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Up until 65 years ago, my family had lived over a century and a half in what during those times was called the Dutch East Indies (Nederlands Oost Indie, NOI), currently, Indonesia. That lineage surrounded the workings of the Dutch East India Company, or VOC, the first truly global corporation. It helped to make many Dutch and other stockholders wealthy over two centuries!

My father, who was of a line of what would now be understood as Dutch colonials, gave a certain credence to the animistic religion of the natives. He feared their voodoo as I had not known him to fear anything else more.

"Animism [] attribute souls to abstract concepts such as words, true names" (from Wikipedia). I believe Subud name-taking or renaming has to do with such an animistic "true name" concept, whereby the namer attempts to ascribe a name that highlights a truth or wished-for characteristic(s) of the name-wearer.

I was born only after my family moved to the Netherlands (at which time my father was 28), finding NOI inhospitable--to put it mildly--where local thugs had been indoctrinated by the Japanese on how to get rid of the Dutch before and during WWII. Therefore, I wouldn't take my observations as gospel, as they have at best a certain measure of second-hand verisimilitude.