The Mystery Solved: Why Tuyul and Babi Ngepet Avoid Stealing Money from Banks
The story of tuyul and babi ngepet is not unfamiliar to Indonesian society. These two supernatural beings are often associated with a quick path to wealth.
In various generational tales, tuyul and babi ngepet are believed to be kept to steal money. However, interestingly, there are no stories mentioning them carrying out major thefts in banks.
Yet, banks as places storing large amounts of money should be an ideal target if the tales were true.
Before delving deeper, it is important to examine the origins of this belief. The myth of assistance from supernatural beings arose from past social conditions rife with envy. When someone suddenly becomes rich without a clear process, society often links it to mystical interventions.
In The Indonesian Economy 1800-2010 (2012), Jan Luiten van Zanden and Daan Marks explain that this phenomenon strengthened around 1870, right after the era of economic liberalisation. At that time, small farmers’ lands were increasingly converted into large plantations and sugar factories. The common people were further marginalised, while traders and entrepreneurs reaped vast wealth in a short time.
This drastic change raised questions among impoverished farmers. Where did the wealth of those merchants come from? Following their logic, the process of accumulating fortune should be visible and gradual, something they did not see in those rich individuals.
From here emerged suspicions that the elites collaborated with supernatural creatures like tuyul and babi ngepet. According to Ong Hok Ham in From Priyayi Matters to Nyi Blorong (2002), this accusation made rich traders and entrepreneurs viewed with contempt because they were thought to have obtained wealth through mystical means.
The popularity of the tuyul and babi ngepet figures then grew as symbols of “instant wealth”. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz also noted beliefs that some people kept tuyul or made pacts with spirits in sacred places.
Owners of tuyul in folk tales are depicted as living very simply to hide their wealth, such as wearing shabby clothes, bathing in rivers with labourers, and eating ordinary people’s food.
However, in modern reality, the concept of “bank money” is vastly different from the world of pesugihan. Banks are a formal financial system unknown to rural communities at that time, so they do not fit into the myth’s framework.
In the end, the tales of tuyul and babi ngepet actually reflect social anxieties due to economic envy. These two supernatural beings are symbols of inequality between the poor and the rich as individuals, not between society and institutions.