The Devil & Dandris Gooneratne

Demonology & Witchcraft in Ceylon

Dandris de Silva Gooneratne

My copy of this miniature masterpiece was gifted to me by my old friend Creon Corea not long before his premature death in 2006. On the title page, he inscribed to me a humorous warning: when reading, don’t let the demon in you come out.          

       I’m ashamed to say I did nothing to disturb the demon for almost twenty years. I only took up the book when I realised that reading it would be useful to the review of Vajra Chandrasekera’s Nebula Award-winning novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, that I am currently writing. I wish now that I’d read it before reviewing Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida: judging by some of the beings and scenes appearing therein, he too seems to have drawn fairly heavily on Gooneratne.

But not necessarily. Both these authors are Sinhalese – as of course was Gooneratne – so perhaps all three were just dipping into the mutual well of folklore. Perhaps not even consciously; for I, too, am part Sinhalese, and reading On Demonology & Witchcraft in Ceylon revealed to me that I have done much the same myself in stories that I have written, without even realising it. In an old novelette titled ‘In the Dark’, for example, a comically lust-crazed demon dwelling in the narrow space separating two huge boulders in the middle of a jungle manifests its desires nationwide in the form of a growing cloud of darkness. I had thought both the dwelling-space and the atramentous shroud my own inventions, but I found them in Gooneratne all the same, along with sundry other material that had somehow invaded my fiction here and there. If I were superstitious, I could easily conclude that all four of us – Gooneratne, Karunatilaka, Chandrasekera and I – were being insensibly manipulated by demonic ethno-chthonic forces. Or – to put it in (very slightly) more respectable language – yielding to drives arising out of the cultural collective unconscious. Well – if so, then my fellow writers have responded in far greater strength and detail than I ever have. Perhaps they’re more Sinhalese, whatever that means, than I, but I think it might be safer simply to assume that they’ve read Gooneratne. Does a cultural group even have a collective unconscious? A question I leave to you, good reader, since I am not at all competent to answer it.

 

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On Demonology… is a short book, originally published as a monograph in the Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1885. My 1998 reprint runs to only 120 pages, rather closely typeset. There are seven chapters: a general introduction to the subject, a kind of demon-directory in which many of the fiends encountered by Maali Almeida in the afterlife take their bows, and descriptions of how these beings, which in Sinhalese folklore are the instigators of all disease and much death, live and go about their diabolical business. This is followed by chapters on the so-called ‘devil-dances’ (ritual exorcisms or, as Chandrasekera more aptly describes them in his novel, hostage negotiations), incantations, charms and other methods by which the demons may be thwarted and even bound to a human’s will. There is a lot of material in these chapters: Gooneratne not only describes the ceremonies in great detail but also explains their alleged meaning and discourses on their origins – though he admits that the rites are so tortuous, confusing and numerous (tradition puts the number of charms alone at 240,000) that their provenance is impossible to untangle. 

       The final chapter, ‘Dreadful Consequences of a belief in Demon Influences’, is an indictment of the superstition. The author notes the prevalence of family feuds and social violence (up to and including murder), as well as the unusual frequency of madness and episodes of mass hysteria, among Sinhalese village-dwellers. Such occurrences, he says, are regularly attributable to demonic superstition. I am not so sure; common human passions – lust, avarice, envy and resentment of others, a thirst for vengeance, paranoia – find an outlet in superstition, but that isn’t where they come from. Feuds and quarrels break out among rural villagers all over the world, whether or not they have any extraordinary belief in demonic powers. 

       More persuasively, Gooneratne enumerates the dreadful inconveniences that superstitions of this kind impose on daily life. The odd taciturnity of Sinhalese at social gatherings, a trait noted by Robert Knox and many subsequent observers, is herein explained: demons are believed to be attracted to places where ‘the noise of loud voices is continually heard.’ He lists no less than twenty such demon-haunted loci, from the conventional – wells, crossroads, graveyards, deserted houses – to the bizarre: places used for washing clothes, wood-apple groves and locations ‘where there are two rocks close to each other.’ All such places are best avoided, even at the price of a long, sweaty detour; but if one is obliged to pass by or visit them, then certain spells and warding-rituals have to be performed, often several times over. These spells and rituals exactly resemble the gesticulations and mutterings of someone suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and are just as wasteful of the performer’s time and energy. Things are worse still for someone ‘struck’ or possessed by a demon: the victim enters a state called tanikama, ‘aloneness’, in which they behave as though they have been declared tabu, isolating themselves from others, often running away from home, and slowly wasting away.*

       The worst consequence of all, according to Gooneratne, is the thraldom these superstitions impose on the minds of the people. When trying to ‘convince a demon-worshipper of the absurdity of his beliefs,’ he notes, the chief obstacle one encounters is

 

…a sort of mental apathy, an unenquiring, contented and lethargic state of mind, satisfied with what it is, and incurious or indifferent to learn anything new – a state of mind in which the man sometimes mechanically acquiesces in all that you say, and admits the force and truth of your arguments, without however his reason being at all convinced or his feelings affected.

 

While this state of mind is proverbially common among the Sinhalese – we even have a special name for such people, welé gembo or frogs in the well – I’m not at all sure that it is produced by a belief in devils, charms and spells. Anywhere you go in the world, you will find people who display the same complacent impermeability to new ideas. You see it among cult members, the narrowly religious, political ideologues and conspiracy theorists, but you don’t really have to look that far; it is widespread, too, among the unthinkingly loyal and the incurably sentimental, a sort of self-brainwashing. It seems to me that Gooneratne was getting his causes mixed up with his effects here; surely it is one’s existing cast of mind that enables one to embrace and feel comfortable with irrational and foolish ideas, rather than the ideas acting upon the mind to change it; but perhaps it is different when the ideas are absorbed in childhood.

       Yet these beliefs, for all the irrational fear they inspire and the encumbrances they impose upon daily life, do appear to have some practical use. Chapter V of On Demonology… contains a long list of diseases and calamities that demons and black magicians are said to inflict on humans, and against which charms are said to be efficacious. Interestingly, most of them are what we should describe as mental illnesses: episodes of mania, fits of rage, outbursts of abusive language, ‘swoons’, anorexia, amnesia, the urge to run away from home and, of course, manifestations of demonic possession. In such cases the devil-dances, charms and rituals can easily be viewed as psychiatric interventions, often quite effective and arguably less damaging to the patient than being locked up in an institution or dosed with the SSRIs and other poisons used by modern science to treat the mentally unwell.

       But though most of the examples of alleged demonic activity described by Gooneratne are cases of this kind (and the rest are easily explained without invoking supernatural forces), the rituals of Sinhalese devil-worship and witchcraft were and still are used regularly in attempts to treat physical illnesses, especially in cases that have been declared terminal by modern doctors. The sounds of devil-drums are not uncommonly heard among the more prosperous residential suburbs of Colombo, testifying that some hapless victim of advanced cancer or multiple organ failure is being tormented through their final hours by desperate relatives (or creditors) seeking to restore them to health by driving the demons out. The devil-doctors, as Chandrasekera calls them, are still in business. 

 

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There is nothing in the least superstitious about On Demonology & Witchcraft in Ceylon. If the author seems to be credulous about anything, it is the primacy of reason and the desirability of Western-style progress. 

       Born in 1827 in the coastal village of Waskaduwa about 40km south of Colombo, Dandris de Silva Gooneratne was baptized at the local Anglican chapel. In those days, baptism was not carried out solely for religious reasons; in a holdover from Dutch law, which the British at first perpetuated, a certificate of baptism was required when, later in life, one wished to register one’s marriage, make a will or carry out any other legal proceeding. Knowing this, the author of a JCBRAS paper on Gooneratne, published in 2008,† not only assumes that Gooneratne’s baptism was of this utilitarian kind but that he was in fact a Buddhist, going so far as to take issue with earlier historians who state otherwise. The scholar rests his assumption on a long-ago declaration by Gooneratne’s nephew that his uncle quit his second term of employment at the Colombo Academy (the present Royal College) because he ‘could not see eye to eye with the Principal regarding certain religious matters.’

       Gooneratne may well indeed have left the Academy for ‘religious’ reasons. His first job, too, had been as a junior teacher there; he had attended the school as a student and was later offered a place on the staff. He did not stay long on that occasion either – and his next job was that of acting secretary to James Chapman, the first Anglican Bishop of Colombo. This was not a position that would or could have been filled by any Buddhist. Nor, in fact, was his next job after that, which was master of the town school at Madampe, a sizeable community near Puttalam. At this time, all matters relating to Ceylon’s schools were in the hands of the Central Schools Commission, which was dominated by Christian clerics, and no-one who was not a practising Christian could hope for any kind of appointment from it.

       The ‘religious matters’ on which Gooneratne and the principal of the Academy could not see eye to eye were, in fact, almost certainly Christian – on both sides. The principal, a forcefully dogmatic and quarrelsome clergyman named Barcroft Boake, belonged to a strongly Protestant, indeed unbendingly Calvinist, faction within the Church of England; he was an implacable enemy of Bishop Chapman, Gooneratne’s subsequent employer, whose attachment to the High Church principles of the Oxford Movement was so strong as to make him almost an Anglo-Catholic. Divisions within Anglicanism had broadened almost to schism by the middle of the nineteenth century, and Boake and Chapman were on opposite sides of the divide; the two men carried out a bitter feud all through Chapman’s episcopacy.‡ Gooneratne, who had come under Chapman’s wing as his secretary and owed his subsequent career largely to the bishop, may also have been persuaded toward the High Church view – or perhaps he had merely happened, on some unhappy occasion, to utter a favourable word about the bishop or his Oxford ideas in the principal’s hearing. For a man like Boake, this could have been transgression enough to merit the sack.

       Whatever the truth of this, the perspective of the author of On Demonology… is that of a rational, modern man who might be a Buddhist, a Christian, or even an atheist. The explanations he advances for the phenomenon of demonic possession are psychological ones, and he presents them in the popular-scientific jargon of his times: hysteria, Mesmerism, ‘the cataleptic trance’ and so on. There is plenty about Buddhism in his book, for the folklore of demon-worship contains many references to the Buddha and Buddhist tradition, but though never less than respectful when dealing with this subject, he never reveals the faintest trace of Buddhist belief. He is writing, you suspect, for his fellow-members of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, nearly all of whom were European, and at whose meetings he first presented this book as a series of lectures.

 

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Gooneratne, in fact, was one of those liminal figures who once operated at the interface between native and colonial cultures all over the world, and whose writings often display greater understanding of the processes and consequences of cultural interpenetration than the work of scholars and administrators who dwell in one culture while they pronounce upon and make determinations for another. The tragedy is that the liminalists’ contribution is often poorly known, discounted due to prejudice or simply failing to find publication. In the case of Ceylon, Gooneratne suggests, the British entirely failed to understand the Sinhalese national character because they remained largely ignorant of and contemptuous toward what they called ‘devil-worship’, making no effort to educate people out of it and declining even to make a serious study of it. They knew about it, of course, but they vastly underestimated its importance in the culture.

 

A series of writers… have, at different periods during the last 200 years, given to the public the results of their enquiries and experience in matters connected to this Island: yet none of them seem to have perceived, in any adequate degree, the extraordinary amount of gross superstition which prevails among the people of whose manners, customs and history they professed to treat… They do not appear to have been fully aware of the extraordinary degree of influence they exercise over the mind of the Sinhalese. (Ch. I)

 

Hence many an Englishman is led to believe that Demon Worship has not at present a firm hold of the minds of a portion of the people, and that it is upheld among the few merely because custom or habit has made it familiar to them. Nothing can be more erroneous than this opinion; for so far from a portion of the people being indifferent to Demon Worship from the conviction that it is an absurdity, we believe there is not (excepting 4 or 5 hundred well educated men in the whole Island) one Singhalese man who believes in anything more firmly than in Demonism. (Ch. VII)

 

Failing to perceive this, and noting the easy adaptability of the Sinhalese to European habits and manners (a phenomenon by no means confined to the English-speaking elite), the British focused on the Buddhist side of the national psyche and failed take enough notice of its dark twin. Only the fervently appalled Protestant missionaries inveighed against ‘charms and devil-dancing’, but their warnings rarely penetrated the complacency of the colonial authorities or the establishment of the Church of England in Ceylon, who did not believe in diabolism and regarded the missionaries as hysterical ‘enthusiasts’. 

       And this raises a tantalising question. What if it had? Would the British attitude toward Ceylon and the Ceylonese have altered in any material way? Might it, perhaps, have drawn aside the arras of Occidentalization that hid from them the timeless superstitions and hatreds that drove their subjects, exposed the alcove in which the old demons of race and creed and caste had secreted themselves? And would they, then, have been so keen to move us forward so quickly along the path to national independence?

       On Demonology… was published in 1885, even as the Sinhalese Buddhist Revival of the late nineteenth century was raising Sinhalese nationalist consciousness and making it inseparable from Buddhism. Among the central texts of that revival was a catechism§ that continued to be taught to Sinhalese children in Buddhist schools until at least the 1960s. It warns unequivocally against belief in ‘charms, incantations, the observance of lucky hours and devil-dancing,’ stating that ‘they are positively repugnant to [the] fundamental principles’ of Buddhism and referring the catechumen to the Brahmajala-Sutta, where ‘the Buddha has categorically described these and other superstitions as pagan, mean and spurious.’ Might we not expect that the rise to dominance of a such reforming strain of Buddhism among the Sinhalese, one that sets itself explicitly against demon-worship and witchcraft, has reduced the potency of belief in demons, charms and other superstitions over the past century-and-a-half?

       Looking about me, the answer seems to be clear enough. I must say that it comes as a blessed relief to find another driving force besides misunderstood and twisted Buddhism with which to associate the horrors that have comprised the history of our country since independence. Certainly I am far from the first to perceive the connection: a number of artists, authors and dramatists working in the Sinhala cultural stream have produced powerful works about our recent past that employ demons, demon-worship and human sacrifice as their central metaphors. It happens in English, too, as the successes of Shehan Karunatilaka and Vajra Chandrasekera both testify.

NOTES

* Gooneratne’s account tallies closely with descriptions of the tabu state given in Freud’s Totem & Taboo, which was published almost thirty years after On Demonology…

† Gunaratna, K. Locana, ‘Dandris de Silva Gunaratna [sic]: Recalling His Times & Some Landmarks in His Career.’ Colombo, JCBRAS New Series, Vol. 54 (2008).

‡ Interested readers are referred to Chs. 7 & 9 of my history of St Thomas’s College, Thomia (Colombo, 2025, Lazari Press).

§ Olcott, H.S., The Buddhist Catechism, ‘certified by the Ven. Hikkaduwe Sumangala of the Southern Buddhist Chapter.’ Colombo, Varanasi, London etc., 1902ff (numerous publishers in Lanka and overseas).