To move from traditionalist village Islam, as portrayed in the last chapter, to Javanist mysticism is, seemingly, to enter a different world with its own language and distinctive styles of thinking, a world at once complex and subtle, yet, despite occasional mystifications and a tendency to paradox, more clearly articulated and realized in everyday life than are the routines of practical Islam. Where Islam promises heaven through ritual compliance and devotion to the Koran, Javanism (kejawèn) takes the everyday world as its key text and the body as its holy book.

The contrast, however, is a matter of divergent orientations rather than exclusive and opposed cultural identities. All Bayu's Javanists are also Muslims in the straightforward sense that they take part in the activities which constitute village Islam: the celebration of Islamic holidays and feasts, Islamic rites of passage, chanting at funeral sedhekah, and grave visiting.

Javanists can be defined simply as those people who tend to stress the Javanese part of their cultural inheritance and who regard their Muslim affiliation as secondary. As with Islam, there are the relatively purer types (the kejawèn equivalent of santri) as well as the less articulate and loosely committed individuals who look to such people for their opinions. (There is also, as noted in chapter 5, a broad middle zone of the ambivalent and indifferent.)