Bomoh, dukun and santet: Southeast Asian magic, honestly
A serious, living belief across the Malay world — and its genuine dangers are human ones, not supernatural.
6 min read · Published 16 August 2026
The short answer
A bomoh (in Malay) or dukun (in Indonesian and Javanese) is a traditional spiritual healer and shaman of the Malay-Indonesian world — consulted for illness, protection, lost objects, luck and love, and to mediate with spirits. The same body of belief has a dark side, ilmu hitam or black magic, whose best-known form is santet: sorcery said to strike a person at a distance with illness, misfortune or death. This is a real, widespread and serious part of the region's culture, not a curiosity. There is no evidence that the magic causes physical harm across a distance — but its human consequences are very real: the nocebo effect on those who believe themselves cursed, exploitation by fraudulent practitioners, delayed medical care, and, at its worst, deadly violence against people accused of sorcery. AsterNym has no part in any of this, and treats it as culture and sociology rather than a method.
Who the bomoh and the dukun are
Across Malaysia, Indonesia, Brunei and Singapore, the bomoh or dukun has long been a community figure — part healer, part counsellor, part intermediary with the unseen. People go to them for herbal medicine, to have a spirit disturbance addressed, to find something lost, to seek protection before a journey or a business, or to ask for help in love or fortune. Related figures include the pawang, associated with controlling nature such as rain or animals.
It is important to say that this role is not inherently sinister. The tradition itself distinguishes ilmu putih, 'white knowledge' used to heal and protect, from ilmu hitam, 'black knowledge' used to harm. Most practitioners a family actually visits are working, or claim to work, on the white side.
The black-magic side: santet and guna-guna
The feared form is santet (also called teluh or, in parts of the region, other local names): sorcery commissioned to injure someone at a distance, said to cause sudden unexplained illness, wasting, or objects — nails, glass, hair — manifesting inside the victim's body. A separate strand is love and influence magic — guna-guna or pelet — used to bind another person's affection or will, which raises its own ethical problems even within the belief itself.
These are described here as cultural facts, not techniques. The point worth holding is that within the belief, santet is understood as something you commission against an enemy, which is exactly why the accusation of being a sorcerer is so socially dangerous — it marks someone as a source of hidden malice in the community.
What actually happens: the nocebo effect
The honest crux of the whole subject is this: a person who deeply believes they have been cursed can genuinely become ill, and in rare, documented cases can decline severely — not because the magic reached them, but because fear, dread and hopelessness act on the body. This is the nocebo effect, the dark twin of placebo; the physiologist Walter Cannon studied its extreme form under the name 'voodoo death' as far back as the 1940s.
That is a real and serious phenomenon, and it explains a great deal of what looks like evidence for black magic. The belief has power over the body precisely because it is believed. The magic does not have to be real for the harm to be real — which is a more unsettling fact than either the believer or the sceptic usually wants it to be.
The real harm is human
The dangers here are not supernatural, and they are not small. The first is fraud: an unscrupulous practitioner can charge large sums to 'lift' a curse that was never there, trading on a frightened family's fear. The second is medical: a treatable illness read as santet may be taken to a dukun instead of a doctor, and the delay is where the actual damage is done.
The gravest is violence. Accusations of sorcery have repeatedly led to people being attacked and killed across the region — most notoriously the wave of killings of accused sorcerers in East Java in 1998, but the pattern of lynchings of suspected practitioners has recurred since. Indonesia's revised criminal code, passed in 2022, even introduced a provision addressing claims to possess powers to harm others by black magic. The most dangerous thing about santet, historically, has not been the curse. It has been the accusation.
How to hold it honestly
Treating this belief as silly is both wrong and condescending to the many millions for whom it is a real part of how the world works. Treating it as literally true is also wrong, and in the fraud-and-violence sense it can be genuinely harmful. Both have to be said at once, which is the same line this site holds for every tradition it covers.
So: the bomoh and the dukun are a real and meaningful part of Southeast Asian life, worth understanding with respect. The magic has not been shown to move illness across a distance. And the suffering attached to it — the frightened, the defrauded, the accused — is real, and deserves more attention than the question of whether the spells work.
Common questions
- What is a bomoh or a dukun?
- A traditional spiritual healer and shaman of the Malay-Indonesian world — bomoh is the Malay term, dukun the Indonesian and Javanese one. They are consulted for healing, protection, lost objects, luck and love, and to deal with spirit disturbances. The tradition distinguishes white magic (healing, protective) from black magic (harmful).
- What is santet?
- Santet is the best-known form of Indonesian black magic (ilmu hitam): sorcery said to strike a person at a distance with sudden illness, misfortune or death, sometimes described as placing objects inside the victim's body. It is understood as something commissioned against an enemy, which is why being accused of it is socially dangerous.
- Does black magic like santet actually work?
- There is no evidence that a curse causes physical harm across a distance. What is real is the nocebo effect — a person who believes they are cursed can genuinely become ill from fear and dread. The belief has power over the body because it is believed, which is different from the magic being real.
- What is the real danger of belief in santet?
- The dangers are human, not supernatural: fraud by practitioners who charge to lift curses that were never there, delayed medical care when a treatable illness is read as a curse, and violence — accusations of sorcery have led to people being attacked and killed, as in the 1998 East Java killings.