Tuan CD, I am not taking a stance against the wayang:- an understanding of the wayang is essential to an understanding of the keris, and to Javanese culture in general, however, it is vital that we recognise that wayang is popular entertainment, and it undergoes continual change, even today, it is still changing. If we wish to use something from the wayang to make a point, we must try to relate the same space in time occupied by the wayang to the point that we are trying to make. What I mean by this is, that the wayang as it is in 2005 cannot be used to substantiate something that applied in 1605, and of course, vice versa.

WOLVIEX

I thank you for drawing our attention to the Phillipovich use of the Durga attrubution in 1966.

I was not aware of this earler usage.

If you have access to this work, can you advise if Phillipovich`s usage of the term is referenced, and if not, is Phillipovich a trained professional in a relevant field and does she substantiate her usage?

The argument for a Durga attribution that you have precised seems to indicate that Phillipovich is using a similar style of logic to that which others have applied in naming this form "Durga". For instance, I have in front of me eight handles with a female form.Three are variations of the wadon form which we have been discussing, one is an abstract but unmistakeably female form,another is an even more abstract form, one is Rangda, one a more or less normal female, the last is a nightmare with female characteristics.Of all these figures, only Rangda is easily identifiable. The others could be anything, and an argument could be constructed to support almost any attribution. In fact, I could probably construct a more convincing argument that any one of these figures is in fact Little Red Riding Hood, than any argument I have yet heard to support the Durga attribution for our original handle form.

Wolviex, you ask:-

"So my question is, is there any other goddess/deity covering herself?"

I`m not at all certain that this is the right question, Wolviex.
Do we yet have a proof that the figure depicted is in fact covering herself? I think not.
Do we yet have a proof that the oft mentioned veil is in fact a veil? I think not.
Do we yet have a proof that the depictation is indeed a deity? I think not.
Do we yet have a proof that we are in fact looking at Durga? I think not.

As far as I can see, we are back at square one:- we have a female figure that somebody has chosen to call Durga, but we do not yet have any evidence available that this is the name that would have been applied to this figure in the culture from which it has come, and at the time when it was produced.
I`m sorry if my standards are too demanding to allow me to be in agreement with this Durga thing, but I have spent better than 50 years watching the fumbled misinterpretation of a cultural icon that many people within Javanese culture believe sits at the center of that culture. Very few people have taken a serious approach to the keris, and speaking for myself, I would very much like to see a stop put to the perpetuation of erroneous supposition.