Divine Intercession: Awakening the Goddess

By Rangda

My journey with burlesque has been a spiritual one. A path of self discovery and self love. A few years ago I started to practice pole on the Wirral with 'Feelin' Peachy' and that awakened a fire and passion for sensual movement. I discovered that I could move my body and my soul felt good. And this led me to burlesque classes with the 'The Spare Rib' in Liverpool. And the very first time I performed burlesque as Rangda, was at a fundraiser for my disabled daughter.  

Rangda is a symbol of my heritage and my life path, and when I perform as her, I feel that I am being taken in the correct direction. Rangda IS energy, ancient and primordial. In Balinese mythology, Rangda is known as the goddess of demons and witchcraft, she shares correspondences with the Benevolent Goddess, Durgda and the Goddess of Destruction, Kali. However, unlike these Goddesses, she is exiled from society and feared as a child eating monster, and is only invoked at temples and sacred spaces to chase away lesser evil spirits and to cleanse the hallowed grounds of negativity. 

Once a year the Balinese people recreated Rangda's defeat at the maw of the Barong in a ritual dance that tells the story of an epic battle between good and evil, showing Rangda being forced back into the realms of darkness for another cycle of time. However, according to myth, Rangda is more than the villain that history would paint her to be. Before she became a revered Queen of darkness, Rangda was Princess Mahendradatta, sold into marriage to unite Java and Bali. And although she does her duty as a daughter and wife, she wants more for herself, she craves knowledgeable and power, and so she begins to read – God forbid! She read books about witchcraft and how she might grow her own mind and power. When she is discovered, she is exiled, forced to leave her children and home, and live in the woods with the unclean demons. She is painted as a wild woman, silenced and persecuted. So cruelly demonised by the patriarchy. And so she becomes the monster they call her. She brings wicked and terrible reckoning in her wake, levelling the field for all wrong-doing done to her.  

So Rangda wasn't created by me, nor did she emerge from me. She IS me. She is the link to the heritage I claim as a mixed race, Indonesian/British woman.  

As a child I was raised and adopted by my biological grandparents. My biological mother was too young and my biological Indonesian father was not involved in my life. The strangest thing – one of many strange things growing up as a mixed race queer child – you understand the world as a place to fit in among, or be ‘othered’. Singled out for your skin colour, eye shape and existing within a different family dynamic. You learn to disassociate from your own looks and, in turn, feelings, all the while knowing that you look different from your family, who painfully look alike, with their pale skin and brown auburn hair. And you find yourself wishing that the talcum powder really could lighten your skin and hair, allowing you to be be white too. You realise when you are old enough, you were actually attempting to erase yourself. To become invisible, see-through.

However, when you push through all boundaries and false loves – and all the other spaces that claim to be ‘safe’, but are just exploitative groups ready to tear you down and violate your sense of self – you learn to look inside. Wade through the cess-pit of your soul and find something there that someone might love one day. After all the self-love graft and work, you can emerge as a Goddess and for me now, she is Rangda. The cry through time to my ancestors to heal generational wounds, she is a symbol to all women who have been harmed by or pushed out of society because she does not conform. She is for anyone, everyone who unapologetically lives their truth. She is the fight against repression and oppression of the patriarchy. Rangda is a primal scream echoing through time, 'Never Again!'... 

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Bio: From the deepest depths of Balinese mythology, Rangda (she/her/they/them), Goddess of witchcraft and demons! Oozing with arcane sensuality, this sultry seductress will bewitch and beguile your senses with her siren's call. A champion for all the mis-heard misfits and all those that aim to misbehave. She will empower you to lose all your inhibitions. As she performs her ritual for you, she gorge upon your sexual desires and depravity and will summon up a mystical energy so great, that you will fall, spell-bound, at her feet in mutual worship. So sharpen your claws and slap your hooves together for this Deadly, dark, demon goddess that will have you begging her to take your breath away, and leave you shouting with reckless abandon, ‘Off with your clothes and down with the patriarchy!' The one, the unholy... Rangda.

You can follow Rangda on Instagram: @rangda_thee 

Feelin' Peachy, Pole Classes Wirral: @poledancingclasseswirral 

The Spare Rib Burlesque: @thesparerib

NW Burlesque Show: @nw_burlesque_show