The Laundry Lady

A day or so before John and I are due to leave Ubud and travel east, we’re sitting in a small coffee house we’ve visited most mornings since arriving. The air smells faintly of clove cigarettes, humidity, and earth.

Across the road, the woman from the laundry steps outside.

She’s holding a tray of canang ... flowers, rice, fruit ... and a stick of dupa already lit. I’ve seen her do this every day, sometimes twice a day, and as we sit there watching her move from the step at the front of the shop to the small shrine, then to the motorbikes lined along the road, she finally reaches the penjor.

The penjor, temporary bamboo poles, decorated ornately, have lined the roads since we arrived. They’ve hemmed the edges of the streets I’ve walked as I’ve felt the magic in the air … that pulsating web of energy that seems to emanate from beneath the surface of things here.

“Watch how she places the offerings into the shrine at the bottom of the penjor,” John says quietly as the laundry woman comes closer.

“She places the focus, the intention, the thanks there. Then it travels up through the different embellishments, shapes, and woven patterns. It moves upward and is amplified by each section, until it pours back down again through the arch and onto the street below.”

Watching the woman light the dupa and listening to John’s words, I realise what this is. Its not simply a devotional or religious act, but a familiar form of magic.

I’ve been circling Western esoterica - the Hermetic texts, Renaissance magic, the Greeks, the Egyptians, Edgar Cayce, Thomas Troward, Madame Blavatsky - for over two thirds of my life, always with the understanding that these traditions weren’t describing superstition or faith, but mechanics … practical ways of aligning with reality in order to co-create it.

Sitting, on a roadside in Ubud, I’m watching the same mechanics of Western esoteric magic, but enacted with flowers, herbs and smoke … by a laundry lady.

What I’d previously assumed were separate worlds, ie. Balinese Hinduism (infused with animism and shamanism) and the Western mystery traditions, suddenly lock together, perfectly aligned, like two transparencies snapping into focus.

The woman becomes a hinge between them, and through her hands I can see both. Continents apart, but the same language.

The penjor are like 3D diagrams from esoteric texts, I realise, watching the laundry lady flick the smoke here and there with her hand. They are apparatus,

The bamboo pole mirrors the axis mundi - the invisible column described in Hermetic cosmology, the pathway along which spirit becomes matter. Heaven. The divine. Kether descending into form, into physical manifestation. Malkuth.

Each element has its place. Each placement matters. Creation, preservation, dissolution, protection - all ordered, balanced, brought into relation. This thing - the penjor - is talismanic magic, swaying in the breeze.

“So beautiful,” I murmur.

I think of Ficino, of Venus, and his writings on beauty as an attractor of harmony, and smile softly to myself. Of course. Of course they knew this. The cili, the woven ornaments, the careful symmetry - it all creates emotional and energetic space for the ritual to work.

The beauty of the penjor isn’t purely decoration, but alignment with the unseen map of the cosmos itself.

And then there’s the role of the human.

Unlike other countries where the spiritual work is off-loaded to priests or nuns in their monasteries, the woman from the laundry isn’t on some spiritual pedestal. She isn’t special. And yet she’s doing something real and something effective.

In Western texts, humans are described as microcosmic gods, capable of shaping reality through conscious participation. Here, that idea isn’t abstract but lived and shared and ordinary.

At this point, something clicks in my mind.

Manifestation, I realise, isn’t about wanting something enough, driving hard to get it, forcing reality through desire and will (which is the methodology peddled by modern manifestation teachers of the West).

It’s about remembering how to stand in the right place and aligning with the mechanics - the same mechanics discovered by people all over the world - of how reality actually works.

The incense burns down.

The smoke thins.

The offerings remain, bright and temporary.

The penjor sways slightly in the wind.

By the time we leave the coffee shop, I can feel a surge of excitement rising inside me. I no longer see the Balinese ceremonies as soley spiritual or religious … but precise, almost scientific, magical practice. And Western esotericism no longer feels academic or abstract pressed down in ancient history. It’s suddenly everywhere … encoded in gesture, material, beauty, and daily repetition.

The woman lighting the dupa never looks up.

She finishes her round and disappears back into the laundry. Her dog - a small, hilarious little beast with comedy teeth and a pink tutu - looks up at us as we walk past.

My brain has been washed.

My body has been rinsed.

The laundry lady has performed some strange magic on my mind, and I can feel something unfolding.

Like a mystery school just opened its doors to me, I think … and at that moment the heavens open and the “ujan” (monsoon rain) begins to pour.