Bali Festivals Information.

Festivals
Festivals for much of the year Balinese temples are deserted, empty spaces. But on holy days, the deities and ancestral spirits descend from heaven to visit their devotees and the temples come alive with days of frenetic activity and nights of drama and dance. Temple festivals come at least once a Balinese year of 210 days. Since most villages have at least three temples that mean you’re assured of at least five or six annual festival in every village. The full moon periods around the end of September to early October or early to mid-April are often the time for important festivals. One such festival is the Galungan day which takes place throughout the island. During this 10-day period all the gods, including the supreme deity Sanghyang Widi, come down to earth for the festivities.

Temple festivals are as much a social occasion as a religious one. Cockfights (where two cocks fight with sharp barbs attached to their legs) are a regular part of temple ceremonies: a combination of excitement, sport and gambling. They also provide a blood sacrifice to dissuade evil spirit from interfering with the religious ceremonies that follow. While the men are slaughtering their prized pets, the women are bringing beautifully arranged offerings of foods, fruit and flower artfully piled in huge pyramids which they carry on their heeds, to the temple. Outside, warungs offer food for sale, stalls are set up to sell toys, trinkets and batik and there are sideshows with card games, gambling, buckers, medicine-men, music and dancing, while the gamelan orchestra plays on in the outer courtyard.

Inside, the pemangkus (temple priests) are suggesting to the gods that they should come down and enjoy the goings on. The small thrones in the temple shrines are symbolic seats for the gods to occupy during festivals though sometimes small images called pratimas are placed in the thrones to represent them. At some festivals the images and thrones of the deities are taken out of the temple and ceremonially carried down to the sea (or to a suitable expanse of water) for a ceremonial bath. Inside the temple the proceedings take on a more formal, mystical tone as the pemangkus continue to chant their songs of praise before shrine clouded by smoking incense. The women dance the stately pendet, in itself an offering to the gods through the beauty of their motions.

During the course of these rituals it’s quite common for people to fall into a believed to have been possessed by a deity. The trance is taken as a religious experience, a form of communication with the gods and spirits, and certain men and women in every village – like the head pemangku – serve the deities as established trance mediums. Through such a medium a request is made to the gods or advice is given. If a person goes into a trance and speaks during the ceremony it is taken as a good sign, a divine gesture to the people that their prayers and offerings have been accepted. When the message is passed on to the priest the person in trance is awoken with prayers and sprinklings of holy water.

As dawn approaches, the entertainment and ceremonies wind down and the women dance a final pendet, a farewell to the deities. The pemangkus politely suggest to the gods that it’s time they made their way back to heaven, and the people make their own weary way back to their homes.

Other Bali Information
	Bali Behaviour There are a couple of rules for visiting temples. Except on rare occasions anyone can enter, anytime; there’s nothing like the attitude found in some temples in India where non-Hindus are firmly barred from entry. Now do you have to go barefoot like in many Buddhist shrines, but you are expected to be politely dressed. You should always wear a temple scarf – a sash tied loosely around your waist
	Bali Architecture Balinese temples usually consist of a series of courtyards entered from the sea side. In a large temple the outer gateway will generally be a candi bentar, modeled on the old Hindu temple of Java. These gateways resemble a tower cut in the halves and moved apart, courtyard is used for less important ceremonies,
	Bali Dance In fact it’s remarkably like the Balinese gamelan music which accompanies most dances, with its abrupt shifts of tempo, its dramatic changes between silence and crashing noise. There’s also virtually no contact in Balinese dancing, with each dancer moving completely independently.
	Bali Economy Bali’s economy is basically agrarian. The vast majority of Balinese are peasants working in the fields. Coffee, copra and cattle are major agricultural exports, while most of the rice grown goes to feed the island’s own teeming population.Unlike most island people, the Balinese are not great seafarers.........
	Bali Religion The Balinese are nominally Hindus but Balinese Hinduism is half a world away from that India. When the Majapahits evacuated to Bali they took with them their religion and its rituals as well as their art, literature, music and culture.
	Bali Geography Bali is a tiny, extremely fertile and dramatically mountainous island. It has an area of 5620 square km, is only 140 km by 80 km and is just 8^ south of the equator. Bali’s central mountain chain, which runs east-west the whole length of the island, includes several peaks over 2000 meters and many active volcanoes......
	Bali Households Despite the strong communal nature of Balinese society, their traditional houses are designed to divide the family from the outside world. Traditional houses (many of which can be seen in Ubud) are like houses in ancient Rome, they look inward and are surrounded by a high wall.....
	Bali Compound The smallest unit in the Balinese community is not the individual but the family. In the strictest sense of the word a family is a married couple with children and the broader sense a family is all the people who live in one compound, family compound. In one such compound there can live brothers, cousins and second cousins with all their children and all relatives who worship in one common house temple.
	Bali Temple The number of temple in Bali is simply astonishing they’re everywhere, in fact since every village has several and every home at least a simple house-temple; there are actually more temples than homes. The word for temple in Bali is pura. which is a Sanskrit word literally meaning a space surrounded by a wall.
	Bali Village Organisation Village organization one of the important element of the village government is the Subak. Each individual rice field is known as a Sawah and each farmer who owns even one Sawah must be a member of his local Subak. The rice paddies must have a steady supply of water and it is the job of Subak to ensure that the water supply gets to everybody.
	Bali Society Balinese society is an intensely communal one; the organization of villages, the cultivation of farmlands and even the creative arts are communal efforts – a person belongs to their family, clan, caste and the village as a whole. Religion permeates all aspects of life so each stage of existence from soon after conception until after the final cremation is marked by ceremonies and ritual.....

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