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span class="inline inline-left">Explosion of colors: Sarad, a decorative offering made of colored sticky rice cakes, is a beautiful sight at every major temple rituals.Dozens of old women descended into the temple’s courtyard. They walked slowly wearing a solemn expression on their wrinkled faces.

They were dressed in plain dark undergarments, white sashes and white kebaya. Their simple costume was in stark contrast to the present temple’s fashion of Balinese women donning expensive, colorful and glittering attires.

In a measured pace, the women walked encircling the temple’s inner and outer courtyard. Throughout the procession they performed simple hand gestures and swayed their bodies delicately.

The unadorned dance and the half-closed eyes of its performers, two signature traits of most of the island’s sacred devotional performing arts, brought to mind the vision of a host of divine fairies glided effortlessly on a cloud.

For two hours these women, most of them were in their late 50s, performed Nampyog, the sacred  dance that marks the highlight of the religious festival at Samuantiga Temple in Bedulu, 30 kilometers east of Denpasar.

The temple is one of the most venerated places of worships in Bali because of its influential role in the formation of Balinese Hinduism.

It was in this temple the feuding sects of Hinduism reached a  peaceful conflict resolution in the  11th century.

Thousands of devotees and tourists watched in awe as the solemn procession went on. By the end of Nampyog the women, called permas (the beloved devotee) by locals, had circled the spacious temple 18 times, a magnificent achievement for elderly dancers, who had waken up at dawn and prayed at six different temples before performing at Samuantiga.

Prayer time: Devotees pray together before participating in Nampyog.Nampyog was divided into five acts. In the first act, the permas performed solo and circled the temple six times. In the second act, a host of male temple priests joined the permas in the procession.

The sounds of the genta (ceremonial bells) in the hands of the temple priests intensified the magical aura of the procession. The temple priests and permas circled the temple three times.

In the third act, the permas performed solo again. This time, however, they danced while holding the tip of the sash of the dancer right behind them.

The white sash became a floating bridge that connected all the dancers into one entity as they circled the temple three times.

About 200 male devotees, old and young alike, descended into the temple in the fourth act to accompany the permas. They formed a human chain before moving fluidly like a wave seeking the shore.

They circled the temple and touched their feet at the pedestal of every shrine in the temple.

“Nampyog aims at spreading out the energy of divine peace. The permas do that through simple, sacred gestures of devotion, while the parekan [male devotees] enact the powerful quality of the spiritual energy to wash out hatred and defilements,” Bedulu village chief I Wayan Patera said.

In the fifth act the permas and male devotees went their separate ways into different shrines to pray and prepare themselves for the oncoming battle of sampian, a ritual paraphernalia made of intricately carved young coconut leaves.

Sampian symbolizes the duality of the universe as well as the cosmic balance required to transform that duality into one single realization of ultimate truth.

Pretend battle: Male devotees hit each other with sampian at the climax of the Siat Sampian ritual.After saying prayers, the permas once again entered the courtyard. Now, they held sampian, which they raised up into the air before uttering a loud screaming and hitting each other with the sampian.

A few seconds later, the male devotees stormed in and started their own battle. The atmosphere of  the battle was far from brutal as the participants laughed and hugged their “enemies”.

By hitting their “enemies” with the sampian, the participants symbolically transfer the divine understanding on the non-duality of the ultimate truth to them.

“Conflicts and problems will keep arising in our daily life, a reminder of the duality of the universe, where right and wrong, day and night, exist together. The sampian will remind us that a balanced life is a solution to reach harmony, and is a way to avoid falling into the extreme,” Patera added.