The book is from an island in Indonesia. It was likely created in the 19th century but it looks much older. It is thick, heavy and dark. Black wooden boards as covers. Brown pages made of tree bark. On those pages are words and mysterious drawings. It rises 3 inches off the table, looking like a tome of spells and incantations. Which, actually, it is. This is “Poda ni pagar si jonnga,” or “Instructions for Magical Protection,” a book used by shamans of the Batak peoples in North Sumatra more than 100 years ago, written in a rarified script that few people could read then and fewer still now. That was by design. The Hata Poda writing system was reserved for Batak traditional healers or shamans. Given the inroads of Islam, Christianity and other religions across Indonesia over the past centuries, and the rise in regional use of Romanized script, there just aren’t many people who can read it today. “It’s a manual with instructions for various methods of divination and/or hints to remind the shaman who is already familiar with the methods,” says Joshua Kueh, head of the South Asian, Southeast Asian, Tibetan and Mongolian section in the Asian…
Creative
From Sumatra, the Batak book of “magic protections”
Source: Library of Congress Blogs — US Government, Public Domain