Myth, Ritual, and the Construction of Sacredness: A Cultural Anthropology Study of Cepuri Parangkusumo, Bantul, Yogyakarta

Abstract

Cepuri Parangkusumo, located on the southern coast of Bantul, Yogyakarta, is a sacred site that unites the mythological narrative of the encounter between Panembahan Senopati and Kanjeng Ratu Kidul, recurring ritual practices, and the political authority of the Yogyakarta Sultanate. Prior studies of this site have largely been descriptive-thematic, examining theological, semiotic, or religious-pluralism dimensions in isolation, without offering a conceptual model of how the site's sacredness is continuously produced and reproduced across shifting political regimes and religious communities. This article addresses that gap by synthesising Mircea Eliade's phenomenology of the sacred, Catherine Bell's theory of ritual practice, Victor Turner's concept of liminality, and Pierre Bourdieu's notion of symbolic capital into a triadic model termed the Narrative–Practice–Power Model. Using a qualitative-interpretive approach grounded in document and ethnographic-literature analysis, the study demonstrates that the sacredness of Cepuri Parangkusumo is not a static property of geography but is generated through three mutually reinforcing mechanisms: myth as hierophany, which supplies a framework of meaning; ritualisation, which embodies and reactivates that meaning; and the power relations of the court and the spiritual economy, which institutionalise and redistribute that meaning within the social-political domain. Together these mechanisms form a self-reinforcing loop that accounts for the site's enduring sacredness amid religious plurality and tourism-driven modernisation. The findings offer a theoretical contribution transferable to other syncretic sacred sites across the archipelago, as well as practical implications for heritage management and interfaith tolerance along Java's southern coast.