Melukat: Into the Sacred Water

I went to the Melukat ceremony expecting the gods of this island, Krishna, Brahma, and Mama Bali herself. I met them. But not before revisiting the gods of my youth.

The Ceremony

I have never trusted the touristic version of anything sacred, so I had avoided Melukat for a long time. I didn't doubt its significance. I doubted the version packaged for visitors. Then a local friend recommended Beji Griya Waterfall to me, so I finally went. The land had been a sacred beji, a place for drawing holy water, long before it had a gate. It belonged to the Griya Gede Manuaba family and had been part of Hindu ceremony and ancestral practice for generations. Melukat is a Balinese purification ceremony centered on tirta, holy water. Before entering the water, offerings are made, and permission is requested before entering sacred space. The ceremony passes through shrines, springs, caves, and waterfalls, each associated with a different deity.

The path descends through the temple, into an underworld of caves and springs. At each stop there was another shrine, another deity, another threshold. The last deity I learned about before reaching the water was Ratu Niang Sakti, the guardian this place peacefully answers to.

My Experience

My guide was Ludi. We were born in the same year, both Gen X, but we grew up on opposite sides of the world and came from completely different cultures. Still, we recognized each other almost immediately. She knew how to move me through the ceremony without telling me what I was supposed to feel. We didn't need much language. Our eyes and smiles said more than words could.

The place was rich with texture, color, statues, water, stone, and landscape. There was something feminine and sensual about it. Every time I thought, this is it, there was another level, another shrine, another god. It was overwhelming.

Then I stood under the falls and the water hit me.

I grew up with Catholic Mass, but I also grew up with Saturday morning movie marathons, MTV music videos, and rock stars. So when something old and unnamed opened in me under that water, my mind went to the iconic waterfall scene from the 1976 King Kong: Jessica Lange's character, soaked in a white dress, small in Kong's enormous palm.

I was mesmerized by that scene as a kid. I used to wonder what it would feel like to be held by something that enormous. And now here I was, standing beneath a waterfall, wrapped in a sarong, drenched by water breaking over black volcanic rock, feeling held by something bigger than life. Not rescued. Not diminished. Just very, very small in the presence of something immense.

By the time I reached the next waterfall, I was part of the ceremony, not just a visitor. The water brought another memory: the exhilaration of a water slide, that moment when your stomach drops and you haven't hit the water yet. Fear and delight arriving together. The pure physical awareness of being alive.

Then the priest poured holy water into my hands, and I thought of Catholic Mass. I remembered the priest moving down the aisle with the aspergillum, incense curling behind him, dipping my fingers in holy water before making the sign of the cross. I began thinking about water and smoke, the elements human beings return to when something needs to be cleansed, blessed, released, or begun again. I thought about Vedic traditions. I thought about sage and sweetgrass and the Indigenous traditions I grew up around in the Pacific Northwest. Different cultures. Different histories. Different gods. And still, again and again, water and smoke.

I thought about Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, the possibility that some patterns run deeper than what we've been explicitly taught, that we can encounter an image or symbol and recognize it before we understand why.

To be clear, none of that makes King Kong my god, or rock stars my gods. They aren't. I'm a deeply spiritual person, and those images were never sacred to me in any literal sense. But they were what I was raised on, and somewhere along the way they became reference points for awe, wonder, and the feeling of being humbled by something larger than myself. So when the water gave me those same feelings, my mind reached for the vocabulary it already had. That's the connection. Not that King Kong is holy. That the feeling was familiar.

By the end of the ceremony, I wasn't transformed into some new version of myself. I was happy. Curious. Alive. I had entered an ancient ritual carrying my own history, and nothing in me had needed to be left outside.

At the end, Ludi told me they sold oils blessed by the Balinese priest. Of course I bought one. I understood exactly what was happening. I come from a country built on selling things, and I run a business myself. It was a good pitch, made at exactly the right moment, by someone who had earned the right to make it.

They sold it. They sold me. I bought it. And I don't regret a single rupiah.

The Gods I Knew

That is what stayed with me.

King Kong was there. So was Mama Bali. The water slide was there. So was the waterfall. The Catholic church was there, along with its incense and holy water. So was the Balinese temple.

Maybe that is what our old images are for. We don't always know why they stay. A movie that makes us wonder. A song whose meaning changes as we grow older. A scent that takes us to a place that no longer exists. Something we loved as children for reasons we couldn't name becomes a reference point, not a religion, but a place where a particular feeling once lived.

At Melukat, I got to meet the gods of Bali alongside the images I already knew. All of it gave me the same things: awe, wonder, aliveness, humility. I was tearful when I said goodbye to Ludi. She asked me how I felt.

"Grateful," I said. "Grateful that a girl from Tacoma, Washington, got to have this day."

Wind through the temple . . .
golden smoke furls into
Mahadeva's flower

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