Balinese Pawukon Calendar

The Pawukon is not a zodiac of signs but a calendar: a cycle of 210 days that the Balinese divide into ten weeks running at the same time — weeks of one day, of two, of three and so on up to ten. The seven-day week gives the cycle its thirty named weeks, the wuku, from Sinta to Watugunung. Most of Bali’s religious ceremonies, temple anniversaries and good and bad days are set by this cycle, and Balinese calendars print it beside the Gregorian dates.

According to Eiseman, the Pawukon came to Bali in the fourteenth century with the Hindu Majapahit of Java who fled to the island; traces of it remain in Java, but it is in Bali that it flourishes. Covarrubias adds that it follows no astronomical or other natural rule: its days are counted, not read in the sky.

Covarrubias records the legend behind the names of the thirty weeks. Sinta, who had conceived after dreaming of a holy man, struck her unruly son on the head; the boy ran away and grew up to be Watugunung, the powerful king of Giling Wesi. Years later he married the wandering Sinta and her sister Landep without knowing who they were, and had twenty-seven sons. When Sinta recognised him by the scar, he tried to marry the goddess Sri to escape the curse and made war on the gods. Wisnu defeated him and decreed that his sons be killed, one every seven days; then he gave their names, together with those of Sinta, Landep and Watugunung, to the thirty weeks.

The day of birth matters in Bali. Every 210 days people celebrate their oton, the Pawukon anniversary of their birth. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz noted that the day of birth is held to indicate much of a person’s destiny and temperament — but these readings combine several cycles, are made by specialists and vary between individuals, villages and regions. The lontar Tutur Gong Besi does describe the character of those born in each wuku, together with, for almost every wuku, a tree and a bird; but in living practice the wuku is one cycle among several. That is why ZodiAtlas shows your wuku first as a fact: the week of the Pawukon you were born in, with its title of God in the Tutur Gong Besi and its holy days. Each wuku page then gives, in our own translation, what the Tutur Gong Besi says of those born in it.