Bornean art: The Spirit Ship (Borneo-Dayak Crafts

Borneo-Dayak CRAFTS
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The spirit ship, like the real canoe, is commonly identified with underworld animals, and its stem and stern display a carved dragon head and tail.

Bornean Art: The Spirit Ship

For most Bornean peoples, with their ancient sailing heritage, the vehicle par excellence was the ship propelled by divine breath, and then the riverine canoe. Naturally, the spirit of deceased would travel to the hereafter in a spiritual ship commanded by a god. Canoe-shaped coffins or funeral monuments are common. Funeral barges carry the remains to the burial site or away to sea, and real or model canoes are placed near the grave. The ship also carries the shaman's soul on its journey to the spirit realm.

The Melanau shaman evacuates the spirits of disease by drifting them away on a raft. The spirit ship, like the real canoe, is commonly identified with underworld animals, and its stem and stern display a carved dragon head and tail. Some Brunei people build a boat-shaped bamboo platform with a crocodile's head and tail, load it with sacks of rice flour, then ritually unload it, enacting a sort of cargo cult the delivery of a godsend by a calling boat.

The spirit ship, an ancient theme of Dong-son culture, is strikingly absent from the forest nomad's culture, which possibly remained out of reach, and it is uncommon among the Kayan who probably arrived later. In groups influenced by the Dong-son culture, the boat marks rank and status in both real and spiritual transportation and is a metaphor of the harmonious and ordered village community.

Bornean arts: The dragon and the underworld, The Tomb-Womb-Jar, The hornbill and the upperworld, The tree of life, The squatting slave and other anthropomorphs, The old tiger, The spirit ship, Plant and geometric motifs.

Borneo: An introduction on the island, Historical background of Borneo, The populations of Borneo.
The Indigenous peoples: Major ethnic groups, Conclusion to the Dayak tribes.
Art in traditional life: People at home, Household arts and crafts, Clothes and textiles, Personal adornment, The wider world, The fields, River and forest, Trade, War, headhunting, and sacrifice, Traditional religion, Of Gods and men, Life and ritual, Sickness and shamanism, Death and funeral art, Primary funerals, Secondary funerals, The living and the death.