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TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION
II. GODS, SPIRITS AND GHOSTS:
(a) Primitive Gods
(b) Siva and the Hindu Gods
(c) Good and Evil Spirits of Dead Mortals
(d) Primitive Spirits, Fairies and Ghosts
(e) Angels and Devils of Islam
(f) Jinn
III. THE MALAY MAGICIAN
IV. THE MALAY CHARM
V. THE SOUL OF THINGS
VI. THE RITUAL OF THE RICE-FIELD
VII. THE SHAMAN'S SEANCE
VIII. THE SHAMAN'S SACRIFICE
IX. MAGIC AND MAN:
(a) Birth and Infancy
(b) Adolescence
(c) Betrothal and Marriage
(d) Death
(e) Installation Ceremonies
X. MAGICIAN AND MUSLIM
XI. MAGICIAN AND MYSTIC
I. INTRODUCTION
This book deals with the magic of the Muslim Malays of the Crown
Colony of the Straits Settlements, comprising Singapore, Penang
and Malacca; of the Federated Malay States, Perak, Selangor, Negri
Sembilan and Pahang; of the Unfederated Malay States, Johore,
Kedah, Kelantan and Trengganu; and of Patani, a northern Malay
State belonging to Siam.
The Malay Peninsula is the most southern extremity of the
continent of Asia. It has the region of Indo-China to the north.
South lies the Malay Archipelago. It stands midway between India
and China. Nature has laid it open to many influences, though
students not presented with the evidence of geography,
anthropology and history are apt to speak as if Malay magic were
unique and indigenous.
The language belongs to the Malayo-Polynesian or Oceanic or
Austronesian family, which obtains from Formosa to New Zealand and
from Madagascar to Easter Island. To the eastern branch belong the
languages of Samoa, Tahiti and Tonga. To the western branch belong
Malay, Malagasy, and languages of the Philippines, Sumatra, Java,
Borneo and Celebes. This latter branch is termed Indonesian,
rather unfortunately, since for anthropologists the word defines a
particular physical strain found in the Bataks of Sumatra, the
Dayaks of Borneo and the Torajas of Celebes.
The typical civilised Indonesian peoples, Malays and Javanese, are
variants of a Proto-Malay race with Indian, Arab and other foreign
admixtures. In that Proto-Malay race, whatever else may be its
components, there is a Mongoloid strain.
In the south of the Peninsula, the bullet-headed straight-haired
Proto-Malays are represented by jungle-tribes known generally as
Jakun and specifically as Biduanda in Negri Sembilan, Blanda in
Selangor, and Mantra In Malacca. The coastal tribes are termed
Orang Laut, or "Men of the Sea," and form a link between the
Proto-Malays of the Peninsula and those of the Riau Archipelago
and Sumatra, their original home.
Another aboriginal forest-dweller is the wavyhaired long-headed
Sakai, supposed mainly on linguistic grounds to have come down
from Indo-China and on anthropological grounds to be related to
the Veddas of Ceylon. A branch of this tribe, the Besisi, have
intermarried freely with the Jakun.
Oldest of all Malaya's inhabitants are the Semang and Pangan of
the north, small dark frizzy-haired Negritos, thought to be
related to the Aetas of the Philippines and the Mineopies of the
Andamans.
Already at the beginning of the Christian era Indian religions,
the caste system and government by rajahs had been introduced into
Java and into Sumatra, whence most of the Malays of the Peninsula
came, and Indian influence spread in a less degree throughout the
Archipelago even as far as the Philippines. The old Malay kingdom
of Palembang in Sumatra introduced Mahayana Buddhism into Java and
had a vague suzerainty over the Malay Peninsula for several
centuries, until in the thirteenth the modern Siamese gained
control in the north and Islam a permanent hold in the south. A
Buddhist inscription from Province Wellesley opposite Penang (in
the southern Indian style of writing found In West Java) dates
back to 400 A.D. But in Malaya, as in Java, the religion of Siva
retained a footing until the advent of Islam.
II. GODS, SPIRITS AND GHOSTS
(a) PRIMITIVE GODS
THE Mantra, a Proto-Malay tribe, claim to be descended from
Mertang, the first magician, who was the child of two persons
called Drop of Water and Clod of Earth. In the Moluccas the earth
is a female deity, who in the west monsoon is impregnated by Lord
Sun-Heaven. The Torajas in Celebes believed in two supreme powers,
the Man and the Maiden, that is, the sun and the earth. The Dayaks
of Borneo hold that the sun and the earth created the world. The
terms, "Father Sky and Mother Earth," occur in the Malay ritual of
the rice-year, at the opening of mines and of theatrical shows and
in the invocations of the Kelantan shaman. A Kelantan account
relates that sun and earth once had human form, sun the form of a
man and earth the form of a woman, whose milk may be traced in the
tin-ore of Malaya and whose blood is now gold. Actors in the north
of the Malay Peninsula say that "the earth spirit, whom actors
fear, is the daughter of Seretang [1] Bogoh, who sits in the sun
and guides the winds, and of Sang Siuh, the mother of the earth,
who sits at the navel of the world." Many religions at once unite
and dissociate the fruitful earth and the gloomy underworld. But
as Malay drama came from India, this northern tradition may be a
corruption of Hindu mythology. By some Malay actors Raja Siu, lord
of the surface of the earth, is invoked along with Siva, and the
name is perhaps a corruption of Siva. Anyhow, in time Siva and Sri
usurped the place of Father Sky (or Father Water, as he is
sometimes called) and of Mother Earth in the Malay pantheon, and
to-day even the existence of these two primitive gods has been
forgotten.
The study of early cults shows that the place of a sky-god tends
later to be taken by gods of the sun, the moon and the stars. So
in some ancient layer of Malay beliefs before the introduction of
Saivism, the white spirit of the sun, the black spirit of the
moon, and the yellow spirit of sunset may have been important,
seeing that they have Indonesian names (mambang), have been
incorporated into the Malay's Hindu pantheon, and have survived
under Islam as humble genies.
"The fishermen along the west of the Peninsula sacrifice to four
great spirits " (also called mambang) "who go by many names but
whose scope is always the same. One is the spirit of the bays,
another
[1. A dialect form of Sultan.]
that of banks or beaches, another that of headlands, and last and
fiercest is the spirit of tideways and currents." Three of these
bear primitive names used by the Proto-Malays. The spirit of the
tides is famous. The spirit of the bays is mentioned as a black
genie and the spirit of headlands as a white. Was there originally
a fourth spirit? To the three Proto-Malay names yet another, not
convincingly authentic, is sometimes added. But only three of the
four bear Sanskrit names. And the modern naming of four spirits
after the Archangels may be due to the liking of the Malay Muslim
pantheist for that number.
It is uncertain, too, if the primitive Malays, like the people of
Madagascar and Celebes, believed in four gods of the air in charge
of the quarters of the globe. In Bali Indian influence gave these
gods Hindu names, and three are still worshipped there as forms of
Siva. One Peninsular charm speaks of "the four children of Siva
who live at the corners of the world." A Perak charm describes
Berangga Kala as the spirit of the West, Sang Begor as the spirit
of the East, Sang Degor as the spirit of the North, and Sang
Rangga Gempita as the spirit of the South. But generally the four
corners of the world are held to be in charge of four Shaikhs, of
whom the most often mentioned, 'Abdu'I-Qadir, is probably the
founder of the famous order of Muslim mystics.
A Malay knows of Vayu under the name of Bayu. But when with arms
akimbo, loosened hair, and head-cloth streaming over his shoulder,
the sailor whistled to the Raja of the Wind, he may have been
invoking not Vayu but some indigenous spirit or the Prophet
Solomon, to whom Allah gave dominion over the breezes of heaven.
In the Malay pantheon there is a mysterious black Awang, addressed
by actors as king of the earth, who "walks along the veins of the
earth and sleeps at its gate." Apparently, therefore, he is
identified with Siva, and this identification, if correct,
suggests a high place for this forgotten figure of some early
cult. But in a Proto-Malay charm to propitiate the aforesaid
spirits of the sea, Warrior Awang figures as their servant, who
climbs the mast of a ship in distress, a young man with "hairy
chest, red eyes, black skin and frizzy hair." A Kelantan charm,
also, depicts him as a haunter of forest undergrowth, "a span in
height, with bald temples, frizzy hair, red eyes, white teeth,
broad chest, and feet and hands disfigured with skin disease."
This is a good picture of a Negrito, member of the oldest race in
Malaysia, but it may be a posthumous description as applied to
this god or godling of a primitive cult, who rides the storm and
can cause ague and disease.
(b) SIVA AND THE HINDU GODS
A white genie, "jewel of the world," lives in the sun and guards
the gates of the sky. He has a brother, with seven heads, king of
all the jinn. This white genie is entitled Maharaja Dewa, a Malay
corruption of Mahadeva, the blue-throated Siva. The distinction
between this white genie and his black brother, who lives in the
moon, is sometimes obliterated, as in the invocation used when
opening the stage for a ma'yong play:--"Peace be upon Mother Earth
and Father Sky! ... Peace be upon thee, Black Awang, king of the
earth! ... Peace be upon the blessed saints at the four corners of
the world! ... Peace be upon my grandsire, Batara Guru, the first
of teachers, who became incarnate when the body was first created,
teacher who livest as a hermit in the moon, teacher who rulest in
the circle of the sun, teacher of mine whose coat is of green
beads, teacher of mine whose blood is white, who hast but one
bone, the hair of whose body is upside down, whose muscles are
stiff, who hast a black throat, a fluent tongue and salt in thy
spittle." Incidentally it is interesting to find the Malay still
paying homage to Siva as Nataraja, lord of dancers and king of
actors, though to-day he is quite unaware of this name and róle of
the Hindu god whose theatre is the world and who himself is actor
and audience. In another Malay invocation the Black Genie too is
painted as "having but one bone, the hair of whose body is upside
down, who can assume a thousand shapes." Though he has "one foot
on the heart of the earth," yet this Black Genie also "hangs at
the gate of the sky."
Batara Guru or Divine Teacher is the Malay name for Siva. And it
is not surprising to find that on accepting the Hindu deities into
their spirit-world Malays paid great homage to Siva under his
sinister aspect of Kala the destroyer of life. Anyhow, here are
the white spirit of the sun and the black spirit of the moon
identified with manifestations of Siva. The spirit of the tides is
often associated with the spirits of the sun and moon, and, again,
the Malay expressly identifies him with Siva and makes Kala the
dread god of the sea.
Furthermore, in Malay mythology there is a Spectre Huntsman, whom
magicians identify with Siva. This Spectre Huntsman is even known
by the various Malay appellations of the Divine Teacher such as
"Raja of land-folk," "Raja of Ghosts," and "Gaffer Long Claws."
Now Siva, of course, was the Rudra of Vedic times. And it has been
pointed out how in Rudra are found the same characteristics that
distinguish the German Wodan (or Odin), namely those of a
storm-god followed by hosts of spirits, a leader of lost souls,
identified both in Malay and German legend with the Spectre
Huntsman. The association by Malays of the Spectre Huntsman with
Siva clearly corroborates the relationship between Rudra and Wodan
and lends colour to the theory of an Indo-Germanic storm-god, the
common source of the Indian and Teutonic myths.
The identification of Siva with Gaffer Long Claws finds a parallel
among the Bhils, Kols and Gonds of India, who also confound him
with a chthonic tiger-god. And like those tribesmen the Malay
appears sometimes to confuse Siva with Arjuna, calling that
demigod the earth spirit and king of the sea.
Last phase of all, Siva becomes father and king of the jinn
imported with Islam. Even his white bull Nandi is yoked to the
service of the new religion. According to early Hindu mythology
Brahma, or according to later belief Vishnu, took the form of a
boar and raised the earth out of the waters. Other stories current
in India make an elephant or a bull the support of the earth.
Muslim cosmogony definitely places the earth on a bull with forty
horns having seven thousand branches, a beast whose body stretches
from east to west. So the Kelantan magician invokes "the father
and chief of all jinn practising austerity in the stall of the
black bull who supports and fans and shakes the world." The idea
that the king of the jinn is the father of seven children may be
connected with the Muslim notion of seven earths.
The wife of Siva is known to Malays as Mahadewi "the great
goddess," as Kumari "the Damsel," and above all, as Sri, goddess
of rice-fields. As Sri she may be said to have taken the place of
"Mother Earth," just as her divine spouse represented "Father
Sky." As Kumari she is supposed in the north of the Peninsula to
have been made by Gaffer Mahsiku out of a bit of eaglewood. (In
Patani a name for the earth spirit is Siriku.) The goddess married
her creator. But the legend adds that she had one daughter by the
god (deva) of the moon and one by the god of the sun, a remarkable
preservation of the Malay myth that the Divine Teacher under
different manifestations lived in both those luminaries. The same
tradition adds that Kumari is invoked against lock-jaw and
dumbness, because she made her eldest daughter live on a hill as
an ascetic with her mouth wide open till it grew into a cave which
Hanuman entered!
The Malay magician often vaunts that "the sword of Vishnu is
before his face" to protect him. And with Siva, Brahma, Kala and
Sri, this god presides over the five divisions of the old-world
diviner's day. Brahma is known as Berma Sakti, but hardly enters
into Malay magic. In Kelantan, Krishna is said to be entreated to
cure snake-bites and the stings of scorpions and centipedes.
Ganesha, under the name of Gana, is little more than a village
godling.
The Hindu demons and demigods that have found a place in the magic
of the Malays may be conveniently inserted here. Of most of them
the magician has only a literary knowledge. The Asuras exalted
demons that war not against men but gods, are represented by Rahu,
who causes eclipses of the sun and moon, and to the Malay mind is
a huge dragon. Danu, a demon relation of his in Hindu mythology,
is the serpent who inhabits the rainbow. In the north, where plays
founded on the Ramayana are popular, Sri Rama, the hero of that
epic, is a demigod invoked especially in charms connected, with
the hunting of elephants, and Hanuman, the monkey-god, is an evil
spirit with the face of a horse and the body of a man. There, too,
the great Rishis or sages are invoked, and the magician takes
shelter behind the name of Narada and the name of Samba, his
derider.
Bhuta and Raksasa are often mentioned as demons even by Malay
peasants. But to-day, at any rate, acquaintance with them is due
mainly to popular romances that have come from the Deccan. The
Malay will turn, for instance, to the story of Marakarma and read
of a Raksasa who lights a fire as big as a burning town, pours
rice on a mat a hundred yards wide, and eats it along with
spiders, centipedes, lizards, flies, rats and mosquitoes that,
overcome by the steam, drop on to his food; he drinks a well of
water, hiccups like thunder, and picks from his teeth with a log
chunks of food so large that they kill cat, goose or fowl by their
impact. Of the cousinship between the Indian Bhutas and the
Indonesian spirits of men who have perished by violence so little
is known that in one account the Spectre Huntsman is called a
Bhuta and in a Perak charm the great goddess Sri is described as
the "Genie Bhuta Sri who presides over rice-fields!" But in fact
it is not these immigrant demons that are the concern of the Malay
magician.
For centuries the Muhammadan zealot and more recently the Ford car
have invaded the fastnesses where Malaya's illiterate priests of
Siva invoked these alien deities. The Hindu gods continue to
survive in invocations degraded to magical charms. Still, too, at
the installation of a Perak Sultan the real Hindu name of the
demigod, who descended on a Mount Meru in Sumatra and became the
father of most of the royal houses of the Peninsula, is whispered
by Sri Nara 'diraja, keeper of the State secret, into the ear of
the new ruler. He and his master are perhaps unaware that so at
the initiation of a child into one of the higher Hindu castes his
teacher whispers a formula containing the name of the god who is
to be his special protector through life. It is to be hoped that
fanaticism will never extinguish this voice from the past.
(c) GOOD AND EVIL SPIRITS OF DEAD MORTALS
The view that ancestor-worship is the oldest of religious
practices no longer obtains. Some savages have believed in a god
existing before the coming of death. Some sacrifice to gods and
not to the ghosts of the departed. Others, exchanging old lights
for new, have come to neglect their high gods and sacrifice to
dead ancestors. Many have nature-gods. Besides, being a family
cult, ancestor-worship cannot have accompanied the group-marriage
of the most primitive tribes.
The origin of this form of worship is easily intelligible. The
dead appear to the living in dreams. Or the dead may be born again
in a child, who is the image of a forefather. A Malay prays at the
grave of an ancestor to beget a child, unaware that probably his
worship is based on the idea of the dead welcoming reincarnation.
The exact likeness of a male child to his father, that is, the
possession of two hosts by the same soul, causes alarm to a Malay;
one of the boy's ears must be pierced, otherwise either the father
or the son is likely to die. Curiously, the resemblance of a girl
to her father or of a boy or girl to the mother is of no moment.
That the dead can be kind to the living is a notion not foreign to
the Malay mind. The ritual by which a Malay acquires the powers of
a shaman suggests that originally the magician's familiars were
spirits of the dead. At the propitiation of the spirits of Upper
Perak, invocations were addressed to the spirits of a famous Raja
Nek and of the byegone magicians of the neighbourhood. A ruler
looks to his royal ancestors for the protection of his person and
his State, visits their scattered tombs after his installation or
before any great enterprise, and when sickness afflicts his house
sets a cooling potion for the patient overnight upon a family
grave. As a Muslim the Malay makes vows to prophets and saints
imploring their aid in the hour of need. In Singapore many vows
are sworn at the shrine of Habib Noh, a humble clerk of the last
century, who gave up the pride of the eye and the lusts of the
flesh for religious asceticism until he could appear in several
places at once. "In every part of Naning are found tombs of men
famed for piety, in whose names the people make vows for the
prosperous termination of any project and whose burial places they
honour with frequent visits and oblations." One outward and
visible sign of the sanctity of such tombs is the supernatural
lengthening of the space between the head and foot stones,
supposed to be the work of the deceased. There are the long graves
of Shaikh Muhammad and Shaikh Ahmad on Bukit Gedong in Malacca,
the burial place of an old Achinese medicine-woman at Kemunting in
Perak, the graves of Shaikh Sentang at Temerloh, of To'Panjang at
Kuala Pahang and of To'Panjang at Ketapang in the Pekan district
of Pahang. These sacred tombs, which exist throughout Malaya, bear
an Arabic name (karamat), though the dead whose tenements they are
need not be Muslim saints and may have been merely some powerful
ruler or the revered founder of a settlement, or even a pagan
trafficker with black magic. A celebrated shrine is the reputed
tomb of Sultan Iskandar, the mythical last Malay ruler of ancient
Singapore, whose grave on the slopes of Fort Canning is the resort
of many suppliants; and a few years ago, when it was desired to
explore it, no one, Malay, Indian or Chinese, would undertake the
task. In Jempul, in Negri Sembilan, there is a grave shaded by a
yellow-blossomed chempaka tree, whose branches are always hung
with strips of white cloth to commemorate the vows paid to a
magician interred beneath them. If the entreaty for health or a
son or whatever may be desired wins a favourable answer, then
failure to sacrifice the promised goat and hold a feast with
prayers and cracker-firing beside the grave brings tribulation
upon the perjured ingrate. The tenant of that Jempul grave was
believed to attend his widow in the form of a tiger. He would
frighten off his daughters' lovers, protect the home when their
mother was absent, and drive temporal tigers from their path.
"There are many little graveyards throughout Jempul which are
credited with having produced tigers out of-human corpses." So,
too, the spirit of the last chief of Muar is supposed to haunt the
wooded hills round his home, a sacred tiger friendly to his
people. The credulity of these Sumatran settlers in Negri Sembilan
finds a counterpart in that of certain Patani families, who in
sickness or misfortune invoke the aid of 'To Sri Lam, an
ancestor's sister who turned into a crocodile. None of these
spirits of the dead that can be gracious to suppliants are
homeless ghosts; they are attached to a religion, a district or a
clan.
Fear, however, leads to respect for many sacred places. The anger
of a Malay ruler is dreaded when he is alive; it is not less
terrible when he is gone. A European who visited the graves of the
Johore princes at Kota Tinggi in 1826 records how his guide
trembled on approaching the place, declaring that any injury to
the stones would bring misfortune on all present and behaved "as
if a demon was about to pounce upon him." There may have been a
peculiar reason for this. Among the tombs is that of Sultan Mahmud,
the last representative of the royal house of Malacca, which
furnished rulers for most of the Peninsular States. He alone of
Peninsular rulers was murdered, stabbed to death for a sexual
crime, the white blood of (Muslim saints and) Malay royalty
gushing from his veins. Apparently he survives in Kelantan as a
white genie, Sultan Mahmud, a sea-spirit, who can cause chills and
ague. A chief, swearing to his suzerain that he had not offered a
bribe to a Government officer, undertook in a tremendous oath
(which came into my hands) to be smitten "by the majesty of the
ruler and of his royal ancestors," if he were committing perjury.
Attributable, perhaps, to this fear of deceased rulers is the
custom of dropping their real names after death and giving them
such titles as "The Deceased who died at the Three Islands," "The
Deceased Pilgrim," and so on. The magician also is not less
terrible after death than in life. Only fear could regard as a
sacred place the rock at Batu Harnpar, where a Sultan of Johore,
caused to be executed a pagan jungle chief "detected in
necromantic practices!" Three months after his execution this
Jakun chief appeared to his son on the same spot and thereafter
haunted it, sometimes assuming the form of a white cock.
Especially baneful are the homeless ghosts of those who perish by
a violent death, of murdered men, of women who die in child-birth.
To them no honour is paid. They are driven away by magical charms
and amulets, by prickly thorns, ashes, and the stench of burnt
herbs.
According to the Muhammadan faith those who die in child-birth are
entitled to the rank of martyrs with whom God is well pleased. The
Malay has found it hard to accept this comfortable doctrine. The
horror of their untimely end led his ancestors to think that such
women generate malevolent spirits. Throughout Malaysia terror is
felt at the plaintive cry of a banshee (Pontianak), which is
supposed generally to appear in the form of a bird and drive her
long claws into the belly of the expectant mother, killing her and
the unborn child. Another banshee (Langsuyar) flies in the shape
of an owl with a face like a cat. The knowing imitate her hoot and
utter the insulting ejaculation, "Your hoot is near, your grave is
far, and you are sprung from the lid of a cooking-pot in a
deserted house," whereupon she keeps silent and cannot bring death
or disaster to any one in the village. Or she may wear the form of
a beautiful woman with flowing tresses. But in the nape of her
neck is a hole, which she is terrified may be found by the
smooth-scaled climbing perch, used therefore by the cunning to
make protective amulets. She flies by night and the rustle of her
tresses is as the rustle of rain. She loves to alight on tall
trees and hide in the bird's-nest fern. When this banshee passes,
the pregnant woman should be bathed and the following charm
recited over betel-vine, which must be given her to chew
I am a Great Rishi!
I slay without asking leave
I behead without making enquiry
I am Allah's champion on earth
I can destroy all creatures;
Only what I create I cannot destroy.
We are children of different seed!
O thou with broad bosom and small teeth!
Thou with flowing tresses and long nails!
Thou with the swaying gait!
If thou alightest on a tree,
Mistress Stickfast is thy name!
If thou alightest on a rapid,
Sang Rangga is thy title!
If thou sittest on a tree-stump,
The Fair Bhuta is thy name.
If thou alightest on the ground,
The Fair Swaying One thy name!
If thou mountest the house-ladder,
Thy name the Fair Sitter!
If thou sittest at the house-door,
Thy name the Fair Bar-door.
If thou sittest on a roof-beam,
Thy name the Fair Peerer!
If thou alightest on the mat,
Thy name the Fair Seated Woman!
Molest not the children of Adam
Or thou wilt be a traitor to Allah!
Such, at any rate, is the charm used in Upper Perak.
To prevent a woman who dies in child-birth from becoming one of
these banshees glass beads are put in the corpse's mouth to keep
her from inhuman shrieking, hen's eggs laid under her armpits so
that she may not lift them to fly, and needles placed in the palms
of her hands so that she may not open or clench them to assist her
flight. (A hen's egg is laid also under the arm-pit of a
still-born child before burial.)
Another spirit (Penanggalan) which sucks the blood of those in
child-bed, consists of a woman's head and neck with trailing
viscera, which shine at night like fire-flies. If she sucks the
blood of woman or child, death follows. The lights of a hill in
Perak called Changkat Asah, lights described in that most readable
book on the Peninsula, George Maxwell's In Malay Forests, are
thought by the superstitious to be troops of these shining ones.
Then there is a class of familiar spirits created from the dead.
Many Malays say that their several names are only dialect terms
for one familiar, but others distinguish three species. The Bajang
may be just a malignant forest spirit or, according to others, a
man's familiar. As the latter he is kept in a stoppered bamboo
vessel and fed with eggs and milk. Released he will cause sickness
and delirium to his victims, especially to children. His visible
embodiment is a civet-cat. He may be the hereditary property of
his owner, but more often is conjured at dead of night from the
newly-dug grave of a still-born child. Pour the blood of a
murdered man into a bottle and recite the appropriate charm, and
after seven or twice seven days a bird-like chirp will announce
the presence of a Polong. Every day the owner must feed this
familiar with blood from his or her finger. Its victim dies raving
unless through his mouth the Polong will confess the name of its
owner and of any malicious person who may have hired it from that
owner. But the best known of these familiars (Pelsit) is of the
nigget type and takes the shape of a house-cricket. A woman goes
into the forest on the night before the full moon, and standing
with her back to the moon and her face to an ant-hill recites
certain charms and tries to catch her own shadow. It may take
three nights. Or she may have to try for several months, always on
the same three nights. Sooner or later she will succeed and her
body never again cast a shadow. Then in the night a child will
appear before her and put out its tongue. She must seize the
tongue, whereupon the body of the child vanishes. Soon the tongue
turns into a tiny animal, reptile or insect, which can be used as
a bottle imp. According to a more gruesome version the tongue that
can change into this familiar must be bitten out of the exhumed
corpse of the first-born child of a first-born mother and buried
at cross-roads. This vampire cricket is employed especially by
jealous wives to injure their rivals or their rivals' children.
Besides these two classes of malicious birth-spirits and
familiars, created from the corpses of man, there are graveyard
spooks of the sheeted dead. In Patani one of the most noted of
these (hantu bungkus) is thought to appear as a white cat or to
lie like a bundle of white rags near a burial ground. "Should a
person pass it who is afraid, it unrolls, twines itself round his
feet, enters his person by means of his big toe and feasts within
on his soul, so that he becomes distraught and dies in
convulsions, unless a competent medicine-man can exorcise it in
time to save his life and reason." A bold person anxious to see
ghosts has only to use as a collyrium the tears of the wide-eyed
slow loris!
A relic of the Malay's fear of the departed survives in the
moribund custom of abandoning a house where a death has occurred.
(d) PRIMITIVE SPIRITS, FAIRIES AND GHOSTS
Spirits and ghosts that are not termed jinn by the Malay
spontaneously may be classed together as flotsam of primitive
beliefs. They may be the ghosts of men who lived too long ago to
be associated ordinarily with the genies of a religion they never
practised in their lives. They may be fairies too human to have
sprung from smokeless fire. They may be godlings or nature-spirits
too local or petty and neglected to have attracted the attention
of the pious. Or they may be spirits too vague to have acquired a
local habitation and a name. Challenged, the devout Malay would
give to all of them the sinister canonisation of Jinn.
Some of this class are on the border-line between spirits and
ghosts. There is the Spectre Huntsman, known generally as a ghost,
in one aspect an avatar of Siva, in another an uxorious villager
whose endless hunt for a mouse-deer for his gravid wife led to his
being turned alive into a forest demon. In many lands a vanquished
aboriginal people are allotted by their conquerors to the
borderland class between ghost and spirit. Were it not that he
also is identified with Siva, it would be tempting to include in
it Black Awang in his shape as a Negrito (p. 7 supra).
Then there are "Bachelor" spirits, who may be forgotten godlings
or the ghosts of youths cut off in their prime. There is the
Bachelor Cock-fighter, who presides over mains and hates liars.
There are the Black Bachelor and the Boy with the Long Lock, of
whom Perak peasants speak.
There are a few spirits of high places, like the Chief of the
mountain Berembun in Perak or Dato Parol, sainted lord of Gunong
Angsi in Negri Sembilan and commander of an army of the dead who
have sprung from their graves as tigers. Most famous is the fairy
Princess of Mount Ledang in Malacca, who married Nakhoda Ragam, a
wandering prince of Borneo. After his death at sea from the prick
of her needle she donned fairy garb and flew to Gunong Ledang,
whence she migrated later to Bukit Jugra further up the coast with
a sacred tiger as her companion. Others make her consort of the
founder of Malacca. But a foreign and literary origin is suggested
for this fairy by the mention of her flying garb, the account in
the seventeenth century Malay Annals of her garth, her singing
birds and her demand, when a Sultan of Malacca wooed her, for a
betrothal present of seven trays piled with the livers of
mosquitoes, seven trays piled with the livers of fleas, a tub of
tears, a basin of royal blood, and one golden and one silver
bridge to be built from Malacca to her hill top.
There is a mysterious Grannie Kemang, known both in Sumatra and in
the Malay Peninsula. In Perak it is thought that she will sow
tares, a refuge for goblin pests, on the fresh clearing unless the
farmer rise betimes to alleviate with cool offerings; the smart of
the burnt forest. Her cooking-pot is the inexhaustible widow's
cruse of the Malay peasant. She is said to have taught the art of
rice-cultivation. One Perak account speaks of her as the
embodiment of the rice-soul. (In a Kelantan charm she is described
as the nigget vampire and declared to be the product of the
afterbirth.)
There are echo-spirits of the mountains, like men and women in
shape. If one of them visits a mortal woman, she bears an albino
child. A former Dato' of Kinta lived with a female echo-spirit in
a cave in the face of a limestone bluff, a beautiful woman called
the Princess of the Rice-fields by the Hot Spring. One of his
followers took another echo-spirit to wife. In three weeks she
bore him a son, whom no mortal woman could suckle.
There is a vague dream demon, Ma' Kopek, the hag that causes
nightmare. Children playing hide and seek may lose themselves
behind her prodigious breasts and be found days later dazed and
foolish. Sometimes she takes them to a thorn-brake and feeds them
on earth-worms and muddy water, which by her magic look and taste
like delicate cates.
There is a Kitchen Demon, a gray dishevelled hag, who warms
herself before the hearth at night and loves to blow into flame
the embers in a deserted house.
There is the Spook that Drags Himself along. He wears the shape of
an orang-outang, peeps into attics where fair maids sleep, and
once carried a girl off up a tree and lived with her as his wife.
There are formless spirits that bring colic, cholera, smallpox,
blindness. Most of these are unknown except to the medicine-man,
who diagnoses, for example, one hundred and ninety nine spirits of
smallpox according to the part affected, and names the one that
attacks a patient's tongue after the Muslim Angel of Death!
Formless too are maleficent auras that emanate from the corpses of
murdered men, of slain deer, wild pig, wild dogs, certain reptiles
and birds. "Soon after death the bristles on the back move, and
stand on end with contraction and relaxation of the muscles; and
to come within the range of the aim of these bristles, which have
the position they assume when the living animal is enraged, is to
invite the attack of the bahdi." A white jungle cock, or indeed
any jungle cock of unusual colour, a jungle cock that does not
struggle in the toils but perches on the rod that suspends the
noose, these have bahdi. "The bahdi have the power of bringing
sickness, blindness or madness upon the hunter, and an attack of
fever after unwonted exertion in a malarial forest is always
ascribed to them. The jinggi can let the deer pass by the
unwitting hunter in the form of a mouse or attack him in the form
of a tiger. They can also give the hunter the appearance of the
hunted and thus expose him to the fire of his friends. The
genaling can kill the hunter outright." In these auras the idea of
potent soul-substance seems to have become merged in the idea of
malicious spirits. The bahdi of a deer can be expelled by sweeping
first a gun, then a branch, and finally the noose in which the
animal was caught, over its carcase from muzzle to hind-legs; the
noose is quickly slipped on to a stake and tightened round it.
Here the magician appears to remove "transmissible properties of
matter" to the stake. In Patani syncretism has given the aura of a
murdered man the shape of a mannikin, and has made the auras of
beasts the slaves of Siva. By some Kelantan magicians bahdi are
said to be one hundred and ninety in number and are given a name (gana)
meaning spirit. All these evil influences are sometimes classed
with jinn.
With jinn, too, are often classed one hundred and ninety goblins
of the soil (jembalang) that creep into the baskets of the reaper
and round the stems of rice-plants, and infest hill and mountain
and plain. Ordinarily their shape, if they have a shape, is not
given. In Patani it is said they are the ghosts of men and, under
Muslim influence, it is alleged that they may "be seen at night in
waste places, leaning on long sticks, wearing red caps and eating
earth. If any one is bold enough to seize one of their caps and
swift enough to escape their pursuit, he will gain the great art
of becoming invisible."
There are numerous nature-spirits; the spirit of the river bore,
that drowns men in its matlike curling wave; the spirit of the
cataract that lies "prone on the water with head like an inverted
copper"; spirits of the sea that settle on masts in the form of
St. Elmo's fire; spirits of the jungle track; spirits that tamper
with the noose and snare of the hunter; spirits that live in trees
especially where wild bees nest; the spirit of the faded lotus.
Many a sacred place in jungle and grove, supposed now to be the
site of some saint's vanished tomb, is really a relic of primitive
worship of the spirits of nature.
(e) ANGELS AND DEVILS OF ISLAM
To-day in every hamlet in Malaya, that has sufficient inhabitants
to form a congregation, there is a mosque where, along with his
fellow villagers, the magician acknowledges that there is no God
but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet. The office of Caliph or
head of the Muslim faith within his own State is the most
cherished prerogative of a Malay ruler. His installation is
attended by the magician, once master of the ceremony but now
merely an onlooker, who listens and hears the court heralds call
to the four archangels to send down upon their new ruler "the
divine majesty of kings by the hands of his angels: the angels of
the rising sun, the angels of the evening, the angels who stand
upon the right and left of the empyrean throne, the angel of the
zenith and the horned princess, angel of the moon." Suckled in
creeds outworn, the magician sits at the feet of the pious and
learns all he can about these angels and the demonology of the
youngest of Malaya's religions. He adds the names of angels and
devils and spirits to his repertory of incantations.
He learns that there are angels, demons (or Shaitan) and jinn, all
higher than man. Actually he has had a Malay account of Muhammadan
mythology for nearly three hundred years in a work called the
Garden of Kings, written in 1638 A.D. by an Indian missionary of
Islam in Acheen. That work tells him of the four angels who bear
the throne Of God, one in the form of a bull, one in the form of a
tiger, one in the form of an eagle, and one in the form of a man.
It tells also of the cherubim who cry incessantly "Glory to God."
But more interesting to him are the four archangels with
individual names, who are concerned with the welfare of men. There
is Gabriel, the angel of revelation, with six pinions, each
composed of one hundred smaller wings; he is covered with saffron
hairs; between his eyes is a sun, and between every two hairs of
his body a moon and stars. Every day he dives three hundred and
sixty times into the Sea of Light, and every drop of water from
his wings creates a spiritual angel (Ruhaniyun) in his likeness.
Two of his pinions he expands only when God desires to destroy
hamlet or town. Two green pinions he opens only once annually on
the night of destiny, when from the tree that stands by the throne
of God the leaves fall inscribed with the names of those who shall
die during the ensuing year. There is Michael, created five
hundred years before Gabriel and five hundred years after Israfil.
His whole body is covered with saffron hairs, every hair
possessing a million faces having a thousand mouths, each mouth
containing a thousand tongues that entreat the mercy of God, while
the tears of his million eyes, weeping for the sins of the
faithful, create cherubim in his likeness. These cherubim are his
servants, who control rain and plants and fruits, so that there is
not a drop of rain falling on earth or sea that is not watched by
one of them. There is Israfil, whose head is level with the throne
of Allah and whose feet reach lower than the lowest earth. With
one pinion he envelopes the west, with another the east; with a
third he covers his person, and with a fourth he veils himself
from mouth to chest. Between his eyes is the jewelled tablet of
fate. His duty it will be to sound the last trump on the day of
judgment. There is 'Azrail, who according to this version is not
(as he should be) the angel of death but only his warder, and is
like Israfil in appearance. The angel of death, bigger than the
seven earths and the seven heavens, God kept hidden and chained
with seventy thousand chains until the creation of Adam. When he
was seen by the angels, they fell into a faint that lasted a
thousand years. He has seven thousand pinions. His body is full of
eyes and tongues, as many as there are men and birds and living
things. Whenever a mortal dies, an eye closes. He has four faces.
When he takes the life of prophet or angel, he shows the face on
his head; the face on his chest is shown to believers, the face on
his back to infidels, and the face on the soles of two of his feet
to jinn. Of his other two feet one is on the borders of heaven,
the other on the brink of hell. So huge is he that if the waters
of all seas and all rivers were poured upon his head, not one drop
would reach the earth. No living creature shall escape death
except the four archangels and the four angels who bear the throne
of God.
There is also a huge angel called Ruh or the Spirit, with the face
of a man, who will stand beside the throne on the day of judgment
and implore mercy for the faithful.
There are the two inquisitor angels, Munkar and Nakir, who visit
the dead in their graves and enquire if they are believers.
Night and day man is protected from devils and jinn by two out of
four attendant angels, who change guard at sunrise and sunset.
Recorders of his good and evil deeds, they are termed Kiraman
Katibin, the Noble Writers; good deeds are written down by the
angel on his right, bad by the angel on his left.
Nineteen Zabaniah (or Guardian Angels), under Malik their chief,
are in charge of hell.
Finally, Iblis, the fallen rebel angel who refused to prostrate
himself before Adam, is commander of an army of supreme interest
to the magician, the host of infidel genies or jinn.
(f) JINN
Jinn or genies sprang from three mangrove-leaves, the green jinn
from a leaf that soared into the green sky, the black from a leaf
that fell at the gate of the forest, the white from a leaf that
fell into the sea. According to another incantation they were
created from the earth of the mountain Mahameru, the Malay Olympus
with the Hindu name. So Malays believe, unless it is to be
supposed that in such charms the magicians were merely inventing
fictitious origins for spirits they wished to control. According
to some incantations the genies of the earth were born of
afterbirth, according to others of the morning star. One
magician's account says that jinn are sprung from the coconut
monkey! Another declares that they were created from Sakti-muna, a
great serpent: the king of the jinn from his life's breath, the
white jinn from the whites of his eyes, the black, blue, green and
yellow jinn from their irises, the genie that lives in the
lightning from his voice. Muslims hold that Jan was the father of
all. the jinn, and Jan in the Quran also signifies a serpent.
There is another legend with a Muslim colouring. When Cain and
Abel were still in the womb they bit their thumbs till the blood
came, and along with them were born jinn, black from the blood
that spurted cloud-high, white from the blood that fell to the
ground. So run the discrepant accounts of the Malay magician, who
accepts also the Quran's version that jinn were created from
smokeless fire.
The account of genies in the Garden of Kings is as follows: Jan,
the father of all jinn, was originally an angel, called firstly
Aristotle but later 'Azazil. When 'Azazil refused to do obeisance
to Adam, his name was changed to Iblis or Jan and his form into
that of a genie; of the relation of Iblis to the genies, however,
there are several variant accounts. Begetting a child every two
days, Jan became the ancestor of all the genies, countless shadowy
beings, numerous as the sands of the earth and filling hill and
cave, forest and plain. At first they inhabited the lowest heaven.
Thence they got the permission of Allah to descend to the earth,
seven thousand troops of them. In time they fought among
themselves and disobeyed God. So He sent Prophets and Angels to
quell them and pen them in a corner of the world. To plague
mankind jinn can assume any shape. Some take the form of men,
others of horses or dogs or pigs, others of snakes, others of
insects. Some can fly. Some can eat, drink and marry. One
tradition talks of three classes of jinn, one winged, another in
the form of dogs and insects, another in human form. A few are
good Muslims and will go to heaven; most are infidels doomed to
hell. Their great age is illustrated from the story of the genie
detected by Muhammad under the disguise of a very old man. Being
recognised as a genie, he admitted that he had met Noah and all
the Prophets after him.
Again the Malay has read of jinn in his recension of the story of
Alexander the Great. That world-conqueror meets a descendant of
the genie Sakhr, who stole Solomon's ring, and assuming Solomon's
shape reigned in his stead for forty days. He and his kin are
guarding till the day of judgment a mosque built for Solomon by
Sakhr in retribution for his presumption. He appears to Alexander
in the form of a handsome youth but turns by request into his
proper shape: huge as the mosque, having seven heads, each with
two faces, each face having four eyes like tongues of flame, a
cavernous mouth, teeth like fiery tongues, a nose like the nose of
a bull; on each forehead are two snakey locks, and the genie has
the feet of a duck and the tail of a bull! Near the border of the
world where the sun sinks Alexander finds genies guarding King
Solomon's treasure-house of jewels. They are the descendants of
human men and ten daughters of Iblis. When Alexander marvels, the
Prophet Khidzr quotes the case of the Queen of Sheba, who had a
human father and a genie mother, and showed this origin by the
hair on her calves.
All jinn are the subjects not of Muhammad but of Solomon, to whom
God gave authority over genies, the animal creation and the wind
of heaven.
One Malay charm speaks of "Jin the son of Jan of the line of the
Pharaohs," a pedigree founded on the Arab notion that the last
king of the pre-Adamite jinn was Jan the son of Jan, and that he
built the Pyramids.
According to Malay belief there are jinn inhabiting the sun, the
moon, the sky, the wind, the clouds. There are others whose homes
or hosts are ant-hills, wells, rocks, the hard heartwood of trees,
ravines, fields, swamps, lakes, rivers, mountain or plain. Others
are genies of cape or bay, the sea, the tide, estuaries.
Syncretism has included in these classes Indonesian soul-substance
and nature-spirits and Hindu divinities; but one tradition of the
Prophet also distinguishes three kinds of genies, one in the air,
one on the land, and one on the sea. Malay medical lore, having
borrowed from Arabia Plato's theory of the origin of disease,
differentiates a fourth class, the genies of fire and fiery
sunsets.
The colour of a Malay genie varies according to his habitation.
Genies of earth and the dark forests and lowering clouds are
black. Those inhabiting the sky are blue or to the Malay eye
green. The jinn of fire and sunset are yellow. In fleecy clouds
and the shimmering sea they are white.
Just as Plato ascribed disease to disturbance of the balance of
power between the four properties of earth, air, fire and water,
out of which the body is compacted, so the Malay medicine-man
ascribes all diseases to the four classes of genies presiding over
those properties. The genies of the air cause wind-borne
complaints, dropsy, blindness, hemiplegia and insanity. The genies
of the black earth cause vertigo, with sudden blackness of vision.
The genies of fire cause hot fevers and yellow jaundice. The white
genies of the sea cause chills, catarrh and agues.
All these are external genies, visible to lonely wayfarers, to the
magician in a trance or, according to Kelantan belief, to the
gazer upon the finger-nails of small innocent boys. They can talk
among themselves or through the mouth of the shaman medium. Genies
of the earth may appear in human form "floating in the air and not
always remaining the same size," or in the form of animals or ants
or scorpions or in any shape they please. The manufacture of old
Chinese crackle-ware is ascribed by Malays to genies. Muslim
genies haunt two mosques in Negri Sembilan, flitting to and fro in
long white robes and sometimes chanting the Quran. If a person
stand under a ladder and bathe in water wherein a corpse has been
washed, he has only to stoop and look between his legs to see
crowds of genies and demons sipping the water. Infidel genies of
the earth are thought in Patani to assume the form of dogs and
guard hidden treasure. If they take a fancy to a person, they
change into little old men and leave sacks of gold for their
favourites to remove. Peculiar bubbles on the surface of the water
indicate the presence of jars of treasure placed by genies in pool
or well. There is a genie "supposed to resemble the human form but
to dart about like a will-o'-the-wisp" and daze the man that
crosses it. Seize a genie and hold him, no matter what terrifying
aspect he may assume, and one can wrest from him the secret of
invisibility. "If a man had a tame genie, he could cause the meat
from another man's cooking-pot to come to him." The founder of a
house of great chiefs in Perak was a poor fisherman. His traps
were repeatedly thrown on the bank and his weirs opened. He
watched and saw the offender, a genie clad in the green robes and
turban of a Muslim pilgrim. He seized the genie and refused to let
him go. The genie said "Swallow this," spat in his mouth, and told
him that he would become the greatest chief in the country and his
family prosper for seven generations.
But these external jinn (for whom Malay physicians find yet
another origin suitable to their medical theories, namely wind)
cannot inflict disease without the help of the class of genies
that inhabit the bodies of men. So, at least, it is said in
Kelantan. When the genie, whose host a man's body is, has weakened
him by loss of blood, coughing, dyspepsia, then only can jinn from
outside enter and cause him hurt. There is a yellow genie
controlling a man's five senses. There is a white genie (jin or
malaikat), also called the Light of the Prophet, that "takes up
its abode in the heart of every Muhammadan and prevents him from
being wicked," Even these internal jinn have colour and shape.
False etymology and recollection of the Indonesian bird-soul make
Patani Malays identify a man's white genie with a bird, one of
Muhammad's parrots!
In some genies abstract ideas seem to find a local habitation and
a name.
The genie of golden life,
The genie of bright desire,
Wearing bangles of brass and coat of steel,
can both abduct a woman's soul on her lover's behalf.
The moral character of the white genie in man's bosom may be due
to confusion of this spirit with the Light of the Prophet. Genies,
destined for heaven, are moral beings, and belong to the several
schools of Muslim belief. The others are capricious and do not
distinguish between good and evil.
The syncretism that has made the name of Malay jinn legion is
patent in the Perak magician's address to "the procession of the
thousand jinn." In that invocation the evil influence believed by
Malay animists to invest the corpses of deer, Indonesian goblins
of the soil, the Misty Beauty that floats over blind wells, the
Piebald Pony, four spirit guardians of the corners of the world,
Kala or Siva in his destructive form, Sri the Hindu Ceres, a Hindu
Moon Fairy beautiful upon waters, the Herald of the World that
dwells in the clouds with a name half Sanskrit half Arabic,
Jamshid a spirit of the headlands bearing the name of a Persian
king, the spirits of the Muslim dead-these and scores more are
entreated so that the magician may display the wealth of his
uncritical lore, offend none of the spirit world and let no genie
escape the net of his magic.
An equally good example is found in the list of the guardian jinii
of Perak, or, to give them their other name, the genies of the
royal trumpets, whose indwelling spirits were fed and revived
annually centuries before the coming of Islam. These include the
Four Children of the Iron Pestle, Old Grannie from up-river, the
Prince of the Rolling Waves, the Children of the Gaffer who lives
in the sky. Brahma, Vishnu, and Indra are among them. King Solomon
and 'Ali, the fourth Caliph, find a place. There are royal
familiars of the State shaman and his assistant. There is the Raja
of all the jinn, who is throned on the breeze of heaven. There is
the Sultan of the Unsubstantial World (maya), who condescends to
the ear-posies of kings from his throne on a crystal car that is
followed by all the Sultans of the universe. And there are spirits
with royal titles in Persian, and female fairies with Sanskrit
names. The list shows a wide knowledge of Malay romances, like the
Hikayat Shamsu'l-Bahrain and the Hikayat Indraputra, that are
based on Indian models and full of heroes and genies with Indian
names. Acquaintance with such literature was an esteemed
accomplishment at Malay courts. Among the jinn regarded by Perak
commoners is 'Umar Ummaiya, the Ulysses of the Persian romance of
Amir Hamzah!
III. THE MALAY MAGICIAN
ANTHROPOLOGY and history confirm the various stages in the
development of the Malay magician.
First he was the Indonesian animist, requiring no initiation into
his office and no help from a familiar spirit. Hunting, fishing,
planting, and healing the sick demanded merely different experts
acquainted with the practice and customs of the particular craft.
In the ritual of the rice-field, for example, a midwife or other
old woman took the leading part, because her sex had a beneficent
influence on the fertility of the crop, and her experience with
human infants qualified her to handle the rice-baby. Courtesy and
persuasion and diplomatic language were the weapons of the Malay
magician of animism.
Next came the shaman. Comparative study has, revealed that
shamanism was "the native religion of the Ural-Altaic peoples from
Behring Straits to the borders of Scandinavia," and "probably of
the early Mongol-Tartar peoples and others akin to them, for
example, in China and Tibet." Its part in the religions of
Malaysian tribes reminds one that on linguistic grounds it has
been surmised the Malay descended from the continent of Asia and
that anthropologists detect in him a Mongol strain. The shaman
still retains his pride of place among the aboriginal tribes of
the Malay Peninsula, Negrito, Indo-Chinese and Proto-Malay. One
word is used by the Malay both for the magician expert in some
particular line and for the shaman who controls spirits by the
help of a familiar. But a distinction between them is recognised.
"Upon the exercise of the shaman's power every Malay looks with
considerable dread, and the least orthodox shakes his head when it
is mentioned." Islam looks far more askance at the shaman who
calls down spirits at a seance than at the commoner medicine-man
who relies solely on charms and invocations covered with a veneer
of orthodox phraseology. His brothers in magic respect the shaman
more highly. In Kelantan when a shaman is operating in any
district "all other medicine-men are disqualified for the time
being."
Sometimes the Malay shaman wears cords round his wrists and across
back and breast over each shoulder and under the opposite arm. He
can use cloth of royal yellow at a seance. Rarely he is a Raja. In
Perak the State shaman was commonly of the reigning house and bore
the title of Sultan Muda. He was too exalted to inherit any other
office except the Sultanate, and according to one account could
ascend no temporal throne. He was allotted a State allowance from
port dues and the tax on opium. The twenty-fifth holder of the
office was a grandson on the distaff side of Marhum Kahar, a
famous ruler of Perak in the eighteenth century: on the spear side
he was a descendant of the Prophet! The wife of its holder bore
the title of Raja Puan Muda. His deputy or heir-apparent was
styled Raja Kechil Muda. So, too, in parts of Timor two Rajas are
recognised-a civil raja who governs the people, and another raja
who can declare tabus and must be consulted by his colleagues in
all important matters.
At a curative (but not apparently at a State-cleansing) seance the
spirit-raising shaman may be a woman. During the last illness of
Sultan Yusuf, a nineteenth century ruler of Perak, a seance was
conducted by Raja Ngah, a scion of the reigning house on the
female side, "a middle-aged woman dressed as a man" for the
occasion-a device I have seen adopted by Malay midwives also. In
Kelantan the shaman may be a Malay or a Siamese woman.
Negritos and certain northern Sakai placed the bodies of dead
shamans in shelters built among tree-branches. The soul of a
Negrito magician may enter tiger, elephant, or rhinoceros, and
there abide until the animal dies, when the soul at last goes to
its own heaven. Some Kinta Sakai used formerly to leave the
corpses of magicians unburied in the houses where they died. The
Jakun of Rompin put them "on platforms and their souls go up to
the sky, while those of ordinary mortals, whose bodies are buried,
go to the underworld." Other Jakun believe that great magicians
are translated alive to heaven. Clearly it was the custom of the
Peninsular aborigines not to bury a magician. His soul might
inhabit a large animal temporarily, but found its way in the end
to some place in the air that is full of the unseen spirits he
controlled. Malays have long buried their magicians. "The majority
of sacred places in the Patani States are the reputed graves of
great medicine-men." But in two of the States on the west coast,
at least, when a practiser of black magic is in the throes of
death, it is believed that the spirit of life can escape only if a
hole is made in the roof of the house.
A shaman by inheritance comes into possession of a familiar
spirit, or perhaps he may inherit one from his preceptor. In
Patani it is said that if a shaman does not bequeath his (or her)
art to a pupil before dying, then his clothes, drums, censer, and
other magical appurtenances will generate a savage ghost. There,
too, it is held that hairy persons are especially qualified to
become magicians. The Benua, a Proto-Malay tribe, believe that the
soul of a dead shaman (who has to be left unburied in the forest)
will in the seventh day attack his heir in the form of a tiger: if
the heir betrays no fear and casts incense on a fire, he will fall
into a trance and be visited by two beautiful female spirits who
become his familiars; if the heir fails to watch by the corpse and
observe this ritual, the dead man's soul enters a tiger for ever.
According to the belief of the Jakun his familiar spirit comes to
a shaman by inheritance or in a dream. In all accounts the shaman
must acquire as his familiar a spirit that has not found rest.
This he does in a trance, often during a vigil beside a grave.
Kelantan Malays prescribe a method of acquiring a shaman's powers
that shows an accretion of Muslim belief on a primitive idea, akin
to the Proto-Malay superstition that round a grave a ditch must be
dug wherein the soul of the deceased may paddle his canoe. Sitting
one at the head and one at the foot of the grave of a murdered
man, the would-be shaman and a companion burn incense and make
believe to use paddles shaped from the midrib of a royal yellow
coconut palm, calling the while upon the murdered man to grant
magical powers. The landscape will come to look like a sea and an
aged man will appear, to whom the request for magic must be
repeated. Now one of the evidences of Muslim saintship is the
ecstatic vision or dream of the Prophet or of one of the greater
saints of Islam. Possibly the "aged man" was Luqman al-Hakim, the
reputed fattier of Arabian magic. One day, according to Kelantan
belief, the Angel Gabriel was commanded to upset Luqman and his
books at sea as a punishment for his pride, and the finders of the
few scattered pages of those books became medicine-men in their
several countries. A Selangor account corroborates the Kelantan
belief that Luqman was the first magician: he lived in the sky,
was descended from Adam and Eve, was a son (or perhaps brother) of
Siva, and so a link with the Hindu element in the modern Malay
medicine-man's shibboleth!
The Malay has always been apt to ascribe greater power to foreign
magic, whether that of a naked illiterate aborigine from the woods
or that of a Hindu trader or an Arab missionary. In an eighteenth
century history of Perak it is recorded how among the medicine-men
in attendance on the daughter of a famous Malay ruler there were
Sakai from the jungle. Magicians, like prophets, have more honour
outside their own borders. It is no wonder, therefore, that the
Malay midwife learnt from the Hindu all the magic he could teach
for the great occasions of birth, adolescence, and marriage, or
that the Malay shaman added gods of the Hindu pantheon to his
demonology and made invocations and offerings to Siva. Long before
the introduction of Islamic mysticism, Hinduism had encouraged the
Malay magician to fortify his powers and command the wonder of the
credulous by ascetic practices. Malay romances, paraphrased from
Indian originals, are full of stories of heroes who acquire magic,
especially for warfare, by retiring into a hermit's seclusion on a
mountain-top. In Patani there is a "curious belief, perhaps more
Siamese than Malay, that no man can become a really great magician
in any country in which the peaks of the hills are rounded, and
that therefore the State of Patalung, in which there are many
conical hills, produces the most powerful medicine-men in the
Malay Peninsula."
When Islam came, the Malay magician sat at the feet of its
pundits, studied their arts of divination, and borrowed their
cabalistic talismans. Before his old incantations he set the names
of Allah and Muhammad, often in impious contexts. He detected his
latest avatar in the living saint of Islam, to whom folk resort
"for advice in legal disputes or as to the success or failure of
an enterprise or as intercessor for the sick or to get a child or
to remove blight or plague or confound enemies." He will,
therefore, seclude himself for certain days of the week or for a
period, the practice being given an Arabic name and having a
religious colour. Sometimes he keeps celibate. Or he may fast to
impress the common herd and enable himself to see visions. A
magician of this type is generally a disciple of a crude form of
Sufism derived from India. A Selangor account, strongly affected
by Neo-Platonic ideas, makes Allah (as Absolute Being beyond all
relations) the first of magicians. "When haze was still in the
womb of darkness and darkness in the womb of haze, before earth
bore the name of earth or sky the name of sky, before Allah was
called Allah or Muhammad was called Muhammad, before the creation
of the Divine Throne and its footstool and the firmament, the
Creator of the worlds was manifested by Himself and He was the
first magician. He made the magician's universe, a world of the
breadth of a tray, a sky of the breadth of an umbrella.... The
magician before time existed was Allah and He revealed Himself by
the light of moon and sun and so showed Himself to be verily a
magician." The first sentence of this quotation is a Malay
paraphrase of the Prophet's simile for God before the creation:
"the dark mist above which is a void and below which is a void."
As Skeat has suggested, the conception of a miniature universe,
Plato's "fixed archetypes," would remind the Malay of the relation
of the tiny Indonesian soul to the physical body. It reminds also
of Ibn 'Arabi's saying that all the universe contains lies
potential in God like the tree in the seed. Indeed, one Malay
account of the origin of the magician relates how at the Muslim
word of creation (kun) "the seed was created and from the seed the
root, from the root the stem, and from the stem the leaves," and
then in the same sentence relates how the word of creation brought
into being a miniature earth and sky. So time has changed the
Malay brother of the Siberian shaman into a humble relative of the
Sufi mystic.
Are there traces of the magician in the Malay king? Among some, at
least, of the Proto-Malay tribes of the Peninsula the commoner
chief or Batin is judge, priest, and magician.
Between the old-world commoner chiefs of the matriarchal tribes of
Negri Sembilan and the Raja ruler there are several ties. Like the
magician (and the European district officer!) both can influence
the weather: a wet season will be ascribed to a cold constitution!
Both are chosen from several branches of one family, theoretically
from each branch in rotation, actually from the branch that
happens to possess the candidate most suitable in years and
character. Both, therefore, like the Malay magician hold "offices
hereditary or at least confined to the members of one family."
Like the Brahmin the Malay magician and the Malay ruler have a
tabu language. A king does not "walk" but "has himself carried";
he does not "bathe" but is "sprinkled like a flower"; he does not
"live" but "resides"; he does not "feed" but "takes a repast"; he
does not "die" but "is borne away." Of the dozen or more words
constituting this vocabulary half are Malay, half Sanskrit. Shaman
and ruler both have felt the influence of Hinduism.
Like the magician, the ruler has wonder-working insignia of
office. The tambourine and other appurtenances of the shaman will
generate an evil spirit if not bequeathed to a successor. To tread
on a Malay State drum may cause death: even a Chinaman has been
known to swell up and die after removing a hornet's nest from this
terrific instrument. The regalia of a Malay ruler were miraculous
talismans that controlled the luck of the State. Quite recently in
Malacca a pretender to the chieftainship of Naning got hold of the
insignia of office, refused to surrender them, and declared that
possession of them gave him a good title.
In the old annual ceremony of expelling malignant spirits from a
Malay State, the ruler took a leading part. And in the ritual of
the now obsolete Perak court magician there are two noteworthy
details. At the seance held during his last illness Sultan Yusuf
was placed shrouded on the wizard's mat with the wizard's
grass-switch in his hand to await, as at an ordinary seance the
shaman alone awaits, the advent of the spirits invoked. Again,
after the annual seance to "revive" the Perak regalia, the State
magician bathed the Sultan and in his person the genies of the
State, who would seem therefore to be regarded as His Highness'
familiar spirits. According to an old account the State shaman of
Perak was eligible for the Sultanate, and the Raja Muda, or heir
to the throne, could become State shaman.
Modern man has forgotten that in appropriating buffaloes with
peculiar horns, albino children, turtles' eggs and other freaks of
nature, the Malay ruler started not as a grasping tyrant but as a
magician, competent above all his people to face the dangers of
the unusual and untried. For under paganism, Hinduism and Islam
magician and raja dead and alive have been credited with
supernatural powers. It is claimed for a modern Malay magician
that he can remain under water for an hour! It was claimed for a
bye-gone ruler of Perak that every Friday he could translate
himself to Mecca and once brought back three green figs as
evidence of his journey. The graves of kings and the graves of
magicians have been alike the object of worship.
IV. THE MALAY CHARM
THERE are three words used by Malays for incantation or charm, two
of them Sanskrit (jampi; mantra), the other the Arabic word for
prayer (do'a). Charms are employed in agricultural operations, by
fishermen, hunters, fowlers and trappers; to abduct or recall the
soul; to revive ore in a mine or a patient on a bed of sickness;
against cramp, poison, snakebite, enemies, vampires, evil spirits;
at birth and at teeth-filing; to save men from tigers, and crops
from rats and boars and insect pests; for beauty, virility, love;
to weaken a rival in a race or in a fight; to divert a bullet or
break a weapon as it is being drawn.
A Malay charm may form part of a primitive ritual, like that of
the rice-year, conducted by a skilled magician. It may be merely
recited on an appropriate occasion by any layman who has learnt
it. One may buy the words of a love-charm, for example, from an
expert "for three dollars, three yards of white cloth, cotton and
thread, limes and salt, areca-nut, and betel-vine," or for "limes
and salt, three small coins, five yards of white cloth and a
needle."
The charm may require to be supplemented by contagious and by
homśopathic or mimetic magic. Sand from the foot-print of the
woman loved, earth from the graves of a man and woman, the
hair-like filaments of bamboo, black pepper: these are often
steamed in a pot while a love-charm is being recited. Another
method is to "take a lime, pierce it with the midrib of a fallen
coconut palm, leaving one finger's length sticking out on either
side whereby to hang the lime. Hang it up with thread of seven
colours, leaving the thread also hanging loose an inch below the
lime. Take seven sharpened midribs and stick them into the lime,
leaving two fingers' length projecting. The sticking of the midrib
into the lime is to symbolise piercing the heart and liver and
life and soul and gall of the beloved. Put jasmine on the end of
the midrib skewers. Do this first on Monday night, for three
nights, and then on Friday night. Imagine you pierce the girl's
heart as you pierce the lime. Recite the accompanying charm three
or seven times, swinging the lime each time you recite the words
and fumigating it with incense. Do this five times a day and five
times a night in a private place where no one shall enter or
sleep." A woman recites a charm for beauty over the water in which
she bathes or over the coconut oil with which she anoints her
hair.
Sometimes the Malay appears to be indebted to India for a charm
and to have forgotten or purposely omitted the accompanying
ritual. In the Atharva-Veda there is an incantation to arouse the
passionate love of a woman:
May love, the disquieter, disquiet thee; do not hold out upon thy
bed. With the terrible arrow of Kama I pierce thee in the heart!
The arrow winged with longing, barbed with love, whose shaft is
undeviating desire, with that well-aimed Kama shall pierce thee in
the heart!
With that well-aimed arrow of Kama which parches the spleen, whose
plume flies forward, which burns up, do I pierce thee in the
heart!
Consumed by burning ardour, with parched mouth, come to me woman,
pliant, thy pride laid aside, mine alone, speaking sweetly and to
me devoted!
I drive thee with a goad from thy mother and thy father, so that
thou shalt be in my power, shalt come up to my wish!
All her thoughts do ye, O Mitra and Varuna, drive out of her. Then
having deprived her of her will put her into my power alone.
Now turn to the modern Malay equivalent:
In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!
Burn, burn, sand and earth!
I burn the heart of my beloved
And my fire is the arrow of Arjuna!
If I burnt a mountain, it wouldfall;
If I burnt rock, it would split asunder.
I am burning the heart of my beloved,
So that she is broken and hot with love,
That giveth her no rest night or day,
Burning ever as this sand burns.
Let her cease to love parents and friends!
If she sleeps, awaken her!
If she awakes, cause her to rise and come
Yielding herself unto me,
Devoid of shame and discretion!
By virtue of the poison of Arjuna's arrow,
By virtue of the invocation,
"There is no God but God and Muhammad is His Prophet."
The Malay lover only talks of Arjuna's arrow. But the Hindu lover
pierced the heart of a clay effigy by means of a bow with a hempen
string carrying an arrow whose barb was a thorn and whose plume
was plucked from an owl.
Even in Vedic times, however, often no ritual was required and the
mere recital of the verbal charm sufficed. A Hindu would mutter in
the presence of a hostile witness:-"I take away the speech in thy
mouth, I take away the speech in thy heart. Wherever thy speech is
I take it away. What I say is true. Fall down inferior to me." So,
too, the Malay today without any ritual recites:-"O God! let the
world be blind, the universe deaf, the earth stretched out dumb;
closed and locked be the desire of my enemy"; or he whispers,
Om! king of genies!
The rock-splitting lightning is my voice!
Michael is with me!
In virtue of my use of this charm
To make heavy and lock,
I lock the hearts of all my adversaries,
I make dumb their tongues,
I lock their mouths,
I tie their hands,
I fetter their feet.
Not till rock moves
Shall their hearts be moved;
Not till earth my mother moves
Shall their hearts be moved.
The voice of the Malay animist is heard in the charm calling the
corn-baby to her embroidered cradle, or in the sailor's invocation
for a breeze: "Come, wind, loose your long flowing tresses," or in
the Perak raftsman's address to the spirit of a perilous
rapid:-"Accept this offering, granddam! Send our raft safe through
the long rapid, we beseech thee! Cause us no harm in mid journey.
Open like the uncurling blossom of the palm! Open like a snake
that uncoils." But it is not in many incantations that the Malay
roars thus "gently as any sucking dove."
Most of his charms bear all the characteristic marks of the Indian
mantra. They must be kept secret. They are in rude metrical form.
Many are a mixture of prayer and spell. Numerous spirits are
generally invoked so that the particular spirit whose help is
wanted or whose malevolence is to be baulked shall not escape
mention. And as knowledge of a man's name will give another power
over him, so it is sought to influence and control a spirit by
enumerating his various names. 'Take an address to the
Earth-Spirit:-
At daybreak thou art called Lord of the Sun-Ray,
In the morning Lord of Fortune,
At mid-day Lord of the World,
At evening Lord of the Evening Light:
In the high forest thy name is the Leafy Orchid,
In mid plain, the Flat One,
In the rivulet, the Flowing One,
In the spring, the Trickler.
Like the Brahmin, the Malay magician will exhaust a series of
possibilities, expelling disease from
Skin and bone and joint and vein,
Flesh, blood, heart, spleen, racked with pain;
or bidding
Genies of the mountains return to the mountains!
Genies of the hills return to the hills!
Genies of the plain return to the plain!
Genies of the forest return to the forest!
For the Malay, too, as for the Hindu the origin of a thing or
spirit gives magical control over them. In the Atharva-Veda the
mention of the names of the father and mother of a plant, for
example, is a typical part of a magic formula. Incense is hailed
by the Malay magician as a product of the brain of Muhammad, "its
smoke the breath of his spiritual life."
Rice-paste:-
It came down from Allah's presence,
From a drop of dew descended!
From the water whence eternal
Life comes-that it's source of being.
The trapper addresses genies -
I know the source of you, genies!
From the mangrove leaves ye were sprung!
One soared into the sky and became the green genies.
One fell at the gate of the forest and became the black genies!
One fell in the sea and became the white genies!
Sometimes an absurdly base origin is purposely assigned, as in a
charm against tigers:-
Ho tiger! I know your origin!
Your mother, tiger, was a toad!
On the plains of Syria you were begotten!
The Malay magician under Indian influence threatens and commands,
though he is apt to disclaim responsibility:-
Take this bait, crocodile,
A cake of yellow rice
The gift of thy sister Fatimah!
If thou takest it not,
Thou shalt be cursed by her,
or again:-
Obey my words, trapped elephant!
If thou obeyest not,
Thou wilt be killed by Sri Rama.
If thou obeyest,
The Great Rishis will keep thee alive.
In a charm to weaken a rival the Malay boasts:-
It is not on the earth that I tread!
I tread on the heads of all living things.
In a charm against a thunderstorm he outroars the tempest:-
Om! Virgin goddess, Mahadewi! Om!
Cub am I of mighty tiger!
'Ali's line through me descends!
My voice is the rumble of thunder,
Whose bolts strike a path for my seeing;
Forked lightning's the flash of my weapons!
I move not till earth moves!
I rock not till earth rocks!
I quake not till earth quakes,
Firm set as earth's axis.
By virtue of my charm got from 'Ali
And of Islam's confession of faith.
To frighten and capture a male elephant the hunter stands on one
leg at sunrise and vaunts his prowess:-
My countenance is the light of breaking day!
My eyes are the star of dawn!
My body is as that of a tusker!
My prop is a fierce tiger!
My seat is a ravening crocodile!
Sitting on the skin of a tiger was supposed by Hindus to give
invisible strength. But these daring assumptions of power were
very far from the mind of the primitive animist, who addressed all
things in heaven and earth with courtesy and deference.
In Malay as in Hindu charms the curse plays a weighty part:-
I would wed the image in the pupil of my mistress' eye
With the image in the pupil of my own!
If thou lookest not upon me,
May thy eyeballs burst!
Or again:-
Genies of supernatural power!
Your home is at the navel of the sea,
By the tree on the broken rock!
Enter not the line drawn by my teacher!
Else will I curse ye with the words,
"There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet."
Om! I neutralise all evil,
O Solomon! In the name of God.
The mystic Om, symbolical of the Hindu triad, Vishnu, Siva, and
Brahma, still remains a word of power with this Muslim magician,
though almost supplanted by the Arabic kun, "Let it be," the
creative word of Allah:-
In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!
I fry sand from the foot-print of my beloved;
Nay, I fry her heart and liver
Night and day, as this sand is fried.
"Let it be," says God.
"And it is so," says Muhammad, His Apostle.
Let her body itch with desire
Giving her no rest from longing for me.
"And it is so," says Gabriel.
Islam, coming first from India, introduced the Malay to a wide
field of fresh magic. A woman desiring the love of a man gets the
following charm written down, wrapped in cerements that have
covered the face of a male corpse, and buried where her lover is
bound to step. The charm is interesting, because so, too, the
Moroccan bride will pray to Allah and the Prophet and Fatimah that
her husband may "be fond of her as the dead is fond of his grave";
and Syro-Christian charms (which appear to have influenced early
Islam) invoke the Father and the Son to bind the tongues of false
witnesses and the navel of the newly-born child as "the ox in the
yoke, the dead in the grave." The Malay charm runs as follows:-
If Muhammad can be sundered from Allah
And a corpse move in the grave,
Only then shall my lover's desire move to another.
The desire of his heart shall be only for me;
Straying now hither he shall be my mate unto death,
Safe near me like a corpse in the grave.
The Muslim element in Malay magic will form the subject of a
separate chapter. But the final evolution of the spoken charm in
the Malay vernacular may be illustrated here by the incantation
whereby the Kelantan shaman exorcises the demon of disease at a
seance:-
O universe, the world of Adam!
Earth was made from a clod rom Paradise,
Water from a river of Paradise,
Fire from the smoke of Hell,
Air from the four elements.
Skin and hair, flesh and blood,
Bones and sinews, life and seed
Came from four elements of sperm.
Skin and hair were created by Gabriel,
Flesh and blood by Michael,
Bones and sinews by Israfil,
Life and seed by 'Azrail!
Where is this genie lodging and taking shelter?
Where is he lodging and crouching?
Genie! if thou art in the feet of this patient,
Know that these feet are moved by Allah and His Prophet;
If thou art in the belly of this patient,
His belly is God's sea, the sea, too, of Muhammad.
If thou art in his hands,
His hands pay homage to God and His Prophet.
If thou art in his liver, It is the secret place of God and His
Prophet!
If thou art in his heart,
His heart is Abu Bakar's palace.
If thou art in his lungs,
His lungs are 'Omar's palace.
If thou art in his spleen,
His spleen is 'Usman's palace.
If thou art in his gall-bladder,
His gall-bladder is 'Ali's palace.
The heart, the lung, the spleen, the gall-bladder
Are the homestead of life,
Not the homestead of genie or Iblis,
Not the homestead of sickness or suffering.
Ho there, genie! thy origin was from the tonguelike fumes of
smokeless hell.
I know thy origin,
The name o thy father, thy mother, and of thy child.
V. THE SOUL OF THINGS
THF, primitive Malay looked below the outer aspect of man and
beast and plant and stone and found a veiled power or inner life
for which their exterior is the host or tabernacle. This animating
spirit he called the vital "spark" (semangat), probably because
the dead are cold. For lack of an exact equivalent, it may be
termed soul, despite that word's other connotations. It is
possessed by all things "in widest commonalty spread." There is no
aristocracy among souls, no "rank, condition or degree,"
distinguishing the soul of man from the soul of plant or animal.
But souls inhabiting things useful to men, like rice, arrest the
Malay's attention only less than his own soul. The soul is the
personal property of its host. It is also an impersonal substance,
whose deficiency in the sick can be supplied by soul-substance
derived, for example, from proper diet, rubbing with a bezoar
stone, being breathed upon by the medicine man or brushed with the
lush grass of his aspergillum.
This substance, which enters the Malay child the moment the bamboo
knife (or midwife's teeth) severs the umbilical cord, permeates
his whole body and its secretions like an electric fluid. In some
parts of the globe it is believed that there are separate souls
for the head, the blood, the heart, the saliva, and even the
foot-prints. A survival of this idea may be traced in the Malay
shaman's altar piled with morsels representing every part of the
beast sacrificed. According to one Malay account the soul lives in
the belly. His head to a Malay is sacred: he resents it being
touched even in play. All parts of the body where soul-substance
is present must be guarded from the sorcery of enemies. A woman's
blood can be employed to her hurt by a disappointed lover.
Clippings from hair or nails are hidden or destroyed for fear
possession of them may give an enemy control over their owner's
soul and so over his life. Clippings from finger-nails can turn
into fire-flies just as the soul of a whole man can turn into a
firefly. So strong is the soul-substance in the hair shorn at a
girl's first tonsure that it is buried at the foot of a barren
tree to bring fruit as luxuriant as her tresses. The abundance of
this substance in hair and teeth makes it politic to sacrifice all
save a lock of a Malay boy's hair and to file off part of a
child's teeth at puberty: formerly the stumps were blackened, it
has been surmised, to conceal from the spirits the partial nature
of the sacrifice. In old days warriors especially, like Samson,
wore their hair long and uncut. And after a death relatives used
to sacrifice some or all of their locks so that the dead might not
revisit them. The history of Pasai tells of a Malay princess born
from a bamboo whose life was bound up with one golden hair that
glittered among her raven tresses: when her consort pulled it out,
white blood gushed forth and she died.
The Malay's respect for saliva is shown by the deputing of a
courtier to take charge of the royal cuspidore on ceremonial
occasions. The midwife spits on the baby she welcomes into the
world. This is a gift of a portion of one's self, a pledge of
union and good-will, a diluted form of blood-covenant. Religious
teachers of piety and learning are invited by parents to spit upon
a child's head or into his mouth to endow him with intelligence
and facility for learning to recite the Quran. The saliva of a
living saint brings benefits to the credulous. For medicinal
purposes saliva is often reinforced by scarlet betel juice. At a
sacrifice in Malacca to the earth spirit before the planting out
of the young rice a man walked round the field, spitting rice from
his mouth, probably not a mere offering of food but a bond of
union between himself and the earth to which his rice-plants were
to be entrusted.
After-birth is full of soul-substance, and dropping on the earth
can generate evil spirits. In many charms the magician threatens
such spirits with knowledge of their origin:-
I know the origin whence ye sprang!
When the discharge before birth began,
A drop of blood fell to the earth,
Creating genies of the earth, goblins of the soil.
The soul may be attacked through objects that have come into
contact with its owner. One way to abduct a girl's soul is to
"take sand or earth from her foot-print or from her garden path or
the front of her door or from her carriage wheels or her pony's
hooves." Frying this soul-substance in oil, one recites a charm:-
I am burning the liver, the heart, the lusts and passions of my
beloved,
So that she is broken and hot with love,
Madly in love with me and restless,
Burning as this sand burns.
The personal soul may depart in sleep "what it sees the man
dreams." A well-known Malay quatrain tells how a girl pats her
pillow and calls upon her lover's soul, which comes to her in
dreams. Sudden awakening, fright or sorcery may separate soul from
body for ever. Then the house of life will fall into disrepair
and, unless the shaman or medicine-man can recall the wanderer,
the body will die. The shaman's personal soul quits his body in a
trance to hold intercourse with spirits. The soul may leave the
human frame and enter that of a tiger to prey upon men.
The Negrito of the Malay Peninsula conceives a man's soul to have
human shape, to be red like blood, and no bigger than a grain of
maize. A Besisi legend finds it in a person's shadow. Both these
conceptions of the soul in its personal aspect recur in the
beliefs of the Malay.
The soul is in the shadow of the physical body. One should not
walk upon a person's shadow, the agriculturist must not hack his
own shadow and the magician, to establish and vaunt his
invulnerable strength, will declare his shadow to be "the shadow
of one beloved by Allah and the Prophet and angels
forty-and-four."
The personal soul is in one's name. The Malay is reluctant to
utter his own name lest breathing it he may part with a piece of
his soul-substance: a third party must be asked to divulge the
secret. A child receives a tentative name before the umbilical
cord is cut, but if the infant falls sick the name will be
regarded as unlucky and changed to mislead the spirits of disease.
A name like 'Abdu'l-Qadir may offend the Muslim saint who founded
the great religious order. Some parents even call their children
by such names as "Ugly" or "Fool" in order to persuade demons that
they are unattractive prey. It is desirable always to disguise
one's real name. An adult Malay is often known as "father (or
mother) of so-and-so." A neighbour calls her friend's husband
"your house." A Perak man refers to his wife as "the person at
home" or "my rice-bag," a Perak woman to her husband as "my
chopper." The Malay seldom mentions the names of close relations,
alluding to them as "elder brother," "younger sister," "grandad,"
"mother-in-law," and so on. Of the dead person he speaks as "that
soul," using an Arabic word. To his ruler he refers as "Lord" or
"He-under-whose-feet-we-are": and the life name of a dead Sultan
is always dropped for a new Arabic title, "The Deceased on whom
Allah have mercy", "Allah's Great Saint," "The Friend of Allah,"
"The Deceased who was strong." The mention of Siva is rare in
Malay charms, the god was invoked as the "Supreme Teacher"; and
the worldly Malay Muslim in ordinary talk speaks of Allah simply
as "Lord," both practices suggestive of a tabu of divine names.
The Malay is afraid even to attract the spirits of beasts. In the
jungle the dreaded tiger is "grandfather." On a mine the elephant,
whose heavy feet and roving trunk can undo the work of puny men,
must be called "the tall one," the blundering water-buffalo "the
unlucky one,"the poisonous snake "the live creeper." In Patani Bay
fishermen call a crocodile the "gap-toothed thingummy-bob," a goat
or sheep "the baabaa," a buffalo "moo," a sea-snake "the weaver's
sword," a tiger "stripes," a monkey "Mr. Long Tall," a vulture
"bald-head," a Buddhist monk "the yellow one," and sea-spirits
"thingummies." Smallpox in many places is termed "the complaint of
the good folk." The mention of the real name may attract the
capricious attention of the lords of the sea, the spirit of a
disease, a human ghost, a king, a mammal or a mother-in-law: it
may also frighten away such elusive things as ore in a mine or
camphor in a tree. So on a tin-mine the ore must be called
"grass-seed " and the metal "white stone." Collectors of camphor
use an elaborate tabu vocabulary of aboriginal, rare and
artificial words: the bamboo is called "the drooper," bananas "the
fruit in rows," bees "seeds on branches," blood "sap," a cat "the
kitchen tiger," a fire-fly "a torch for the eyes," the nose "the
smeller," the jaws "the chewers," a bed "the cuddling place," and
so on. Not only is the name of camphor itself avoided, but no
words are uttered which might lead the tree to suspect that Malays
were in search of its treasures. So human in anger and fear are
trees and minerals and beasts.
For there is no difference between the soul of man and the soul of
beasts and plants and objects. As the soul of man can take the
form of insect or bird, it is easy to figure him re-incarnated in
animal form. The deer was a man who died of abscess on the leg.
The tiger wears the stripes he earned as a naughty school-boy. The
elephants have a city where they live in the shape of men. Limes
can be used to abduct the soul of an elephant as well as the soul
of a girl. The solid-casqued hornbill was a malicious son-in-law,
the argus pheasant once a woman. In using dogs to hunt deer, the
magician reminds them of that common kinship which in a Malay
folk-tale makes the house-dog a fitting bridegroom for his
master's daughter, and he urges them by promise of relationship or
marriage with the quarry
Buck and he shall be thy brother
Doe and she shall be thy mistress.
Dogs, like rice, are close friends of man and have personal names
and souls.
To make it bear fruit the durian tree is beaten like a naughty
child. "There are plants to which a particularly strong
soul-substance is attributed, on account of their tough vital
power. Among all Indonesians, Dracoena terminalis stands foremost.
It is the sacred plant, which is used by magicians in all their
proceedings, and whose strong soul-substance they try to transfer
to man." Moreover, plants, like men, have this substance in every
part of them. Take the tree, where wild bees nest. Its root is
called the Seated Raja, its stem the Trailing Raja, its branch the
Pendent Raja, its leaf the Soaring Raja-in Malay the word Raja
denotes either sex. Similar names are given to the parts of the
lime tree, and the spirits of the parts of the eagle-wood tree are
called expressly princesses. The aesthetic side of such
nomenclature is a side issue to the Malay. To the coconut palm he
ascribes definitely seven souls, named after princesses whose
"neck" the tapper seizes, whose blossom-like "hair" he rolls up,
for whose juice he holds an ivory "bath," where the princesses may
"clap their hands and chase one another." Like rajas and spirits,
the camphor tree is addressed with a special tabu vocabulary.
Formerly there were seven experts required to take camphor, as
there are seven midwives required to bring a raja into the world.
The camphor princess lives in the tree, which is her house. Once
she was wooed in her human form by a man. When he broke her
command and recited to his ruler the magical chants his bride had
taught him, she became a cicada and flew up into a coconut palm.
So the soul-substance of a camphor tree may appear in either
shape, as the soul of rice may appear as a grasshopper or be
treated as a human baby. The soul of the rattan is in its tiny
mimic, the stick-insect. The soul-substance of eagle-wood, the
coconut palm and of man is conceived as a bird. Therefore, souls
are summoned by the burring call of the housewife to her chicken,
and rice is sprinkled over a man to retain his soul in his body.
Stress was laid rather on the soul's power of flight than on any
definition of this symbol until the Malay philologist studying the
Muslim cosmogony discovered the soul in the Nur-i-Muhammad (the
Radiance of Muhammad) and identified the bird in his bosom as the
Prophet's parrot (nuri Muhammad)!
The flutter of the heart, the vital spark in the firefly, the
stridulous telegraphy of the cicada in a tree, the rustling flight
of a bird from its branches, an uncanny likeness and the
anthropomorphic learnings of men explain the origin of these
conceptions. Possibly association of colour has led to the soul of
tin-ore being detected in the buffalo and the soul of gold in the
barking deer, an animal often described in Malay romance as golden
and stamped on the obverse of the tiny gold dinar minted in
Kelantan. A Besisi legend speaks of a bright snake with seven
souls in the form of iridescent rainbows. The ascription of seven
souls to men and trees, when the soul-substance has so many hosts
and so many shapes, is a moderate estimate based on the worldwide
regard for the number seven.
In Negri Sembilan the soul of a house is said to appear as a
cricket. The Patani fishermen think that even a boat has an
individual soul (maya), generally invisible, to keep it from
dissolution. It is lucky to hear the chirping sound of this soul.
It is luckier still to see the soul. That of a dug-out manifests
itself as a fire-fly, that of a large boat as a snake, that of a
ship as a person either male or female according to the qualities
of the vessel. If ill fortune at sea reveals that the soul of his
boat is weak, the fisherman engages a magician to feed it with
offerings laid on each rib. There is no soul until all planks have
been fitted and the hull can be properly called a boat. It is
dangerous to keep a perfect neolithic celt (which the Malay takes
to be a meteorite), as it has life and will attract lightning to
disappear in the flash, but chipped or damaged the stone is dead
and harmless.
Hard objects have strong soul-substance, of which magic makes good
use. The sick are rubbed with bezoar-stones. A candle-nut, a stone
and an iron nail are employed both at the birth of a child and at
the taking of the rice baby. The drinking of water in which iron
has been put strengthens an oath, for the soul of the metal will
destroy a perjurer. Applied to the wound, the blades of some
daggers can extract the venom from a snake-bite, and the mere
invocation of magnetic steel will help to join parted lovers.
VI. THE RITUAL OF THE RICE-FIELD
IN the magic safe-guarding rice from seed-time to harvest survives
the primitive ritual of the Indonesian race. Strip away the
obvious accretions, the names of Hindu deities, the thin Muslim
veneer, and the essence of the ritual remains intact in Malaya
to-day. It deals with the soul-substance, human, animal,
vegetable, with the spirits of dead magicians, nature-spirits and
Father Sky and Mother Earth. Except for Sky and Earth the spirits
invoked lack the omnipresence and individuality of gods, bear
generic names and are indefinite in number. Their sphere is a
particular district. They inhabit the rice-field, the thick
jungle, the rays of the setting sun. No temples are erected in
their honour. The customary and symbolic rites that persuade them
to friendly relations with man can be enacted in a forest
clearing, in the corner of a rice swamp, on the floor of a village
barn. No shaman or priest of Siva or Muslim elder presides. The
magician has the narrow scope of the spirits he serves. He belongs
to one small village or humble district. Often the rites
controlling the growth of rice are conducted by an old Malay
woman, relic of the far distant past when man hunted and killed,
and woman, the bearer of young, delved, lending the benign
influence of her motherhood to make crops prolific. Among many
aborigines this older custom is observed and the rites are
celebrated not by a man but by a woman, fitting midwife for the
rice-baby. Still in parts of the country agricultural implements
are given by the Malay groom to his bride as a wedding present.
Before starting to fell a clearing for rice, the farmer takes a
lump of benzoin on a plate wrapped in a white cloth as a present
to the local magician, a survivor in Malay culture whose trust is
"first in God, next in His Prophet, and then in the magicians of
old, the ancestral spirits who own the clumps and clods " of the
locality.[1] This expert recites charms over the benzoin and
returns it to the planter with traditional instructions. First he
is to burn the benzoin in a bamboo conch and fumigate his adzes
and choppers, praying to the guardian spirits, male and female,
newly dead and dead long since, to be cool and propitious. Then he
is to stand erect facing eastward and look round at the four
quarters of the heavens; he is to notice at which quarter his
breath feels least faint and begin to fell in that
[1. Except where acknowledgment is made to other sources, the
following account is based on two manuscripts written for me by
Perak Malay headmen twelve years ago. It contains certain
interesting details hitherto not noted in the Peninsula.]
direction. After one or two hacks at the trees he must cease work
for the day.
When the time comes to burn the clearing, the man gets more
benzoin from the magician, furnigates his torches, lights them and
cries thrice to spirits of all sorts, Indonesian, Indian, Persian,
Arabian, to goblins with a Sanskrit name, to indigenous vampires,
and goblins of the soil, saying that the magician has duly
informed them of his desire to burn, that he himself has paid them
due respect, and that trusting to the luck of his instructor he
hopes for a favourable breeze. Very early in the morning after the
burn he and his wife and children must hurry to mitigate the smart
of the half-burnt clearing with water in which are steeped cold
rice from last night's meal, a slice from the cool heart of a
gourd, and other vegetable products chosen for their natural
frigidity or appropriately cool names. Also a little maize should
be planted. All this must be done before Grannie Kemang can get up
and sow rank weeds that will flourish and provide hiding places
for goblin pests. Before quitting the clearing, one should pile
and singe three rows of the unburnt brushwood. Then one must go
home and wait three days before completing the burn.
The next important occasion is the planting of the rice-seed. In
Perak and Kedah the time for this is taken from observation of the
Pleiades. "When at 4.30 a.m. or thereabouts a few grains of rice
slip off the palm of the hand, the arm being outstretched and
pointed at the constellation, or when, the arm being so directed,
the bracelet slides down the wrist, it is considered to be time to
put down the rice nursery." In some places the planter is guided
by observation of the sun, calculating from the time when it is
thought to be exactly overhead at noon. Others "keep the
seed-grain in store for a certain definite period, that varies
with the character of the grain and may be anything between four
and seven months.... This period of rest is vital to the
productive power of the seed." The flooding of some stream, the
fruiting of certain trees also afford rough local indications to
supply the defect of the misleading Muhammadan lunar calendar.
A seed plot is chosen where the soil smells sweet. It is
partitioned off by four sticks into a square of a prescribed size.
Here both Sakai and Malays sometimes practise a method of
divination. Water in a coconut shell and leaves are placed within
the square. If the next morning finds the leaves undisturbed, the
water unspilt and the frame unmoved, the spot is auspicious; it
remains only to plant rice-seed in seven holes within the square
as custom ordains.
A stick, if possible of a special kind of wood (termed the
"tortoise's chest") which has grown on an anthill, must be cut
fresh on the morning of the ceremony to make the "mother dibble."
It must be in length thrice the span between a woman's thumb and
ring-finger and it must be peeled. A match or "twin" for the
mother dibble must also be prepared, of any wood, unpecled, three
cubits and three ring-fingers long. Another dibble is selected by
the magician from the heap of dibbles brought by the planters. A
pretty leafy shrub is got ready to make a " plaything " for the
seed. The leader of the village mosque chants prayers for all
souls. Then those present feast.
Next, with a white cloth about his head the magician squats,
facing the east. The big toe of his right foot is above the big
toe of his left, and he recites charms over benzoin. He fumigates
the mother dibble, her "match" and the other dibble, and sprinkles
them with rice-paste, does the same to the other tools, and the
same thrice to the earth in the middle of the chosen square. He
holds out to the four quarters of heaven seven packets of sweet
rice, seven sugar-canes, seven bamboos containing rice cooked in
them, the Malay's most primitive cooking-pot, and rice parched,
yellow and white. He lifts the mother dibble in both hands, holds
it across his head, its point towards the right. After reciting
charms he holds it above his shoulder point to earth, and digs it
into the middle of the square, withdraws it and then plants it
firm and erect in the hole. Next he plants the twin or duplicate,
and then the leafy shrub. He ties the mother dibble, her "twin"
and the shrub together with bark, and decorates the mother dibble
with a creeper whose name denotes increase. At the foot of the
mother dibble he sets a bamboo containing rice from the freak ears
most favoured for the rice-baby as certain to contain the rice
soul, a rod of iron, a stone worn smooth in a waterfall, and three
quids of betel. On the shrub he hangs seven packets of sweet rice,
seven sugar canes, seven kinds of banana, seven sorts of jungle
fruit, apparently to attract and keep the seven souls of the rice.
He charms the third dibble and, before planting it also by the
side of the mother dibble, uses it to make seven holes, saying as
he makes them: "Peace be unto thee, Solomon, Prophet of Allah,
prince of all the earth! I would sow rice for seed. I pray thee
protect it from all danger and mischance."
After fumigating two handfuls of rice he holds it with his right
hand above his left and sprinkles it with cool rice-water of the
kind made for his burnt clearing and with the rice-paste used in
all magical ceremonies. In Negri Sembilan as he does this he
recites a verse:
Rice-paste without speck!
I'll get gold by the peck!
I charm my rice crushed and in ear!
I'll get full grain within the year.)
The rice-paste is taken from a coconut shell (or in modern days
from a soap-dish!), in which there have also been steeped a nail
and husked rice. It is applied with a brush of herbs whose
vigorous growth or lucky names ("the reviver", "the full one") are
calculated to benefit the seed, body and soul. Going to the first
hole the magician cries: "Peace be unto thee, Solomon, Prophet of
God, prince of all the earth! Peace be unto you, genies and
goblins of the soil! Peace be unto my father the Sky and my mother
the Earth! Peace be unto you, guardian father, guardian mother! I
would send my child, daughter of Princess Splendid to her mother.
I would bid her sail on the sea that is black, the sea that is
green, the sea that is blue, the sea that is purple. For six
months I send her, and in the seventh I will welcome her back. It
is not seed I plant: it is rice-grain." Holding his breath, he
puts the seed into the seven holes. When he releases his breath,
he does it gently and with averted face.
The rice-paste he buries beside the mother dibble and turns the
coconut shell, its receptacle, upside down on the surface of the
ground, fumigating it and passing a censer three times round it.
Then he rises from his task.
Children rush to pick the sweet offerings from the shrub, though
one offering at least must be left on its branches. The leader of
the mosque intones prayers in honour of the Prophet. Men seize the
dibbles, women the seed. With shouts and laughter the sexes strive
to outdo one another in speed at their respective tasks. Before he
goes home the owner of the field removes from the square the
bamboo filled with rice. This cereal is eaten for the evening meal
by himself and his family, but no stranger may partake of it.
If it is dry hill rice, the seed has been sown over the field from
the first and no transplanting is required. If the rice is to be
planted in an irrigated field, the seed is sown in a nursery and
forty-four days later the young shoots are transplanted. That wet
rice cultivation is less primitive is perhaps shown by the
omission in many districts of all charms at this function, though
again seven bunches are planted first, along with a banana plant
and three stems of the Clinogyne grandis, and a fence is built
round them. (In Negri Sembilan the following invocation is
addressed to spirits:-
O Langkesa! O Langkesi!
Spirits of the field ye are four!
Counting me we are five!
Hurt not nor harm my child!
Break faith and ye shall be stricken
By the iron that is strong,
By the majesty of Pagar Ruyong
(Home of our royal house),
By the thirty chapters of the Quran.
Allah fulfil my curse!)
After this preliminary rite no work is done for the rest of the
day. On the morrow the seedlings are planted out by women, who
must neither drop the young plants nor speak. A wooden dibble is
used in remote districts; elsewhere a dibble with a steel point
that bears the euphemistic name of "the goat's hoof." "This
instrument carries from five to nine seedlings at once and is used
seven times in quick succession." While each of seven bunches of
seedlings are being planted the tongue must be "pressed against
the roof of the mouth." At this season a propitiatory sacrifice is
sometimes offered to the earth spirits. If dry rice is being
cultivated, this is done about the time the rice begins to swell.
From about the fourth month of its growth no stranger may enter
the field.
As soon as the ear has swollen large, the farmer cooks sweet rice
in a bamboo and invites the magician, the leader of the mosque,
and other worthies to the feast of "splitting the bamboo." Nightly
now rubbish and stinking herbs are burnt to scare evil spirits.
When the crop is ripe for harvest, the magician has to "take the
souls of the rice." For two evenings he walks round the edge of
the field, coaxing and collecting them. On the third he enters the
field to search for their host, looking about for ears of royal
yellow, certain types of freak ear reminding one of a veiled or
laughing princess, ears on stalks interlaced, ears from stalks
with a lucky bird's nest at the root. When he has found a suitable
host, he ties seven stalks with bark and fibre and many coloured
thread having a nail attached to it, and slips the nail into the
middle of the bunch. Thrice before the cutting of the seven stalks
is performed the magician walks round them bidding malicious earth
spirits avaunt:-
"Goblins of latter days! Goblins of the beginning! Goblins one
hundred and ninety! Goblins under my feet and subjection! Goblins
that creep into baskets and round stalks! Goblins of hill and
mountain and plain! Goblins mine! Get ye back and aside or I will
curse ye."
Early the next morning the leader of the mosque mounts a covered
shelter in the field and intones prayers in honour of the Prophet.
A feast follows. When evening is about to fall, the magician and
an assistant and the farmer walk up to the plant chosen the day
before. A puzzle ring is carried to hang on the stalks. The
magician, his head covered with a white cloth, draws near. Taking
care lest his shadow fall on the seven stalks, he fumigates them
and, sprinkling rice-paste, grasps them gingerly, hiding in his
palm a tiny blade, whose handle is carved in the shape of a bird
for disguise. He bows his head to the ground and mutters a
traditional invocation:-
Soul of my child, Princess Splendid!
I sent you to your mother for six months, to receive you growing
tall in the seventh month.
The time is fulfilled, and I receive you.
I told you to sail to the sea that is black, the sea that is
green, the sea that is blue, and the sea that is purple,
To the land of Rome, to India, China, and Siam.
Now I would welcome you up into a palace hall, To a broidered mat
and carpet.
I would summon nurses and followers,
Subjects and soldiers and court dignitaries for your service;
I would assemble horses and elephants, ducks and geese, buffaloes
and goats and sheep with all their din.
Come, for all is ready I would call you hither,
Soul of my child, Princess Splendid!
Come., my crown and my garland, flower of my delight!
I welcome you up to a palace-hall,
To a broidered mat and carpet.
Soul of my child, Princess Splendid!
Come! I would welcome you!
Forget your mother and wet-nurse.
White and black and green and blue and purple get ye aside!
Brightness of genie and devil begone!
The real brightness is the brightness of my child.
Clearly the four seas must symbolize the black earth of the
newly-tilled fields, and the carpet of green rice-plants changing
tint from light to dark until the harvest.
The magician lifts his head. Skyward and all around he gazes for
the advent of the rice-soul. With the sound of a breeze it appears
either in the form of a grasshopper or other insect or in the
shape of a girl, Grannie Kemang. If it fails at first to come, the
repetition of the most coaxing lines of the invocation three times
is certain to fetch it. The magician holds his breath, shuts his
eyes, sets his teeth, and with one cut severs the ears from the
seven stalks. Like a midwife holding a new-born child, he puts the
ears in his lap and swaddles them in a white cloth. This rice baby
he hands to the owner of the land to hold. He cuts seven more
clusters of grain from round the plant whence "she" was taken and
puts them along with an egg and a golden banana into the basket
prepared for the baby. The rice-baby is cradled among brinjal
leaves, a stone and a piece of iron, and under a canopy of cool
creepers and bark and fibre and coloured thread. The magician
smears the seven stalks from which the ears were cut with clay,
"as medicine for their hurt from the knife," and hides them under
neighbour stalks that are whole. Then facing the east, he touches
the maimed stalks and cries:-
Ho ancestresses whose rice-fields shone at the coming of our first
king!
Grow here, maidens, in clumps!
Establish your home here!
If the seven tiers of heaven are shaken,
Then only shall my child, Princess Splendid, be shaken;
If the seven layers of earth are shaken,
Then only shall my child, Princess Splendid, be shaken;
Else shall she be established as rock, firm as iron
From this world unto the world hereafter,
Established in limbs and body with father and mother.
Only if the Prophet be parted from Allah
Shall you be parted from me.
The magician kisses the rice-stalks and heads the procession
carrying the rice-baby home. The farmer is addressed as the father
of the baby and his wife as the mother. She and her children are
waiting and, as she takes the basket from her husband, the woman
exclaims:-"Dear heart! My life! My child! How I have longed for
your return from your voyage! Every day of your absence, every
month, all the year I've missed you. Now you've returned safe and
sound! Come! Your room is ready." She kisses the rice-baby three
times. The magician fumigates and sprinkles a spot for the cradle.
Then he takes the egg out of the cradle and breaks it. If there is
an empty space at the top of the egg, it is a poor omen; if at
either side of it, a good; but if the shell is quite full, the
omen is so good that it must be greeted with an offering of yellow
rice and a spatchcock. The egg and the golden banana must be eaten
by the farmer and his family, and no one else may taste them. For
three days the household must keep vigil, the fire may not be
quenched, the food in the cooking-pots may not be finished, no one
may go down from the house or ascend to it. Thus all the
precautions fitting for a new-born child must be observed. During
the three days following these birth tabus, one small basket of
ears a day may be reaped, and the reaper must work silently, not
gaze around, and guard against his shadow falling on the plants as
he would guard against another's shadow falling on his own. On the
seventh day reaping may begin in earnest, but the yield for that
day is devoted to a feast in honour of the spirits of dead
magicians, the forebears who have charge of the district.
The rice won on the seventh day is trodden out on a mat, and
winnowed in a sieve. Then the grain is placed on a mat in the
middle of the garden along with brinjal leaves, a stone from a
waterfall, an iron nail, a candle-nut, three cockle-shells, a
creeper and the inverted rattan stand of a cooking-pot on which is
put a coconut shell full of water (to quench the thirst of the
parching grain). Around this stand the grain is spread, nor may it
be left unwatched until the sun has dried it.
In some parts of the Peninsula there is a "harvest dance that
forms part of the procedure of gathering in the rice. The
performers are a band of some fifteen or twenty young children,
both boys and girls, who carry winnowing-sieves and other tools of
the harvester. The troop is invited forward by an old woman taking
up her position on the threshing screen and singing to the
children, who respond by dancing and putting questions for the old
lady to answer in verse. When the spectators are weary of the
dancing and singing the performance is brought to an end in the
following very curious way. The girl-leader of the children's
chorus sings a verse that purports to be a charm ' making all
things brittle.' Having done so (doubtless with the idea of making
the threshing easier) she leads her band of dancers to the screen
by way of testing the efficacy of the magic. The children tramp
and stamp on the screen; and when a lath has shown its brittleness
by breaking, the charm is supposed to have done its work and the
dance ends."
The next process is to pound the rice in a wooden mortar. Again
the mortar must be hung with bark, black fibre, coloured thread
and cool-named leaves. Allah and the Prophet are invoked. The
pestle crushes the grain slowly three, five or seven times, and
then may work at ordinary speed. The rice crushed, the "eldest
child of the year," is cooked in a spray-hung pot and eaten at a
feast.
The last and biggest feast of the rice year is "the Malay harvest
home. Each planter keeps open house in turn, when all his friends
come to help him tread out his grain. Even the reverend elders
assume for the time the manner of children and verses are bandied
with the gentle licence characteristic of Malay junketings."
Games, theatricals (and formerly buffalo-fights) formed part of
the celebrations. Tithes are paid to the mosque and fees to the
magician.
The magician presides over the first storing of the grain in the
barn. Again, brinjal leaves, a stone from a waterfall, a piece of
iron, a candle-nut or better three candle-nuts, a plant with a
fine healthy name, three cockle-shells, a piece of torch, all
covered with the ancestral rice-measure and the measure covered
with the rattan stand of a cooking-pot hung with bark and fibre
and coloured thread-on these solid soul-strengthening foundations
he pours the grain from the three basketfuls of rice cut near the
sheaf whence the rice-baby was taken. The shepherd of souls has
performed his final task and the remainder of the grain is left
for the farmer to pile.
Some of the ears that go to make up the rice-baby will be mixed
with next year's seed and some with next year's magic rice-paste
used at all functions by the Malay magician.
This account of the ritual of the rice-year in the Malay Peninsula
can be supplemented from other sources. Nearly a century ago in
Province Wellesley the seed was twice measured before being sown
in the nursery "in order to ascertain that none had escaped
preternaturally." There, too, sometimes seven stalks were cut for
the rice-baby, sometimes two only, a male and a female, on each
side of which a gold or silver ring was tied before they were
wrapped together in a white cloth. The most notable point in the
Perak account is that the farmer and his wife are regarded as the
father and mother of the rice-soul. In Malacca the sheaf from
which the baby is cut is called the mother, treated like a woman
after childbirth and reaped by the farmer's wife. In ancient
Greece there was confusion as to the moment when Demeter, the
corn-mother, changed into Persephone, the corn-daughter, and in
many other countries the bucolic mind has glozed over this
difficulty.
The charming of hatchets, the dibble cut from a special tree
likely by sympathetic magic to influence the quality of the
rice-plant, the dibbling of seven holes in a special plot, the
holidays prescribed after felling and sowing and reaping, the
seven ears for the rice-soul, the various communal feasts
throughout the rice-year, all these are found among the
Proto-Malay tribes of Malaya.
In Negri Sembilan, where matrilineal custom laughs at the
proscriptions of Islam, girls and men bandy Malay pantun, half
verse half riddle, one with another as they work in the fields.
Comparison with planting rites in other lands has suggested that
riddles are a survival of a tabu language, employed not to
frighten the soul of a cereal by direct reference to the processes
of agriculture.
The symbolism of the ritual will be clear to any one who has
grasped the primitive Malay notion of the soul. The soul of the
rice in the field is of the same stuff that villagers' are made of
and, figured in anthropomorphic form, is treated with the care
lavished on a new-born child.
The recognition by the animist of souls that may inhabit stock or
stone, man or plant, and quit its host to assume the shape of
tiger, grasshopper or girl, leads naturally to belief in
disembodied spirits that may enter man and make him sick, enter
drum or stone and make it a fetish, and act as capriciously as
animals or human beings. The idea of the survival of the soul
apart from the body leads also to the worship of ancestors. So in
the ritual of the rice-field there is continual reference to
ancestral spirits and goblins of the soil, the hill, the plain.
Accordingly, every three or four years before clearing their
fields for planting Malay husbandmen have a mock-combat to expel
evil spirits. Sometimes banana stems are the weapons wielded.
Sometimes the two opposing parties hurl thin rods with pared flat
ends like that of an old-fashioned stethoscope across a gully
until a blow makes the face of one of the combatants bleed and
ends the fray. It has been suggested that originally one of the
parties in such mimic battles represented the forces of evil. In
Negri Sembilan the magician opens the proceedings with this
conjuration:-
In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate!
Ancestors that inhabit the layers of the earth!
Genies of the soil! Idols of iron!
Get ye aside, genies and devils!
Make way for the might of Allah!
You who thrust up to peer
Bow down, for as a tiger I pass by.
Genies and devils and goblins!
Trespass not where Allah hath forbidden,
Else are ye traitors to Him whose Being exists of necessity.
I know the origin whence ye sprang:
From the soil of Mount Meru ye were born,
In the clouds, called the Beautiful Billowy Ones!
In the sky, the Pendent Ones!
In the fig-tree, the Peerers!
In the water, the Crawlers!
In the paths, the Up-Stickers!
I have Allah's mandate!
His Prophet is my prop:
The recording angels fight for me;
The four archangels are my brethren;
I live in a fort with seven walls of steel.
Descend angels and protect me.
And cause my enemies to bow down;
Locked be the teeth and heart and spleen
Of all who purpose evil against me.
I know the origin of ye spirits of evil:
Ye were sprung from the serpent Sakti-muna!
May ye be afflicted and distressed;
When ye gaze, may your eyes be blinded,
And may your going be shameful and grovelling.
Grandsire! thou who dwellest in bay and reaches, upstream and
down,
Dwellest on mountain and in forest and on mound,
In ravine and valley and spring and tree and rock!
Take thy soldiery, thy people and thy children
To the shady tree at the land's end
At the foot of Mount Kaf.
Keep me from harm and destruction
Or thou shalt be smitten by the majesty of God's word.
For God and Muhammad and His saints and Prophets
And the angels forty-and-four and the four archangels
Are with me.
Noah, guardian of earth!
Jacob, guardian of rock!
Luqman, guardian of iron!
Solomon, guardian of all living things!
I crave earth, water, wood and stone,
A place to build houses and hamlets and a country.
Ho! all living creatures,
We are all of one origin, all servants of God!
If ye harm or destroy me,
Ye shall be smitten by the word of God,
The miraculous power of Muhammad,
The sanctity of His saints and prophets,
By the four-and-forty angels,
The four archangels and the thirty chapters of the Quran!
Grandsire, save me from harm!
If thy eye offend me, God shall blind thee;
If thy hand molest me, God shall break it;
If thy heart purpose evil towards me,
It shall be crushed by the Apostle of God.
Another incantation follows to open the doors of the seven heavens
and the seven earths:-
Genies infidel and Muslim!
You and I are of one origin, both servants of God.
But ye are born of hell-fire,
And I of the light of the Prophet
Ye are children of Sakti-muna the serpent,
I am descended from the Prophet Adam;
Ye are followers of the Prophet Solomon,
I am a follower of the Prophet Muhammad.
You and I are servants of God.
Plague not the followers of Muhammad,
Else ye will be traitors to God,
To His Prophet and the four archangels
And the angels forty-and-four.
Genies and devils and goblins!
Get hence to the big leafy tree at the land's end
At the foot of Mount Kaf,
Else ye will be traitors to Him who was from the beginning
To God's house at Jerusalem, the primal land.
My altar is strewn with clods red and black:
Jinn! goblins! hence! and come ye not back.
This expulsion of demons, these incantations, this reference to an
altar introduces the shaman with his confident control of the
spirit world, his seances and periodical sacrifices for the public
welfare.
VII. THE MALAY SHAMAN'S SEANCE
THE main tasks of the Siberian shaman are healing and divination.
His familiar spirit or spirits, possessing him their medium,
descend at a seance to cure the sick, avert evil, foretell the
future or answer enquiries. By auto-suggestion the shaman falls or
pretends to fall into a trance and is possessed by spirits who
speak through his mouth. All these are features of the Malay
seance, which resembles very closely that of the Mongol shaman
even in details of ritual: the beating of a tambourine, wild
singing, the rustle and voices of invisible spirits, the expulsion
or sucking out of the spirit of disease, the medium on return to
consciousness oblivious of what has passed, the offerings made to
spirits.
Information about the ritual of the aboriginal shaman of Malaya is
scanty but accords generally, so far as it goes, with what might
be expected. He performs mostly inside a round hut or circle of
some kind. He wears on his head a wreath of leaves with a tuft,
and he carries a switch of leaves. Often his hut is darkened.
Invocations are chanted to the sound of bamboo stampers clashed on
logs. One account states that the shaman strokes the evil spirit
out of a patient with his switch, and that he shouts and shrieks
to drive it into a cage or network of loops to be imprisoned by
his magic. Perhaps this is a vague description of the frenzy of
possession?
The Malay seance is used to cure sickness; to divine the
whereabouts of lost or stolen property; to discover if a princess
shall bear a son or what the future holds for a Mecca-bound
pilgrim! There is a record of a seance where earth spirits were
entreated to allow a sacred rhinoceros to be hunted. The object of
the most famous seance in the history of Perak remains obscure.
Either it was to enquire from the spirits of the State if a plot
against the British Resident would succeed or to ask their leave
and help to take his life.
Sir Frank Swettenham has described how a spirit-raising seance was
conducted by a royal female shaman during the illness of a ruler
of Perak some thirty years ago. The magician, dressed like a man,
sat with veiled head before a taper, in her right hand a sheaf of
grass cut square at top and bottom. This sheaf she took
convulsively. The taper flared, a signal that the spirit invoked
was entering the candle. The magician, now supposed to be in a
trance, bowed to the taper "and to each male member of the
reigning family present!" After many spirits had been invoked, the
sick raja was brought out and seated on a sixteen-sided stand (an
improvement on the double pentacle called Solomon's seat) to
await, with shrouded head and a square bunch of grass in his hand,
the advent of the spirits of the State. Conducted back to bed, His
Highness fell later into a swoon attributed to possession by those
spirits! At this royal seance the magician's daughter led an
orchestra of "five or six girls holding native drums, instruments
with a skin stretched over one side only" and beaten with the
fingers.
At a humbler seance held in Perak there was only one musician, the
shaman's wife, a "wild-looking Moenad." Her husband held a bunch
of leaves in either hand. The musician beat a one-sided drum and
screamed out interminable chants. Her husband began to nod
drowsily, sniffed at his leaves, waved them over his head, struck
them together, and became possessed of the shaman's usual
familiar, a tiger-spirit, as shown by growls and sniffing and
crawling under a mat. Between the incantations he accepted a
cigarette and talked to the patient's family, using, however, an
aboriginal Sakai dialect. Possessed again of the tiger-spirit he
executed weird dances and sprinkled the sufferer with rice-paste.
Finally his tiger-spirit identified as the cause of the patient's
illness a dumb vampire (Langsuyar), to be expelled neither by
invocations nor the sprinkling of ricepaste.
Another magician accompanied by a male tambourine-player then took
his place. He held convulsively a single sheaf of grass and became
possessed by four spirits in succession but to no purpose. Finally
both magicians waved all evil spirits away from the patient on to
a miniature revolving model of a mosque, and set it, filled with
the flesh of a fowl and other delicacies, adrift upon the river.
In an account of yet another seance in Selangor, where to cure an
ailment the magician became possessed by the tiger-spirit, it is
said that the ceremony usually took place on three nights and that
the same odd number of persons should be present each time. For
the reception of the spirit an artificial bouquet of flowers,
doves and centipedes, all made of palm-leaf, was prepared. After
an invocation the magician bathed himself in incense, suffered
spasmodic convulsions, spoke a spirit language, became possessed,
sat with shrouded head, lit tapers on the edges of three jars of
water, and rubbed the patient with a bezoar stone. Then donning a
white coat and head-cloth, he fumigated a dagger, dropped silver
coins into the three jars, and gazed to see their position under
the three tapers, declaring that it indicated the gravity of the
patient's illness. Scattering handfuls of charmed rice round the
jars, he put into them improvised bouquets of areca-palm. blossom,
and plunged his dagger into each bouquet to dispel lurking spirits
of evil. Another sheaf of palm-blossom he anointed with oil and
used for stroking the patient from head to heel. Next he was
possessed by the tiger-spirit, scratched, growled and licked the
naked body of the patient. He drew blood from his own arm, with
the point of his dagger and fenced with his invisible spirit foe.
Once more he stroked the patient with the sheaf of blossom and
with his hands. Again he stabbed the bouquets, stroked the
patient, and after lying still for an interval recovered
consciousness.
In Perak a seance is known as "possession by spirits": in Kelantan
as "the play of the fairy princess." This Kelantan ceremony is
performed for three or sometimes seven nights in succession. It is
repeated after a week or so if the sick person's condition
improves. Besides the shaman there are three musicians, one to
strum on a three-stringed viol, one to beat a brass bowl with
pieces of bamboo, one a drummer. The shaman recites a long
invocation to the four archangels, the friends of the Prophet, the
seven miracle-workers, and the father of all genies, explaining
that not he but Luqman al-Hakim is offering them a little rice and
water and a quid of betel. Next the musician with the viol chants
a song with an orthodox introduction but ending with an invocation
to the spirits of the village, various nature-spirits, the Spectre
Huntsman and Siva, begging them to recall any of their followers
plaguing the sick man. The shaman shrouds and fumigates himself
and falls into a trance. The orchestra plays frantically. A chant,
disguised by the phrases of Muslim medico-religious lore, invites
the spirit of the fairy princess to enter the medium. The shaman
nods and whirls his head violently; his eyes are closed and he is
possessed by spirit after spirit until he has chosen the one he
desires to retain. Gazing at the flame of a candle he reports the
cause of the patient's illness. He sucks or pretends to suck the
body of the sick man and starts another chant full of pantheistic
Muslim lore declaring that man's body is God's house and no place
for spirits of evil. This exorcism eventually transfers the spirit
from the patient into the shaman, who has to dispel it thence with
the help of one of his familiars.
Should the patient recover, a final seance takes place at which
there is a sacrificial offering. The patient is bathed in charmed
water from three jars and has three rings of thread drawn over him
from head to heel. "At Penpont, in Dumfriesshire, the emissary of
a patient, when he reached the (holy) well, I had to draw water in
a vessel which was on no account to touch the ground, to turn
himself round with the sun, to throw his offering to the spirit
over his left shoulder, and to carry the water without ever
looking back to the sick person. All this was to be done in
absolute silence, and he was to salute no one by the way.'" In
Pahang when a Malay woman fetches water from the river for a sick
person's seance, she must let it trickle into her vessel slowly
without gurgling, she must cover the mouth of the full vessel with
leaves and she must not speak to any one while carrying it.
In Kelantan there are several milder forms of exorcism, practised
by traffickers with special spirits, such as the nature spirits of
yellow sunsets and the echo spirits. In one, where, however, there
is no music and recitations take the place of chants, the shaman
becomes possessed and waves over the sufferer a leather puppet
figure of Smar from the Javanese shadow-play! If recovery ensues,
among the final sacrificial offerings a model of a wayside
resting-place is reserved with dainties for Siva.
The seance to "revive" (memuleh) the Perak regalia has never been
described. The duties of the Sultan Muda or State magician were to
be chief of all magicians and to know their merits, to attend
royalty in sickness, to pay homage to the genies presiding over
the destinies of Perak, and to give annually a feast to the
spirits inhabiting the regalia. At the seance preceding this feast
the palace would be full of shrouded magicians, each invoking his
or her familiar. The Sultan Muda sat veiled, a bunch of grass in
his hand, while the chief musician called upon the genies in order
of precedence to descend and bring their thousand attendant
spirits. "Come down to the gate of this world! Pass in procession
to the posy, your place to alight. In your might lies the might of
our Sultan. Come around, pass into the posy, your place to alight,
and enter your jewelled curtain." As each spirit entered the posy,
the chant ceased and the sound of the tambourines was stilled.
Meanwhile some humble musician would be crying on the
tiger-spirit:-"Warrior! Son of a warrior! Matchless in might!
Come, my lord! Come, my life! Descend into this posy, your
alighting place, and pass into your jewelled curtain. Come by the
blessing of 'Ali, the spirit who hangs at the door of the sky."
And as the tiger-spirit came, the village magician who had invoked
him would turn about seven times and leap and growl, as his
familiar asked why he had been summoned. The magician would
answer:-"You have been invited because our lord has got ready a
hall and is inviting the Sultan of the Impalpable Air and all his
followers to a feast upon the morrow and he hopes that no harm may
befall them on the way." Speaking through the magician, the spirit
answers:-"It is well. I and my subjects can be present. The bad I
will not bring." So spirit after spirit was raised and invited
until the Sultan Muda gave the signal to retire.
The next morning the Sultan Muda, the Raja Kechil Muda and their
tambourine players went with rice-paste and turmeric and censers
to superintend the building of a nine-storeyed hall, surmounted by
a model of a fabulous bird, Jatayu (offspring of Vishnu's Garuda)
that lives on dew. It was adorned with palm-streamers from which
hung woven boxes of rice, cakes, sugar-cane and bananas: on the
topmost tier was the severed head of a pink buffalo, surrounded by
water-vessels. An altar on sixteen posts was erected with
offerings for spirits not connected with the destinies of the
State. Two bamboo conches served to hold food for hungry spirits
of the dead (karamat). At dusk the Sultan Muda mounted and waved
from the nine-storeyed hall. The others waved beside the altar and
the conches. Then the Raja Kechil Muda fell into a trance and with
shouts ascended to the mat prepared for him. Twelve musicians beat
tambourines and chanted invocations to the genies to leave the
pools and plains of spirit-land and enter the jewelled curtains
and posies prepared for them. After a rest and refreshment the
magicians renewed their invocations. The tambourines and drums of
their assistants were answered by the thud of all the royal drums
and the blare of the royal trumpets. On the right of the presiding
magicians sat virgin princesses holding sacrificial offerings on
their laps, on the left young unmarried princes supporting the
regalia. Then the two chief magicians did obeisance to the
regalia, offered delicacies to "the thousand gcnies" and poured
upon the royal drums and into the royal trumpets drink, which
vanished miraculously as though imbibed. Finally, towards dawn the
Sultan Muda and his magicians fetched the ruler of the State, and
bathing His Highness bathed in his sacred person the genies that
presided over the destinies of his kingdom.
In Kelantan also when a feast was prepared to propitiate the
spirits of a district or to banish evil spirits from the
countryside a seance formed part of the ritual.
Exactly how the spirits visit the medium is not expressly stated.
They enter the flame of candles and cause them to flicker. At the
installation of a Sultan of Perak the guardian genies of the State
may inhabit the State sword and make it press upon the ruler's
shoulder. In the regalia ritual they are invited to descend on
posies (jinjang malai), perhaps flowers stuck behind the ear of
the magician, as the yellow chempaka blossom is still stuck behind
the ear of a ruler at his installation. The convulsive shaking of
the shaman's grass switch may indicate that they enter there.
Sweet jasmine attracts them. A Perak chief, who knew how to make
from the shroud and coffin of a murdered man powder rendering
spirits visible, enabled a friend at a seance to see two women
with streaming hair descend through the roof and alight on the
flower-vase, the artificial garden prepared for their advent!
All the evidence points to the make-believe of the Malay shaman's
trance. One magician possessed by a spirit remembers court
etiquette sufficiently to bow to members of the royal family, and
falls down before a dish-cover the sight of which was anathema to
the spirit possessing her. Another toothless shaman asked why the
betel-nut has not been pounded, as the genie possessing him is
stricken with years. One possessed by a female spirit impersonates
a woman in his gait, and by arranging his dress to suit the part
is said to cause amusement to the spectators. Another showed an
anxious husband a hollow bamboo stopped up at either end. "Therein
he declared, recovered by his magic, was hair and a fingernail of
my wife, which some enemy had stolen. On no account was the bamboo
to be opened. But I was unbelieving, risked the harm which old
folks prophesied and broke the seals. Now my wife's hair was fine
as silk and this was as coarse as the hair of a horse's tail; my
wife's finger-nail was curved like the young moon and delicate as
pearl, and this nail was thick as the nail on a man's thumb. It is
a pity the white man has not made a law to clap such rogues in
gaol, but they shall be shut in Allah's gaol hereafter, which is
much worse."
There are parallels to the indication by a familiar of this cause
of a disease, but the two related to me were both examples of a
shaman's roguery. As a rule the object of a seance for the sick is
to expel or coax an evil spirit out of the sufferer's body,
sometimes into the shaman's own but usually on to a receptacle
containing food.
VIII. THE SHAMAN'S SACRIFICE
AT "the primitive annual nocturnal rite" of feasting the spirits
of the regalia and State of Perak the head of a pink buffalo was
set on the topmost tier of the altar, the royal princesses held
bits of the sacrifice on their laps, and there was a feast on the
spot while drink was being poured upon the royal drums and
trumpets. The ceremony recalls Westermarck's theory that the
origin of sacrifice was the idea that supernatural beings, having
human wants and human needs, might suffer privation and become
feeble if offerings were not made to them. This account of an
annual feast to the guardian spirits of a Malay State can be
supplemented by records of parallel rituals to propitiate
beneficent spirits and expel evil influences from State, district
and sick men.
One account of the ritual to feast the spirits of a district comes
from Upper Perak. When the people of the place are agreed as to
the time of the celebration, each brings a measure of rice and two
coconuts. Candles are lit and the shaman burns incense, invoking
it as "born of the brain of Muhammad, the breath of his spiritual
life"! Next he calls upon "the ancestor spirits, genies and
goblins to whom the earth and water of the district belong," and
informs them that he is slaughtering a pink buffalo, without
blemish and with horns the size of a man's closed fist, in order
to invite the countryside to a feast. He prays that they may
cherish all from danger and hurt. The buffalo is slaughtered and
its blood caught in a bamboo. The shaman removes and sets aside
nose, eyes, ears, mouth, hooves, legs and shoulders, tongue, tall,
heart and liver, representative of every part of the body. From
the flesh of the carcase seven kinds of food are prepared; soused,
fried, boiled, toasted, and so on, and one portion is left raw. In
ancient China, also, offerings were "of blood, of raw flesh and of
sodden flesh." A four-sided seven-tiered altar is built of palm
stems. On the topmost tier are placed the blood of the buffalo,
the pieces of the carcase set aside by the shaman, the seven kinds
of meat, seven cooked and seven raw eggs, and seven vessels of
water. On the five central tiers are spread sweetmeats; on the
lowest tier twenty-five cigarettes and twenty-five quids of betel.
The food not offered on the altar is eaten by those present. If
there is a surplus, it may not be removed: those who wish to eat
it must resort to the spot on the following day. At dusk the
Muslim audience depart, all except the shaman and one or two hardy
assistants. Circumambulating the altar, Malaya's primitive
celebrant then invoked the spirits to the feast and summoned them
by burning incense and waving a white cloth. Seven times he cried
hail to the spirits and then went away. For seven days no stranger
might enter the parish, no one might throw anything into it or
take anything forth, no one might use abusive language or cause
leaf or branch to wither.
In this and the Perak regalia feast have survived the elements of
one of the world's oldest ceremonies: the victim without spot, the
feast in which all partake before the altar, the blood that is not
left to fall upon the ground, the offering that must be utterly
consumed and that no stranger may approach, the celebration by
night or before dawn. Decay has marred the ritual. The Upper Perak
ceremony the Muslim villagers regard as an occasion for junketing
and, afraid or ashamed to be present, depart before the most
tremendous moment has arrived. Again, it is not a totem but
spirits who are approached, nature-spirits, spirits of the dead,
Arabian genies and the Prophet addressed as a shaman! Upon them
all the celebrant cries the peace of Allah.
In the regalia ritual there are four altars or receptacles for the
sacrifice, and their modern significance is explained. In
Kelantan, too, when a sick person recovers after the "play of the
princess," it is the custom to offer a sacrifice on four altars or
receptacles. On the model of a square five-storeyed platform are
placed "fish-a bit of skate, of shark, a crab, a prawn;
flesh-pieces of chicken, duck, goat and beef, both cooked and raw;
vegetables-various, both cooked and uncooked; boiled rice of seven
different colours; two kinds of intoxicating liquors (arrack and
toddy); some bananas; various kinds of cake, the blood of a fowl,
and parched rice. . . . . One silver dollar is placed on each
storey." This money is intended for " the princess." Three tiny
collections of the same things in miniature, with a silver dollar
to each, are put, one on a square mat, another into a
cradle-shaped basket termed "the raja's hall," and the third upon
a little platform half way up a bamboo splayed into a conch. The
princess descends and proceeds to taste the offerings, beginning
with those on the small mat, going next to the model platform, and
ending at the cradle-like basket. The model platform is taken to
the neighbouring jungle and left there, but the small mat and the
cradle, both designedly appropriate for the princess, are kept in
the village for a few days'. The flat platform and the bamboo
posts splayed into conches may possibly be connected with the
widespread evolution of the altar proper and the idol, developed
from a post or monolith beside the altar on which the sacred blood
of the totem was splashed to keep it off the ground. In Polynesia,
also, "beside the larger temple altars there were smaller altars
some resembling a small round table, supported by a single post
fixed in the ground: occasionally the carcase of the hog presented
in sacrifice was placed on the large altar, while the heart and
some other internal parts were laid on the smaller."
Eating together marks the tribal bond among Malays. In Negri
Sembilan a newly elected chief invites all his people, men, women
and children, "the cocks that lay not eggs, the hens that cackle
and the chicks that chirp," to a public feast called "the
sprinkling of the broken grain." He sprinkles the grain as a
symbol of gathering them under his wing, and the bond of tribal
unity is acknowledged in old-world sentences:-"Together we skin
the heart of the elephant; together dip the heart of the louse.
What we drop is common loss: what we gain is common profit." No
one can slaughter a buffalo without permission of the tribal
chief. No tribal chief can refuse to be present at a feast for
which a buffalo is slaughtered: the heart, the liver, and a slice
off the rump are his perquisites. A buffalo (never an Indian bull
or cow) is slaughtered at all big Malay feasts, secular, magical
or Muslim. At certain secular festivals the animal is caparisoned
with cloth and has round its neck the three-tiered gold ornament,
modelled after its horns and worn at weddings. The Yamtuan or
overlord of Negri Sembilan used to claim all buffaloes with
abnormal horns as perquisites of royalty. To spirits a pink
buffalo must be offered. The roof-trees of the Bataks, a
Proto-Malay people of Sumatra, are decorated with buffalo-horns.
This domestic animal was imported into the Malayan region ages ago
from India.
In ceremonies conducted to coax away patently maleficent spirits,
the risk of a bond between the spirits and their propitiators, if
both partook of the same sacrificial meal, seems to be consciously
shunned. A banana-leaf tray or model house or boat is often filled
with offerings for the spirits plaguing a sick Malay, and hung up
in the jungle or set adrift on the river to bear them away. Among
the offerings on one such tray was observed a faked quid, the
betelnut replaced by nutmeg, the gambier by mace, and the lime by
oil. But the quid prepared along with it to be chewed and ejected
by the magician upon the patient's back was genuine. Again, there
is a notable record from Selangor of a wave offering for a sick
Malay. A hanging frame-work or tray was filled with the usual
three kinds of rice, parched, saffron and washed, an egg, bananas
from one comb, pieces of uncooked flesh making up a whole fowl.
The blood of the fowls was placed in one of five miniature
palm-spathe buckets, two of the other four containing water and
two the juice of cane. Five waxen tapers were placed on the tray
and lighted to guide the spirits to their meals, and five lighted
cigarettes for them were added. The tray was waved slowly above
the patient, waved seven times before him, held for him to spit
on, and carried out and hung from a tree in the jungle. It is
significant that the cooked and uncooked flesh each made up a
whole fowl and that all the bananas were plucked from one comb. No
meal was taken by those present.
The precaution not to eat of the food presented to spirits is not
however observed in the ritual to "cleanse" a country or district.
Perhaps like the coconut, betel and cigarette offered outside a
village quarantined for smallpox, the buffaloes sacrificed at the
cleansing of a countryside are offered not to maleficent spirits
but to the spirits invoked to combat them. Until recent years
Perak used to be "cleansed" periodically by the propitiation of
friendly spirits and the expulsion of malignant influences:-"The
main line of development in ritual is from the propitiation or
insulation of evil influences to the conciliation of beneficent
powers." The royal state shaman, his royal assistant, and the
chief magicians from the river parishes assembled at a village at
the foot of the rapids below which the habitations of Perak Malays
began. Seances occupied seven days. A pink buffalo was killed and
a feast was held. The head and other pieces of the victim were
piled on one of the rafts, which then set out down-stream. The
four leading rafts were prepared for the four great classes of
spirits and were manned by their appropriate magicians. The
foremost raft carried a branching tree, erect and supported by
stays, and was for the shaman's familiars. The fifth raft bore
Muslim elders! Next came the royal band with its sacred drums and
trumpets, and then the Raja Kechil Muda (the title of the
assistant State shaman) and his followers. As they floated down
the river, the magicians waved white cloths and invoked the
spirits of the districts passed to come aboard and consume the
offerings. Whenever they reached a mosque, they halted for one
night while a seance was held and the villagers slaughtered a
buffalo, placing its head on one of the spirit rafts and eating
the rest of the carcase. At the mouth of the river the rafts were
abandoned and allowed to drift to sea. The State shaman did not
accompany the procession downstream, leaving the escort of the
spirit rafts with their grisly freight to his assistant. So, too,
the magicians of the different parishes of the river-banks stayed
behind in turn, each of them supplying a substitute to go
downstream with the assistant State shaman.
In Kelantan a similar ceremony took seven days and seven nights,
pink buffaloes were sacrificed, and the shaman conducted the
seance called "the play of the princess."
The communal sacrifices for state or district described in this
chapter all follow a shaman's seance and may be surmised to be
part of the most primitive ritual in Malaya. They reveal the early
attitude of the Malay mind towards sacrifice. With human wants,
kind spirits may become feeble through hunger. With human weakness
and fallibility, evil spirits will desert a person or country for
offerings of food and be decoyed by greed on to waste waters. The
partaking of a sacrifice establishes communion. It is necessary
therefore to eat of the offering to friendly spirits. Food offered
to spirits of disease one should be chary of tasting. By a gift,
as in the shaman's invocations a sacrifice is so often termed,
spirits can be conciliated. Finally, when a patient recovers there
is the offering to the spirits for their beneficence, actuated no
doubt by fear of punishment for omission but containing also the
germ of the freewill sacrifice of gratitude.
Sacrifices were made to spirits either at the uncertain times of
epidemics or at periods more or less defined. The sacrifice to
revive the spirits of the Perak regalia was annual. The
"cleansing" of the States of Perak and Kelantan is said to have
been triennial. One account indeed states that Perak was cleansed
once in seven years or once in a Sultan's reign, but this is
probably a native explanation of the gradual lapse of the custom.
The ritual to feast the spirits of the Upper Perak district took
place "when the grain in the rice-fields was beginning to swell."
In most places where rice is grown elaborate propitiatory
ceremonies of a communal character are celebrated in the spring of
every third or fourth year.
IX. MAGIC AND MAN
To protect the soul-substance of his staple food-plant the Malay
peasant, conservative as agriculturists all the world over, is
content with the primitive ritual of the animist, covered for
decency's sake with a thin veneer of his later religions. Courts
and ports, where new faiths first found acceptance, are more open
to liberal influences, and to safeguard the body and soul of man
the Malay has added to the practices of the animist all the magic
that Hindu and Muslim could teach him. Like all primitive peoples,
he believes that evil spirits are especially active on the
abnormal occasions of life, so that birth, puberty and marriage
are invested with the most lavish ceremonial. For the dead he
accepts Muhammadan rites almost unalloyed.
(a) BIRTH AND INFANCY
As soon as a Malay woman is with child, she and her husband have
to observe certain rules and abstentions, so that no vampire may
injure the expectant mother, no prenatal influence affect the
unborn, and nothing impede or mar a safe delivery.
To frustrate evil spirits the woman must carry a knife or iron of
some sort as a talisman, whenever she ventures abroad. If her
husband stir out of his house after dark, he may not return direct
but must visit a neighbour's house first to put any chance vampire
following him off the scent. At the time of an eclipse when
spirits prowl, the woman must hide under the shelf in the kitchen,
armed with a wooden spoon and wearing as a helmet of repulsion the
rattan basket-stand that is used for the base purpose of
supporting the round-bottomed cooking pots. Every Friday she must
bathe with limes, a fruit distasteful to devils, and drink the
water that drops off the ends of her tresses.
To avert untoward prenatal influences great circumspection is
required. In the event of an eclipse the Malacca or Singapore
woman will bathe under the house-ladder, so that she may not give
birth to a parti-coloured child, half black half white. If a Malay
husband blinds a bird or fractures the wing of a fowl, his
offspring runs the risk of being born sightless or with a deformed
arm. As this last prohibition would involve a vegetarian diet in
humble homes, modern husbands get over it by the convenient
fiction that, if the death of an animal is compassed deliberately,
there is no startling of the child in the womb and so no fear of
harm. Before the end of the sixth month, when the foetus acquires
personality, and especially before the third month, the Patani
husband may not even cut down a creeper, and if he slits the mouth
of a fish to remove a hook, the child will have a hare-lip.
At a Perak house where there is a pregnant woman, no one may enter
by the front door and pass out at the back or contrariwise,
probably because there is one exit only from the womb, the house
of birth. Guests may not remain only one night, perhaps because
any form of hurry is likely to induce miscarriage. Neither husband
nor wife may sit at the top of their house-ladder, a rule
wide-spread in the Malay Archipelago, for any blocking of a
passage protracts delivery. An unplaned house-pillar indented by
the pressure of a parasitic creeper that twined round it when it
was a living tree will exercise a like obstructive influence.
After the engagement of the midwife in the seventh month, the
Malay husband (like the Brahmin) may not have his hair cut, for
fear the afterbirth break.
In Upper Perak another rite precedes the customary lustration in
the seventh month of a first pregnancy. Apparently it is an
example of imitative magic, designed to facilitate delivery. A
palm-blossom is swathed to represent a baby with a child's brooch
on the bosom. This doll, adorned with flowers, is laid on a tray
and the tray placed in a cradle made of three, five or seven
layers of cloth according to the rank of the prospective parents.
Midwife and magician sprinkle rice-paste on doll and cradle. The
midwife rocks the cradle, crooning baby songs. Then she gives the
doll to the future mother and father and all their relatives to
dandle. Finally the doll is put back into the cradle and left
there till the next day, when it is broken up and thrown into
water.
Everywhere when a woman has gone seven months with her first child
there is performed a ceremony, observed also by Indian Muslims. In
Malaya, today, it is begun with chants in praise of the Prophet.
Next morning husband and wife, arrayed in holiday attire, are
escorted down to the river. Incense is burnt. Toasted, saffron and
white rice and a cooling rice-paste are sprinkled as at every
momentous business of Malay life, at seed-time and harvest, at
birth, at the shaving of a child's head, at circumcision, in
sickness, on return from a long journey, at a chief's
installation, at a warrior's preparation for battle. Now it is
sprinkled on water for lustration. The couple are bathed, a white
cloth is stretched above their heads, coconut palms are waved over
them seven times, and they are drenched with water specially
charmed to avert evil and procure wellbeing, as at the lustration
after marriage. Two candles are lit and carried thrice about their
heads, and they must face the light with direct glances to avoid
any chance of their child being squint-eyed. Then the procession
returns to the house, where the couple sit together in state as at
a wedding. Shawls are spread on the floor (seven if the patient is
a raja), and the expectant mother lies on her back with the shawls
under her waist. The midwife seizes the ends of the first shawl
and rocks the woman slowly as in a hammock, removes it, seizes the
ends of the next shawl and repeats the performance seven times.
Among the presents given to the midwife as her retaining fee on
this occasion is a betel-tray. The contents of this she empties:
if all of them drop together, it is a sign that delivery will be
easy. In Negri Sembilan betel-nuts are cut into pieces and thrown
like dice, inferences being drawn as to the sex of the unborn
child according as more flat or rounded surfaces lie uppermost.
The magician "chooses an auspicious place for the birth and
surrounds it with thorns, nets, rays' tails, bees' nests, dolls,
bitter herbs and a rattan cooking-pot stand, to keep the spirits
of evil from molesting mother and child in the perilous hour of
their weakness. He selects the suitable spot by dropping a chopper
or axe-head and marking the place where it first sticks upright in
the ground. Thorns and rays' tails are thought to be dangerous to
the trailing entrails of the vampire; bitter herbs are unpalatable
to every one; dolls may be mistaken for the baby; nets and bees'
nests are puzzling to spirits because of their complexity, and
sometimes a much perforated coconut is hung over the door to
bewilder ghosts by the multiplicity of its entrances and exits."
Most of these demon-traps are set under the floor of the house.
But over the patient's head is hung a fisherman's net and a bunch
of the red Dracoena, whose tough vital power denotes its strong
soul-substance. By some midwives imitation weapons of lathe are
suspended from the roof. The midwife may dress as a man. All locks
on door or box are opened, the sufferer's hair is unbound, and any
knot in her clothes is untied.
If delivery is difficult, the magician may be called to lift the
end of the woman's tresses and blow down them. Or he may recite
charms or write a text from the Quran on paper and tie it round
waist or thigh. The husband will be summoned to step to and fro
across his wife or kiss her, thus condoning any sins she may have
committed against him. If the woman is a Raja, chiefs will make
vows of a goat or other offering for her recovery. To register
each vow, the midwife ties a ring round the wrist of the patient.
Should the throes be prolonged, husband or mother puts dollars
under the sufferer's back to be distributed in charity when her
peril is past. If the afterbirth will not follow, a portion of the
umbilical cord is cut from the child and tied to the patient's
thigh as a kind of sympathetic attraction. A boy born with a caul
is considered very lucky. Immediately after birth the umbilical
cord is tied with seven circles of black fibre and severed with a
bamboo knife: later, when the cord falls off, a poultice is
applied, mixed with pepper to make the child brave. In Negri
Sembilan it is believed that if the severed cords of a woman's
successive children are preserved together, these children will
not quarrel or be disunited when they grow up.
Her trouble over, the mother is laid on a platform and toasted
frequently during forty-four days of seclusion. The toasting is a
primitive and widely spread custom, still surviving in Hindu
ritual with invocations to Agni. As for the seclusion, "the
contagion of woman during the sexual crises of menstruation,
pregnancy, childbirth, is simply intensified, because these are
occasions when woman's peculiar characteristics are accentuated,
these are feminine crises when a woman is most a woman." The
savage dreads the contagion of her effeminacy, weakness, timidity
and hysteria. And survivals of this dread may be traced in the
observance of continence by Malay warriors and fishermen, in the
notion that menstrual blood can cause leprosy, in the custom of
husband and wife feeding separately except on the occasion of
their marriage.
A baby's first cradle is a tray on which are placed a bit of iron
and a peck of unhusked rice. In Perak "when the baby is promoted
from this tray, the rice whereon he has lain is measured to
foretell his future; if the measure is brimming, he will be rich;
if it is short, poor; the balance of the rice is thrown to the
chicken to avert ill-luck."
A brush is dipped in a black mixture made of burnt coconut shell,
and the eyebrows and outlines of the nose, chin, and other
features are marked in black so that demons may not recognise or
desire the infant. A cross is put on the forehead and a spot on
the nose. In Selangor a girl's forehead is marked with a cross, a
boy's with a mark recalling the caste mark of the Hindu. The
mother, also, is daubed on nose and bosom.
In some parts the moulding of the child's head, due to the process
of birth, is reduced by massage or a constricting cap.
A tentative name is given to a child before the umbilical cord is
cut. "In Upper Perak names suggested by some local circumstances
are given at birth, and girls, for example, are called after a
butterfly, a fish, a plant. Later the parents will consult a
religious elder to take a horoscope and select a Muhammadan name
for the child according to the date of the birth. This name may be
adopted temporarily or permanently. The original pagan name may be
used still but will be changed for another in the event of
sickness. . . . In Kelantan five or seven bananas are dubbed with
persons' names: they are laid before the infant and he is given
the name allotted to the particular banana he grabs first." The
Perak Malays have a series of conventional names for their
children in order of seniority. A Malay, as we have seen, will
often drop his own name and be called "Father of Awang," or
whatever is the name of his first-born. Like the Brahmin, he
refers to his wife never by name but as "the person in my house,"
or, when she is older, as "the mother of Awang or so-and-so."
If the child is a raja, young mothers of good family suckle him or
her in turn, their own children thus becoming foster brothers or
sisters of the infant. The royal mother may confirm this by
suckling the infant of the foster mother.
Muslim custom prescribes the seventh day for the formal naming of
the child, the shaving of its hair, and the sacrifice of two goats
for a boy and of one for a girl. This is followed in Malaya. One
lock of hair is left on a boy's head as on the head of Brahmin
children and of Egyptian Muslims, but it is a custom of primitive
Malays also to leave a lock unshorn as a refuge for the child's
soul. Sometimes this tonsure ceremony may be deferred for girls
until marriage. At one such deferred ceremony the headman and the
girl's nearest relatives clipped the ends of seven locks with
seven strokes of the scissors, an exact though unconscious
imitation of Brahmin ritual. When the head of a royal baby is
shaved, the wives of the great Perak chiefs each snip a few hairs
in turn according to their rank. Notable, too, is the opening of
the child's mouth by a ceremony performed also in Arabia and
Egypt, but perhaps dating back to Brahminical India. A gold ring
is dipped in a mixture of betel-juice and sugared and salted
water, and an elder utters a Muslim adjuration of which the
original occurs in the Rig-Veda: "In the name of Allah, the
Merciful, the Compassionate! May he lengthen your life! May he
teach you to speak fittingly in the court of kings! May he give to
your words the attractiveness of betel, the sweetness of sugar and
the savour of salt!" The gold ring is tied to the child's wrist.
When the forty-four days of purification are complete, the midwife
throws away the platform on which the young mother has been
roasted and the ashes of the fire that has burnt without cease by
her side. And now, just as the Brahmin takes a child out formally
to see the sun, so the Malay introduces his child to "Mother Earth
and Father Water." The midwife carries the baby to the top of the
stair or house-ladder, recites incantations and marks a cross on
the soles of the infant's feet with lime. She descends and puts
the child's feet first on iron (the blade of a wood-knife or the
head of a hoe), then into a tray containing gold and silver
(usually a ring of each metal) and lastly on the earth. That is
the custom in Upper Perak, but details vary in different places.
In Kelantan a raja's child has to be taken down from the house by
three steps, no more, no fewer. He is carried through a line of
women holding lighted candles to a spot where seven gold plates
are placed. The first plate contains herbs, the second unhusked
rice, the third husked rice, the fourth rice-paste, the fifth
yellow turmeric rice, the sixth earth from a grave, and the
seventh sand from the sea. Into each of these plates the child's
feet are pressed before they are allowed to tread the earth. Then
the baby raja is carried up a seven-tiered stand and bathed. After
the lustration, the stand is thrown, with the spirits attaching to
it, into the sea.
Next the Malay infant is carried down to the river. A candle is
lit and stuck on a boulder or bamboo staging. Mother and midwife
descend into the stream. The mother bathes the hair of the midwife
and then the midwife performs the same service for the mother. An
offering is made to the water-spirits: an egg, a quid of betel,
seven long and seven square rice-packets. The usual three kinds of
rice and rice-paste are sprinkled over the surface of the river.
The child is passed through the smoke of incense. Then a live fowl
is placed in the water and the child made to tread on it, so that
he may have power over all domestic animals. Next a sprouting
coconut seedling is set afloat and the infant's feet are placed on
it, so that he may have power over all food plants. Lastly a
jungle sapling, usually a rattan creeper, roots and all, is put in
the stream and the setting of the little feet upon it gives the
child dominion over the forest. A palm-spathe bucket and a
banana-flower are turned adrift. If the baby is male, a boy
catches a fish with a casting-net; if the baby is female, a girl
should throw the net. Finally a man casts the net over a group of
the midwife, mother and infant, and a crowd of tiny children
representing fish.
After this ritual introduction to earth and water, the infant is
laid for the first time in a swinging cot fashioned of black
cloths hung from a rafter. Into the bunt of the cot are put a cat,
a curry-stone, and an iron blade to mislead and terrify evil
spirits. Then the midwife lifts the baby into his new home. Pious
old ladies croon lullabies. Muslim prayers are recited. There is a
feast on curry and rice.
In the water for a baby's ablutions arc steeped the same
collection of strong-souled substances that are put beside the
garnered grain of the rice fields. If the attacks of spirits have
made him sickly, the leaves of a plant called the Genie's Tongue
(Hedyotis congesta) may be infused in his bath. If the baby cries
continually, he may be "smoked over a fire made of the nest of a
weaver-bird, the skin of a bottle-gourd, and a piece of wood that
has been struck by lightning." It is unlucky to praise the health
or beauty of a child.
Great care is taken of the placenta, the child's "younger brother"
(or sister), which is kept for a while and then buried, generally
under a tree. If the new born child is royal, boys of good family,
five to seven years old, are chosen for this function. Their
leader envelopes his head in a black cloth and on it carries the
placenta in a new earthen pot to a place selected for the burial.
Sometimes the boys ride there on elephants. In Perak the coconut
seedling used at the infant's introduction to water is planted to
mark the site. Head and face still enveloped, the leader of the
band returns to the royal cot, greets its occupant with the Hindu
Om and hails him as brother of himself and his followers.
(b) ADOLESCENCE
Magical precautions accompany circumcision, teeth-filing and the
boring of girls' ears. Even the observances at handing a child
over to the care of a religious teacher and at the conclusion of
his studies, Muslim as they now are, may be a survival of Hindu
ritual or some more primitive initiation ceremony.
Circumcision is regarded as a Muslim obligation. A boy undergoes
it at any lucky and convenient age between six and twenty. Often
it is done immediately after the celebrations at the conclusion of
his religious studies. At the Perak court, amid great festivities,
a young raja is clothed like a bridegroom in State dress. The
State magician pours oil upon water in which the acid juice of
limes has been mixed. From the pools of oil that float in the
shape of moon and stars, he tells if the moment is propitious for
the ceremony, and if the boy will later marry a girl of his own
class. Then he rubs the mixture on the forehead, hands and feet of
the boy and of his companions who will undergo the operation at
the same time. Feasting may last for days. Royal candidates are
borne in procession-in Perak on painted elephants or men's
shoulders, in Negri Sembilan in the ruler's processional car, in
Patani on a huge coloured model of a mythical bird. In Patani,
too, sham weapons of wood are carried in front of them. In
Kelantan a torchlight procession goes seven times round the house
of the chief where the function is to be held; wooden or palm-leaf
walls are removed and the procession perarnbulates the house
without descending to the ground. In Perak sometimes the boy is
seated on a bridal dais, has a dance with lighted candles
performed before him and his fingers stained with henna. There,
too, a raja is covered with a silk cloth, his body sprinkled with
saffron rice and cooling rice-paste, and his mouth stuffed with a
lump of glutinous rice and three grains of parched rice. A hen is
placed on his body and encouraged to peck up any of the grains of
rice that may be sticking to his mouth. If she is slow to peck, it
will be long before the boy marries. Two coconuts and a small bag
of rice are rolled over him from head to heel. Just before the
operation the boy is escorted to river or well, where the same
offerings are thrown to the spirits of the water as when he was
first introduced to that element. The boy bathes along with his
parents, and the one long lock of hair that has been a symbol of
childhood is shorn by his mother or nurse or the man who later is
to circumcise him. During this tonsure a mock fight is started
with bundles of rice, till the water resounds as if buffaloes were
fighting in it, a custom recalling the mock combat to clear the
rice-fields of demons. The final ceremony then takes place
indoors. The boy is seated on the stem of a banana or on a sack of
rice, and at the Perak court a swordsman stands beside him so that
if aught goes wrong "the plug for the wound and the dressing may
be taken from the operator's corpse." At the same court throughout
the various stages of the ritual, at the taking of the omens, at
the procession to the river, and at the operation, the royal drums
are beaten and the royal flutes and trumpets blown. The sufferer's
food consists of dry fish or buffalo meat and his plate is lined
with a parched banana-leaf, the dryness of diet and leaf having a
hornoeopathic effect on his unhealed wound. Till the wound is
well, he may not wear a cap. For months before the operation he is
warned not to eat tough meat. These and other rules are dictated
by mimetic magic. If he was born with a caul, a piece of it
preserved from his birth is often given him to eat in a banana.
An analogous but merely nominal ceremony of a very private nature
is observed for girls also, either in infancy or early youth, a
midwife being the surgeon.
Puberty brought also for both sexes the practice of filing and
blackening the teeth in order to substitute for sharp white fangs,
"like those of a dog," an even row of teeth, black "like the wings
of a beetle." One of the incantations recited is for personal
charm and pre-eminence and shows signs of travestying the Sufi's
"perfect man." In a folktale called "Awang Sulong" the operation
was done with one rasp of the file a day and one a night for nine
days and nights, and the beauty of the glossy black stumps of the
hero made folk ask
Whose the cock that struts so bravely,
His lips a shore beset with bridges,
Bridges of black shining palm-spikes,
Teeth as stems so sharp and knitted,
Mouth a boatful of red nutmegs,
Ebon teeth like bracelet circle?
The object of this practice, as of circumcision, was, it has been
surmised, to sacrifice a part to save the whole. Blackening of the
teeth has died out, but filing is still practised, even after
marriage, to beautify the teeth and prevent their decay.
Girls' ears are bored either in early childhood or at puberty,
with the usual magic ritual to worst evil spirits. At the Perak
court in the eighteenth century two nights were devoted to
henna-staining before the ears of a ruler's daughter were pierced,
and on the second night she was escorted on an elephant seven
times round the palace. The needle employed is threaded with
cotton of many colours, having at the ends turmeric cut in the
shape of a floweret; two of these flowerets adorn the thread left
in each ear. just as the boring begins, those present throw money
into a silver bowl, perhaps to drown any cry or murmur. After
this, large ear-studs used to be worn during a girl's maiden days
but are now donned only at her wedding to be discarded formally on
the consummation of the marriage. At the Perak court the ceremony
is concluded with a feast and prayers in honour of the Prophet and
of the parents and ancestors of the ruler.
(c) BETROTHAL AND MARRIAGE
There is little or no magic about a Malay betrothal. It is a
contract to be ratified before headman or elder, and to be
published abroad by the despatch to the girl's relatives of two
elaborate betel boxes, one of them containing one, or in Negri
Sembilan two, rings wrapped in betel-leaf. If the youth is guilty
of breach of promise, the girl's people keep the ring or rings: if
the girl is guilty, her parents return them with cash their equal
in value. In parts of Perak the betel boxes are replaced by trays,
one of which is adorned with a paper tree; and, when the bearers
arrive, yellow rice is strewn. The boxes or trays are proffered
only if negotiations for the marriage are successful. Nowadays
girls are seldom married before they are fourteen or fifteen, or
boys before the age of seventeen: often both are older. Like the
Hindu, the Malay considers a hairy person unlucky. The Brahmin
student may not feed "the husband of a younger sister married
before the elder, the husband of an elder sister whose younger
sister was married first, a younger brother married before an
elder, an elder brother married after a younger," and in Malaya,
also, the request for a younger sister's hand before her elder
sisters are wedded is universally disliked. In the figurative
language of Malay betrothal verses the suitor comes, like the Esth
wooer, "in search of a lost calf," just as among the Finns he
wants to buy a bird, and among the Sardinians to ask for a white
dove or a white calf. The suitor accepted, his mother is invited
within, where she slips the ring (or two rings) on the finger of
her future daughter-in-law. Songs and feasting conclude these
preliminaries.
Seven days later the suitor and his friends resort to the girl's
house and stay singing and feasting for two days and two nights.
Before leaving, the suitor does obeisance to his future
mother-in-law. When harvest time comes, he and his friends are
invited to help, and the rice that will be eaten at the marriage
is trodden out to the accompaniment of songs bandied between men
and women, the two parties of groom and bride. But in Negri
Sembilan a youth is ashamed to meet either of the parents of his
future bride, even accidentally on the road.
Favourite times for weddings are after the harvest or after the
season of rice planting, not only because those are days of
leisure but probably because so the child in the womb and the
grain in mother earth are likely to develop simultaneously. The
festivities may occupy two or four or five days if the contracting
parties are humble peasants, seven or forty days or even months if
they are rajas. Astrological tables are consulted to determine a
lucky time to begin them.
On the first day the magician takes steps to protect the groom,
and a matron to protect the bride from all jealous spirits. In
Upper Perak this preludes a most elaborate marriage ritual. The
magician ties a ring on a white thread round the bridegroom's
neck; lights a candle on cup or tray; burns incense and invokes
all spirits and the sacred dead to be kind. He scatters saffron
rice, sprinkles the groom with the usual cooling rice-paste and
dresses his hair. A matron does the same service for the bride. If
her shorn fringe lies close to the forehead, it is a sign that she
is a virgin; if it sticks up, then "the flower has been sipped by
a bee." At the Perak court the midwife first waxed and clipped
seven long hairs: if the stumps moved or the tips fell towards the
girl, she had been deflowered. On either side of the house-door a
red and a white flag are stuck. The magician descends the
house-ladder, sprinkles the earth with yellow rice and rice-paste,
and offers betel. to the spirits of the soil. The bride is bathed
in her house. The groom is conducted down to the river. A white
flag with a candle fixed on its shaft is planted on the bank. Near
by, two large candles are put on the ground. Incense is burnt in
three bamboo cressets, to which are tied three candles, three
quids of betel, and three native cigarettes. On a vertical frame
is fastened a palm-blossom. Again rice is scattered with appeals
to all the spirits of earth and water. The palm-blossom is broken
open that the dew in its heart may be mixed with limes and
rice-powder for bathing the bridegroom. During the lustration he
stands in the river facing downstream and has water thrown into
his mouth. The white thread is broken from his neck and he is
dressed in a raja's garb: a scion of the Perak royal house will be
lent the armlets and jewellery used at the installation of the
ruler. Then, mounted on elephants with painted foreheads, the
procession wends its way with religious chanting and song to the
house of the bride. An umbrella is held over the bridegroom's head
and his attendant fans him. On arrival the groom steps down into a
tray of water, in which are a stone, a ring, a razor, and a
dollar. He is sprinkled with saffron rice and seated on a dais.
For three nights, singing and firing crackers, youths encircle a
"henna tree" in a bowl containing henna and stuck with lighted
candles. The experts seize and dance with it in turn until one of
them carries it up the house-ladder, where girls receive the
"tree" and take up the dance. To extinguish the candles during
inversions and gyrations is the sign of a boor. On this first
night both bride and groom are stained with henna in private, and
the formal marriage before an authority from the mosque may now
take place. All the fingers of the girl are stained; three of the
man's, counting from the little fingers. On the second day a Perak
princess of the highest rank used to be taken in procession with
flags, umbrellas and music, seven times round the palace. On that
night the fingers and palms and toes and the sides of the feet of
the married pair are stained with henna in public. Dramatic shows,
dancing girls, and feasting entertain the guests. The rice for the
confarreatio on the morrow is brought out, piled in tiers on an
octagonal platter, topped with a tinsel tree and stuck with dyed
eggs on skewers. The couple sit in state, and guests pay homage to
the bride now and to the husband at the sitting in state on the
following day.
On the third day there are chants in praise of Allah and the
Prophet. A buffalo is slaughtered. The girl's relatives escorted
by music present decorated rice, coconuts and firewood to the
relatives of the groom. The bridegroom is escorted thrice each way
round a circular dome-shaped frame containing incense, that is, in
a passage between its mat sides and a white cloth held up by those
present. Afterwards he is placed inside the frame and censed for
the space it takes a dancer with a branched candlestick to circle
the structure three times. Next the bride is brought out to
undergo the same ordeal. The bride goes to her room. A duenna
guards the door. There is a mock combat between the sexes. The
magician demands entrance for the bridegroom, and is admitted
after presenting a betel-box that contains a ring and some cash.
His instructor lifts the groom's left hand and puts it on the
bride's head. The couple have to feed one another with betel. Then
three, five or seven old people paint the palms of the couple's
hands with henna and sprinkle them with rice. After that they are
stripped of their finery, led three times in each direction round
an inverted rice-mortar and seated upon this symbol of sex and
fecundity. They are lifted thrice before they arc declared duly
seated. The magician pours fresh coconut oil into a bowl of water,
and after throwing five grains of rice on the oil, drops the wax
of a lighted candle on to the mixture. The pair are bathed with
this compound, together with water from blossoms of the areca and
coconut palms. Coconut fronds are waved seven times above their
heads. Bathing accomplished, vari-coloured string is dropped round
and over the heads of the pair three times while they step
forward, and then under their feet and upwards three times while
they step back. After that the string is lowered to their chests
and severed over the right rib of the groom and the left of the
bride. If the front piece is longer, the wife will obey her
husband; if the back piece is longer, the "rudder will be at the
bows," that is, the wife will rule the roost if the two pieces are
equal, both will hold their own. The next ceremony obtains
everywhere. Husband and wife don royal costume (or nowadays the
man may wear Arab dress)-this, it has been surmised, "shows both
the tabu character of bride and bridegroom, and also an attempt at
disguising them by fictitious change of identity." The couple then
sit in state on a dais, the husband on the right of the wife.
Sumptuary custom fixes the number and colour of mats and pillows
allowed, according to the rank of the contracting parties. There
is an exercise in Swedish drill, where the performer has to sink
slowly down into a squatting posture, straighten his knees and
stand erect. This exercise the embarrassed pair have virtually to
fulfill, until after three efforts they are seated simultaneously
as custom ordains. The floral pyramid of rice on the octagonal
platter is broken and the pair have to feed one another three
times with clots of the rice held in their fingers. After that
they must remain motionless, like a ruler at his installation,
while those present do obeisance to the "royalty for a day."
Guests throw money into a bowl. Muslim prayers may be read. At
last the principals are allowed to retire. Each guest is given a
dyed egg out of the rice pyramid to take home.
On the following days there is more lustration and feasting.
Throughout all these ceremonies bride and groom remain silent and
no glances are exchanged between their downcast eyes.
If a husband is disappointed in the virtue of his bride, he may
advertise his disillusionment by appearing without headdress or
creese and he can claim back half the dowry. But a marriage is not
consummated for three nights or more. So it is not usually till
the seventh day that, with little fingers interlaced or both
holding one handkerchief, the couple are bathed again with all the
precautions described for the bathing on the third day. The seven
fronds waved over them are dropped for bride and groom to step to
and fro across them three times, after which the fronds are cast
out of the house taking ill-luck. A censer is passed about the
pair and a cord of vari-coloured thread is tied around their necks
joining them. At this ceremony the guests, also, are drenched with
water from buckets and bamboo squirts. (At royal weddings, before
they are bathed, the pair are carried in procession three or seven
times round a storeyed pavilion built for the lustration.) After
being bathed, both don finery once more and sit in state.
Sometimes on the night before this final lustration the groom's
friends tear him from the dangerous fascination of his wife's arms
by lighting a smoking fire to bring him to the door, whereupon he
is carried off to his parents' home and only escorted back next
day for the bathing ceremony.
Everywhere it is usual for the husband to live in his bride's home
for some while after the marriage. Among the matrilineal
Minangkabau colonists of Negri Sembilan he lives in it
permanently.
The ritual of Upper Perak on the border of the Siamese Malay
States contains some novel details. The circumambulation of a
structure containing incense and the lustration of the couple
before the day when the big sitting in state takes place have not
yet been recorded from the south.
The order of marriage ceremonies varies according to locality and
the means of the parties. Sometimes the Muslim service is
performed just before the sitting in state. Sometimes the mimic
combat for the bride's person, a custom practised in ancient India
and in Europe, takes place on arrival at her house and is repeated
before the bridal dais.
The throwing of rice over the head of a bridegroom is commonly
observed by Indo-Germanic peoples. Confarreatio, or eating
together, is a worldwide usage. In many parts of India and Europe
and in Muslim Morocco the bridegroom is treated as a king on his
wedding day.
The Code of Manu lays down that among the elements of a Brahmin's
wedding are the leading of the bride three times round the sacred
fire, each time with seven steps, and the binding together of the
wedded pair by a cord passed round their necks. Again, "On the
second or third day of Brahmin marriage ceremonies," says
Thurston, "sacrifices are performed in the morning and evening and
the nalagu ceremony. The couple are seated on two planks covered
with mats and cloth, amidst a large number of women assembled
within the pandal. In front of them betel leaves, areca nuts,
fruit, flowers and turmeric paste are placed on a tray. The women
sing songs they have learnt from childhood. Taking a little of the
turmeric paste rendered red by the addition of lime, the bride
makes marks by drawing lines on her feet. The ceremony closes with
the waving of water coloured red with turmeric and lime, and the
distribution of betel leaves and areca nuts. The waving is done by
two women who sing appropriate songs." In many parts of India
bridegroom and bride are seated on mortar or pestle or grinding
stone.
A custom of Hindu origin is for a Malay raja to remain away and
send his creese or his handkerchief to represent him when he
marries a wife of humble birth. An obsolete raja custom was to
send a creese to parents who were reluctant to give their daughter
in marriage, with a message that the suitor was ready with dower
and presents doubled: if they remained obdurate, the creese had to
be returned with double the dower offered. Another method, with a
Sanskrit name, was for the suitor to force entry into the house,
secure the girl, and drawing his creese defy resistance. If the
ruse succeeded, the man had to give twice the usual dower, present
two garments instead of the customary one and pay double the
ordinary fines for trespass. These two ways of wooing are probably
of Indian origin.
The painting of the couple with henna to fend off evil influences,
the first night in private, the second in public; the dance with
the henna bowl and lighted candles-these ceremonies occur at
Muslim marriages even as far away as in Morocco. Islam has added
items to the ritual of Malay marriage but has failed to banish
others incompatible with its tenets. The sitting in state and the
lustration of the pair before mixed audiences of men and women
offend the strict, but retain so strong a hold on the Malay
imagination that a bigoted chief, whom I knew, reluctantly
observed them, but in a loft under the roof, where guests could
not scale!
It should be added that when the bride is a widow, particularly a
childless widow, the marriage rites are greatly curtailed and
often confined merely to the short legal service before the Kathi.
(d) DEATH
It is no part of the plan of this book to describe the ordinary
Muslim rites for the disposal of the dead. But certain Malay
superstitions require notice.
In Selangor and Negri Sembilan, when a practiser of black magic
lies dying, dissolution of the powerful soul from the wasted body
is helped by the making of a hole in the roof. Everywhere a dagger
or a pair of betel scissors or some other symbol of iron is placed
on the chest of a corpse, and watch is kept especially to prevent
a cat from touching the body and electrifying it to an awful
travesty of life. Lights must be lit and incense burnt and the bed
where the deceased slept in life arranged for seven days after a
death. In the neighbourhood of the house no rice may be ground,
shots fired or music or dancing performed. After the demise of an
important member of a royal family no gong or musical instrument
may be struck for forty days. It is forgotten that originally
silence was kept in order not to guide the deceased back to his
temporal home, and such silence is now regarded only as a mark of
respect.
The body of an important person is escorted under umbrellas to the
place of ablution where men or women, according to the sex of the
deceased, support it on their extended legs. The corpse of the
chief of Jelebu is "washed by all the mosque officials in the
district together with the Hajis." This chief's retainers hold his
insignia round his corpse, which is laid upon a dais of the type
prepared for all formal functions. As the corpse is being
shrouded, forty Hajis offer prayers. For it is believed that among
every forty who offer the prayers there will be a saint whose
request will be heard.
A chief's bier is a huge platform, which it may take a hundred men
to lift. At the obsequies of the last Sultan of Singapore eighty
hired bearers and numerous volunteers carried this structure, at
the corners of which stood four men scattering yellow rice and
flowers mixed with pieces of gold and silver. A bier may be of
several storeys. The bier of the commoner chief of Jelebu, for
example, is of five storeys; the bier of a raja is of seven. At
the Jelebu rites a lad chosen from a particular tribe scatters
coin from the topmost bier; nine maidens of the same tribe are
seated on the litter, eight keeping the corpse in position with
their extended hands and the ninth holding a young plantain tree
as a symbol that "the broken grows again " and the chieftainship
of Jelebu never dies. At the funeral of royalty sixteen girls used
to support the body. Outside the Minangkabau colonies of Negri
Sembilan the tree symbol is not found in the Peninsula. Children
are made to pass under a parent's bier before it is carried to the
grave, not only as a token of respect but to prevent them from
pining for the deceased.
In many places strips are torn from the pall and worn by relatives
of the dead on arm or wrist to keep them from undue longing for
the departed. This is the practice in Negri Sembilan and at the
obsequies of a Sultan of Perak. The Malay Annals record an
instance where the pall of a tributary prince was despatched to
his suzerain with the news of his demise. Generally Malay mourners
wear workaday shabby clothes, a custom still followed at the Sri
Menanti court. But in some places, like Malacca, European
influence has led to the adoption of black garments. Again, the
old custom was for mourners to go without headdress and with
dishevelled hair, and at a royal funeral it was expected that all
a ruler's subjects should exhibit these signs of grief. For three
days after the death of the chief of Jelebu no man may wear any
headdress except a white cap, Hajis must discard their turbans and
women their veils. When the most famous ruler of Perak in the
eighteenth century came to the throne, for seven days the royal
drums and trumpets were silent in honour of his predecessor, and
on the eighth the new raja's headdress was brought on an elephant
by the Bendahara, the chief who rules temporarily during the
interregnum between ruler and ruler; Sultan Iskandar 'Inayat Shah
donned it. and only then did his courtiers cover their heads. (The
new Sultan dismissed from office and broiled in the sun many
persons who had failed to arrive for the obsequies!) Sometimes for
forty days after a ruler's death no headdress is worn. But in
place of the baring of the head, Perak Malays have introduced a
very popular fashion of wearing a white band round the hat.
At a ruler's funeral the State drums are beaten and the state
trumpets blown. Then for seven or even twenty or forty days they
are silent. After the death of a great chief his royal master may
order that they keep silent for five or seven days. This custom
also was probably designed to avoid guiding and recalling the
departed to his earthly home.
It is considered unlucky to attend the funeral of one who has died
a bad death, or of one whose corpse turns a dark livid hue, and
mourners hurry away. There are some who will not partake of a
funeral feast, especially on the third and seventh days after the
death, because demons have often been seen pouring into rice and
curry water that has run off the corpse at the final ablution.
Take a strip of the shroud, a chip of the coffin-plank, and a
broad leaf to hide behind, and one can see them, some with
children on their backs, like human beings, catching the water in
jars!
Temporary wooden posts are often planted at a grave, until
permanent stones can be got. If the deceased has left a child
frantic with grief, then every night for three or seven successive
nights a vessel of water is tied to the temporary tombstone by a
shred of the shroud, and every morning the child is bathed in the
water. In Perak, on the hundredth day the temporary posts are
cleansed with limes and rice-paste, thrown into the river and have
water sprinkled over them thrice to drive away evil influences.
Sometimes over the tomb of a saint or ruler there is fixed a
mosquito-net or a light frame and canopy or a palm-thatched roof
under which lamps and candles are lit.
Everywhere Muslim burial is the rule now, though there survive
shadowy traditions of older rites. Cremation was practised in
mediaeval Malacca. The Dayaks of Borneo carry into the forests the
bodies of those who have met a violent death, and lay them on the
ground; their priests they honour by exposure on a raised
platform. In the Malay Annals and the tale of the Malacca hero,
Hang Tuah, there are allusions to leaving bodies on the ground,
but only those of traitors or enemies. In the north of the Malay
Peninsula suspension of the dead between trees is practised by the
Buddhist Malayo-Siamese, both as a permanent form of burial and as
a preliminary to cremation, and the northern Sakai dispose of the
bodies of their magicians in the same way. "Among some of the
Sakai-Jakun tribes of Pahang it appears that not only is a
settlement deserted when a death occurs but the corpse is left
unburied . . . in the abandoned house, for, if they put a corpse
into the ground, the spirit would not be able to make its escape
upwards."
Are there signs of former aerial burial among the civilised
Malays? Many of the grave-stones of rulers of Perak are on raised
platforms. And it was not uncommon in the past for rajas and
chiefs to be left unburied for days, their successors having to be
elected before the interment. Sultan 'Ali of Perak, who died in
1871, was left unburied for forty days, because his lawful
successor feared to come upriver, "and the presence and
proclamation of the new Sultan are essential features of the
burial ceremonies of the old." A similar case is recorded from
Jelebu.
The Proto-Malays of the Peninsula have perhaps been influenced by
the civilised Muslim Malay. Anyhow they bury their dead. "The body
lies about three feet underground, the tomb, which is made of
earth beaten smooth, rising about the same height above the
surface. A little ditch runs round the grave, wherein the spirit
may paddle his canoe. The body lies with the feet pointing towards
the west. The ornamental pieces at each end of the grave answer to
tombstones " and have a Malayo-Arabic name. "On the other side of
them are seen the small, plain, upright sticks, called soul-steps,
to enable the spirit to leave the grave when he requires. There
are four horizontal beams on each side of the grave, joined in a
framework, making sixteen in all, laid on the top of the grave and
so forming a sort of enclosure, in which are placed, for the use
of the deceased, a coconut shell, a torch in a stand, an
axe-handle and a cooking-pot, while outside this framework hangs a
shoulder-basket for the deceased to carry his firewood in." Thus
is described the grave of a Johore aboriginal chief who died in
1879.
Expensive and well-built houses are killing the ancient custom of
abandoning a home where a death has occurred. But Sultan Iskandar
'Inayat Shah of Perak removed from Brahmana Indra and built a new
palace at Chempaka Sari because he "disliked hearing the royal
music near the grave of his predecessor," and Sultan Mahmud, his
successor, removed from Chempaka Sari to the Big Island Indra
Mulia. Nowadays a wooden house is sometimes taken to pieces and
erected on a site more lucky.
(e) INSTALLATION CEREMONIES
The selection of a ruler is supposed to be made before his
predecessor's body is consigned to the grave. In one Malay
folk-tale, where a king has died childless and his successor is
chosen by a sagacious elephant (as in many Indian stories), the
prince selected is bidden to sit beside the corpse of the
deceased, while guns are fired and the drums and trumpets of the
royal band are sounded seven times. In Naning and in many parts of
Negri Sembilan, a chief's successor must mount the bier; failure
to achieve this is regarded as a bar to election and, if there are
more claimants than one, they scramble on to the hearse together
or one after another. At his installation a new commoner chief of
Jelebu has to sit on the dais on which the body of the last chief
was washed for burial.
The formal installation of a ruler is made some while after the
obsequies of his predecessor. There are festivities for seven days
or forty days. Then the prince is bathed ceremonially and dons
robes of state. A Perak Sultan wears a gold neck-chain,
dragon-headed armlets of gold, and a creese in his belt; in his
head-kerchief is thrust the royal seal, and from his shoulder
hangs a sword with an Arabic inscription, reputed to have been the
weapon of his ancestor, Alexander the Great! Seven times he is
taken in procession round the royal domain, to the thud and blare
of the state drums and trumpets, escorted by courtiers carrying
flags and pennons, creeses, lances and swords. On his return to
the palace, he listens to a herald reading a proclamation from an
unintelligible version of an old Sanskrit formula. He is cooled
with rice-paste and sprinkled with rice. About him clusters a
retinue, holding umbrellas, weapons, and betel-caskets. The
Sultan's pages rest swords and creeses on the right shoulder; the
pages of the heir to the throne may not lift his insignia above
their arms. His Highness enters the hall of audience, mounts the
throne, and has to sit motionless " while the royal band plays a
certain number of times. . . . The number should not exceed nine
or be less than four. Any movement by the Sultan would be
extremely inauspicious." At this moment the genies of the State
are apt to make the sword of Alexander the Great press on the
royal shoulder. Into the Sultan's ear, the king's secret, namely,
the real Indian names of the divine founders of his house, is
whispered by a descendant of the herald who came out of the mouth
of a bull when first the bearers of those Indian names alighted on
earth and required a pursuivant. His subjects in the hall bow to
the earth seven times in homage.
In Negri Sembilan the Yamtuan's regalia comprise sets of eight,
eight weapons of each kind, eight umbrellas, eight betel-boxes,
eight tapers, eight water-vessels, eight handfuls of ashes, and a
bowl with one strand of human hair. When all is ready for the
installation, chamberlains invoke the archangels to send down the
divine power of kings by the hand of angels. "The weapons are
taken out of their yellow wrappings, the royal umbrellas are
opened, the royal candles lit, the water-vessels and betel-boxes
are lifted up on high for all to see. A copy of the Quran is set
down before these mighty regalia, and ewers filled with every kind
of holy water are arranged before them. One ewer contains water
mingled with blood; another contains water with a bullet in it;
another may have water mixed with the pure rice-paste that
sterilizes all evil influences. A censer is waved. . . . The great
chiefs are about to swear allegiance to the king. The presence of
the holy regalia, the water crimsoned with blood, the water that
washes the lead or iron of war-all these things lend additional
terror to perjury." The herald who proclaims the election of a new
Yamtuan "is expected to stand on one leg with the sole of his
right foot resting against his left knee, with his right hand
shading his eyes, and with the tip of the fingers of his left hand
pressing against his left cheek!" The chiefs sweep forward on
their knees, raise folded hands seven times to their brows, kiss
their overlord's hand thrice and retire. Again incense is burnt,
"and the word of God as written in the Quran is believed to come
down and is repeated in Arabic in the hearing of the people, 'Lo,
I have appointed a Caliph to be My vicegerent on earth.'"
When a commoner chief is installed by the Sultan of Perak, he
stands at the entrance to the palace under a large banana leaf,
while a herald reads over him the chiri, that unintelligible
Sanskrit formula "in the language of the genies." Then the oath of
allegiance is taken. Drums clash. An old man steps forward, and
using a grass brush sprinkles rice-paste down the banana leaf that
covers the candidate's head. The brush and the leaf are cast away
and the rice is scattered over his body. When the new chief has
doffed his creese and crawled up to the throne to do homage, the
Sultan moistens his brow with rice-paste, tucks a bunch of yellow
chempaka bloom under his head-kerchief and sprinkles him with
rice. The chief retires backwards, doing obeisance as when he
came. A curtain is dropped midway across the hall and he goes out.
He must cross water and may not look upon the Sultan or his palace
or his elephants or anything that is his for one week. Violation
of this rule may cause death to chief or ruler.
To the primitive patriarchal and matriarchal communities of the
Malay race kings and royalty were foreign. The description in
Malay romance of royalty's silks, seamless, fast of dye,
iridescent, of gossamer muslins tangled by a dewdrop, and of other
wonderful raiment, are only the hyperbole of village rhapsodists
marvelling at the luxurious novelties of the court and winning
favour by lauding them. The yellow umbrella of the Malay ruler was
imported from China. Court sumptuary laws for cloths, weapons, and
houses came from India. Among Malay regalia, the sword and the
seal are foreign, and the names of half the drums and trumpets are
Persian. The idea that a ruler can slay at pleasure without being
guilty of crime is not Malayan. The word Raja is Sanskrit; the
word Sultan introduced with the religion of Muhammad. The divinity
that hedges a modern ruler is Muslim and conferred by Allah during
the recital of the text: "Lo! I have appointed a Caliph to be My
Vicegerent on earth." The white blood of Malay princes is that
ascribed by Muhammadan mystics to certain saints.
X. MAGICIAN AND MUSLIM
A rough granite monolith inscribed with Muslim laws in the Malay
language and Arabic lettering, recently discovered in Trengganu,
is evidence that Islam had reached the east coast of the Malay
Peninsula as early as the fourteenth century. At the beginning of
the next century it became the State religion of Malacca. Barbosa
ascribed this change of creed from Hinduism to the presence of
many Indian Muslim traders at that port. An Achinese account gives
1474 A.D. as the date of the conversion of the first ruler of
Kedah to embrace the religion of the Arabian Prophet. The royal
house of Malacca gave rulers to Johore, Pahang and Perak,
dominated Selangor and Negri Sembilan and so spread the new faith
throughout the Peninsula.
The early missionaries came from the Coromandel Coast and Malabar,
and therefore made the Malays Sunnis of the school of Shafe'i.
Later arrived missionaries from the Hadramaut. In the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries Sayids of the great Hadramaut house,
descendants of 'Alawi, grandson of 'Isa al-Mohajir, gained
enormous influence at the Perak court, one of them marrying a
sister of Perak's most famous ruler and becoming the father of a
Sultan of that State.
The Malays of the Peninsula have been Muslims for some five
hundred years. No zealots, they are orthodox and convinced
believers. But in their beliefs and their magic the influence of
the early Indian missionaries of their latest faith is marked.
There is a book called the Crown of Kings, of which several
editions have been printed in Egypt and at Mecca. It is on sale at
most native bookshops in the Peninsula. Its author was an
Achinese, prominent in the war against the Dutch, Shaikh 'Abbas,
who died in 1895. The book is especially interesting because, like
"the majority of Muslim philosophers and authors of
bibliographical and encyclopaedic works," the compiler "keeping to
the classification of the sciences given by the Aristotelians,
considers astrology as one of the seven or nine branches of the
natural sciences, placing it with medicine, physiognomy, alchemy,
the interpretation of dreams, and so on." The work is not free
from Malay and Indian influence. There are given, for example,
five divisions of a five-day cycle, presided over by Siva the
Supreme Lord, Siva the Destroyer, Sri, Brahma, and Vishnu! Still,
the treatise is a fair example of what Islam has taught the Malay
to regard as science, and it is, in effect, a repertory of his
latest magical lore.
The author begins by saying that the science of astrology as first
taught by Enoch was simple, and became complex and difficult only
at the prayer of Jesus, whose whereabouts before His arrest by the
Jews were betrayed by astrological calculations. This part of the
book quotes among its authorities Abu Ma'shar, an Arab astrologer
known to Christendom in the Middle Ages as Albumasar, and Ja'far
al-Sadik, the sixth of the twelve Imams, reported by the Shilahs
to have been the author of a book of infallible astrological
prognostications for the information of the House of the Prophet.
A manuscript work on "Prognostications by Ja'far al-Sadik" came
into my hands from Malacca, and in Acheh and Java also
fortune-tellers' manuals are ascribed to him.
Crude astrology divorced from all knowledge of astronomy enters
largely into the Muslim element in Malay magic. It determines
lucky and unlucky times for begetting children, fighting, house
building and planting. At the Perak court the moment propitious
for the circumcision of a prince is divined from pools of oil
floating on water "in the shape of moon and stars." There are
charms that must be written only when the constellation of the
Scorpion is invisible. The meaning of a dream may depend on the
day of the week on which it came to the sleeper; the omen to be
drawn from an eclipse on the month and year of its occurrence.
Astrology is employed to trace a thief or recover stolen property,
and is part and parcel of most forms of divination. For example,
there are several ways of ascertaining how long one shall live,
ways different according to the month of the Muhammadan year. In
the first month one has to close one's eyes at midnight, recite
"Say, 'God is One!'" ten times, and then open one's eyes and gaze
at the moon; if it looks black, in that month one will die. In the
fifth and sixth months one must gaze not at the moon but at a lamp
and that only on a Wednesday night. In the seventh and eighth
months one recites "Say, 'I seek refuge in the Lord of the
daybreak!'" seven times and gazes at water in a bowl; if it looks
red, in that month one will die. In the Fasting month one recites
"Praise be to God" nine times and gazes at the moon; if one's
shadow is there, in that month one will die. In the last two
months of the year the eyes have to be closed, the passage "Say,
'God is One!'" recited thrice and the creed once, and one's gaze
directed at a cloudless sky either at dawn or at eve; if it looks
red like blood, assuredly in that month one will die.
All Malay treatises on divination from dreams bear an Arabic title
and are of Muslim origin. A popular poem on the subject begins by
explaining the omens to be drawn from dreaming that one sees
Allah, meets an angel, beholds the Throne of God or Paradise or
the Razor Bridge across hell-fire or the Guarded Tablet of Fate.
Then it interprets the meaning of dreams about the Four Friends of
the Prophet, the Quran, Iblis, being banished by a Shaikh, riding
a camel, eating horse-flesh, seeing a date tree or a fig tree!
Needless to say, none of this theology, zoology and botany is
Malayan. Local fauna often takes the place of alien fauna in
native translations of Muslim manuals, but otherwise their
contents are foreign and it is futile to look for an indigenous
theory of dreams among Muslim Malays. All these dream manuals are
divided into chapters according to the class of object about which
one dreams: men, beasts, flora, clothes, birds, insects, countries
and roads, stones, fruits, musical instruments, traps for fish and
game.
The Crown of Kings devotes several pages to the omens to be drawn
from involuntary convulsive movements of the left eyebrow, the
right eyelid, the left nostril, the upper lip, the
shoulder-blades, the left ring-finger, and every part of the body.
When the Malacca hero, Hang Tuah, was in Java, one day he donned
his magic creese because an involuntary twitch of his right
shoulder led him to expect a brawl. But few modern Malays heed
these niceties or have read of them. Divination by the values
attached to the letters of men's names is best known from a "Poem
on Affinities" to determine if a marriage will be happy: the abjad
or alphabet of letters representing numerical values is employed.
This Malay poem has been translated into English. Divination by
possession is known to the Malays as to the Arabs, but belongs to
the primitive, impious, and decried practices of the shaman, who
on demand will use it even to foretell the outcome of a pilgrimage
to Mecca! Geomancy, or divination from sand, is mentioned in Malay
literature under its Arabic name, but is never practised by the
Malays. Nor do they observe the entrails of animals for omens.
Malay treatises enumerate many animals, pigs, the rhinoceros, wild
dogs, deer of all kinds, whose entrance into a garden forebodes
calamity, unless the evil portent is averted by the offering of
prayers to the Prophet and of cash, cloth, and a feast to the
pious expert who recites the prayers. Butterflies, bees, hawks,
woodpeckers alighting on a roof, frogs, monkeys, snakes, and
geckoes invading house or garden, a tortoise under the floor,
fungus growing in a kitchen, coconuts two on a stem, nests of
wasps or mason-bees in one's clothes-all these are variously
portents of poverty, divorce, disease or death, which the recital
of an appropriate passage from the Quran can change into omens of
riches, health and happiness. When a mat belonging to the second
Caliph of the Abbaside dynasty was gnawed by a mouse, it was sent
to a diviner who foretold a quiet and prosperous reign for its
owner. The Malay manuscript from which the above list of portents
is taken concludes with a dissertation on the omens to be drawn
from the gnawing by mice of mats or pillows or of the neck, the
right arm or the left arm, or the bottom or side or back of a
man's coat!
A Kelantan magician, whose lore was full of Muslim borrowings,
claimed that he could reflect genies on the finger nails of
innocent little boys. Sir Frank Swettenham met an Arab in Malaya
who declared that he could see a robbery re-enacted in the surface
of water, but that first of all he would see a little old genie by
whose help the scene of the crime would be reflected. The same
writer saw a bowl of water, with a cotton lid tied taut across it,
used as a planchette to discover a thief. A chapter of the Quran
was read, two men supported the bowl by the rim, and when at last
a slip of paper containing the name of one of the suspects was
laid on the lid, the bowl began to revolve. (The author explains
that the bowl failed to respond to the first four names, that the
names were written in English characters unintelligible to the
Malays present and that the experiment succeeded twice!) Among the
regalia of the ruler of Negri Sembilan is a bowl and a hair.
Divination with this apparatus is done by Malays to discover a
thief. The bowl is divided by lines of Indian ink into eight
compartments, each inscribed with the name of the possible
culprit. A blind man holds the hair, to which a gold ring is tied
above the centre of the bowl, and intones a Muslim prayer,
whereupon, if the name of the culprit is there, the ring swings
violently into the compartment containing it.
Arab diviners, the recitation of passages from the Quran, the
description of methods of divination in magico-religious tracts,
the observance of astrological times, all suggest that the forms
of divination popular with the modern Peninsular Malay are derived
from Muslim sources.
A notable contribution from Islam to Malaya was a new type of
amulet. The animist found a fetish in every object possessed of
potent soul-substance, stones from a water-fall, candle-nuts,
cockle-shells, the hardy grass (Eleusine coracana) that survives
even on the trodden path. A strange knot in a Malacca cane, a
curious whorl on the wooden sheath of a dagger, a mark on the
damascene of a creese that no smith designed to fashion, the rare
celt, the Perak "ball of petrified dew," all these attracted his
attention and awe and trust. The bezoar stone secreted in fish or
monkey or coconut he kept in rice-grain for fear that it should
vanish offended and an article of great medicinal value be lost.
Then, India introduced a fresh stock of charms. The tinsel
marriage crown protecting bride and groom, the thread tied round
the newly-wedded and on the wrist of a child, the incense burnt to
scare demons, the waving of charmed water over a married pair and
over the sick, and perhaps the rubbing of those in ghostly peril
and the frail and ill with yellow turmeric, red betel, and black
ashes may be traced to this source. Last of all, Islam trafficked
in amulets inscribed with magic squares, cabalistic letters, the
signs of the planets and the signs of the zodiac, the names of the
angels and the Excellent Names of Allah. The hexagonal star of
Solomon's seal is used by Malays to cure madness and possession by
devil, familiar spirit, ghost or genie. In Perak three such stars
are drawn on paper that is steeped in water for washing the face
of one afflicted with dizziness. A magic square scratched on leaf
or paper and buried in the middle of a rice-field or at its four
corners will keep away rats and pests from the plants. Arabic
characters representing K, M, 7, D, 3, ALA if traced in oil on the
palm of the hand and furtively rubbed on one's face in the
presence of one of the opposite sex will attract that person's
love. Another such formula will bring the Perak fisherman a good
catch. Yet another is hung round the neck of an infant that
refuses its mother's breast. One is inscribed on lead and planted
under the house-ladder of a woman one loves illicitly. Another is
put under a patient's pillow to induce sleep. A text from the
Quran is hung in a child's locket to save it from convulsions or
tied in a woman's waist-belt to save her from demons, or fastened
to an aching limb or written on paper to be dissolved in a
patient's drinking water. Printed or manuscript texts are pasted
over the door of house or room to scare evil spirits. There is a
translation by a Kelantan Malay of a treatise popular with Indian
Sunnis, the Mujarrabati-i-Dirbi, or "Prescriptions," which cites
among its sources works by al-Buni, a celebrated Arabian writer on
the Cabbala, divination, magic squares, and the virtues of the
Basmala. The Basmala is a name for the Arabic formula translated
"In the Name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate." The Malay
translation of the "Prescriptions" relates as follows:-"When God
sent down the Basmala the hills shook. Its Arabic letters are
nineteen, the number of the angels in charge of hell; whosoever
recites them shall not be damned. It was the Basmala that set up
Solomon's kingdom. Whoever writes down the phrase six hundred
times and wears it shall be honoured by men. Whoever recites it
seven hundred and eighty-six times for seven consecutive days
shall gain whatever he desires. Read fifty times over the face of
a tyrant it will bring him low. Written down sixty-one times and
worn it will make the barren fruitful. Written on tin and put in a
fishing net it will attract shoals from all the seas." Similar
virtues attach to the opening chapter of the Quran and many texts
used by Muslims to ward off physical and spiritual ills.
Incantations are frowned upon by strict theologians but, as we
have seen, they are the breath of the Malay magician's life.
Recited for a lawful object they do not strike the vulgar as
unorthodox. Illicit charms for the seduction of women the Malay
has inherited from the Hindu. And if there is reason to suspect
the efficacy of his appeal to "Allah, the Merciful, the
Compassionate" and to Muhammad to make a girl yield to her lover,
then "it is better if possible" to add a conclusion patently
impious:-
In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate!
Friend of mine, Iblis! and all ye spirits and devils
That love to trouble man!
I ask you to go and enter the body of this girl,
Burning her heart as this sand burns,
Fired with love for me.
Bring her to yield herself to me!
By virtue of this rice and steam
Place her here by my hearth
Or else take ye heed!
In a charm against the Will o' the Wisp a Kelantan magician, with
pantheism perhaps unconscious, vaunts, "I am Iblis, the son of
Pharaoh! "
To destroy an enemy, there is prescribed in Malay versions of
Muslim treatises a world-wide method of sorcery. A cabalistic
symbol is inscribed on wax. The wax is moulded in the form of a
man. Then the eyes of the figure are pierced with a needle or its
belly stabbed, while a purely Arabic charm is recited to call down
upon the victim the anger of Allah! To rob an enemy of power to
harm, it suffices to draw his portrait in the dust of crossroads,
grind one's heel on his navel, tread on his pictured heart, beat
the face with a stick, and recite a short imprecation. Symbolic
charms and Arabic formulae are also prescribed to cause impotency.
Every good Malay Muslim views with horror these black practices
and Satanic incantations.
The contribution of Islam to Malay magic is not interesting.
Flotsam and jetsam from the Talmud, the works of the Gnostics, the
science of Indian astrologers and the practices of Hindu
sorcerers, it came to Malaya third-hand.
XI. MAGICIAN AND MYSTIC
ONCE more the Malay magician sat at the feet of Indian teachers,
this time as a student of Muslim pantheism.
To India have been traced the first use of the Sufi term fana for
loss of the individual self in God, and the Sufi's acquaintance
with the practice of "watching the breaths" as a means of worship.
The Sufi legend of Ibrahim bin Adham, the hunter prince of Balkh
who gave up his throne for the beggar's bowl, is modelled upon the
story of Buddha.
The Malay has two versions of the tale of Ibrahim, prince of
Balkh. Long before he got them, India had taught him to fast and
practise austerities in order to acquire invulnerability and other
magical arts. Brahminical mantra, to which even the gods were
subject, would have prepared his mind for the audacities of
popular Sufism. Like the mantra, too, Sufi secrets and charms were
fascinatingly esoteric, to be revealed only to the initiated. The
doctrines that the disciple must honour and obey his teacher above
all men and pass through several initiatory stages were not new to
a race that had been under Hindu influence for centuries.
Teachers of Sufisrn came to the Malay Peninsula more than four
hundred years ago. Before the end of the fifteenth century a
Sultan of Malacca sent an embassy to Pasai, a small Sumatran port
famous as a religious centre, offering a present of gold and two
slave girls to any theologian who could say if those in heaven and
those in hell remain in their respective places for ever. A Pasai
pundit replied openly that they did, quoting the authority of the
Quran. But the Sultan of Pasai summoned him, hinted that an
embassy could not have come for such an obvious answer and
suggested giving in private an interpretation of the problem,
communicable only to the chosen few. The pundit took this advice
and won the prize offered by Malacca. There is little doubt that
his answer was on lines suggested by a work that has left its
impress on many Malay charm books, the Insanu'l-kamil or "Perfect
Man" of al-Jili. "You may say, if you like," writes al-Jili, "that
hell-fire remains as it was, but that the torment of the damned is
changed to pleasure," or, again, "the power of endurance of the
sufferers in hell continues to grow-God never takes back His gifts
and these powers come from God-until there appears in them a
Divine power which extinguishes the fire, because no one is doomed
to misery after the Divine attributes become manifest in him." The
author of the Malay Annals, writing at a learned court, was not so
indiscreet as to reveal this mystery to all and sundry. Nor does
he give the Sufi answer to another problem propounded by Malacca
to Pasai, the paradox that both the man who believes and the man
who disbelieves that God created and bestowed His gifts from all
eternity is an infidel. Theological discussions like these are
above the head of the magician. Moreover, he has left to the
foreigner to practise occasionally in Malaya that orgiastic Sufism
which degrades the famous cry of Abu Sa'id, "There is nothing
inside this coat except Allah." Village magicians that refrain
from the black art are popular, while the Arab teacher is
respected, feared and disliked, and the Indian often despised. The
Malay Annals cynically record how when the Sultan of Malacca took
his Arab teacher into battle against the Portuguese in 1511 A.D.,
the theologian clung with both hands to the howdah and exclaimed,
"Let us return! This is no place to study the unity of God. "
The Shi'ah heresies and the "rash mystic pantheism" to be detected
in many Malay charms has not received the attention of English
students. "Such mysticism," remarks Snouck Hurgronje, "is found
also in Arabian lands but only in small circles of the initiated
as half secret doctrines of the Sufis, cautiously concealed on
account of the hunt of official theologians for heresy and of the
suspicious fanaticism of the vulgar. In the East Indies, however,
it formed woof and warp not only of learned speculation but of
popular belief. Tracts with drawings and tables were used in the
endeavour to realise the idea of the Absolute. The four elements,
the four winds, the four righteous Caliphs, the four founders of
the schools of law, the four attributes of God in dogma, the four
grades of progress in mysticism, the four extremities of the human
body, and many other sets of four were for popular mysticism
revelations of the one indivisible self of man. Through the names
of Muhammad and Allah, each in Arabic spelt with four letters,
were symbolised the One Being."
Every Sufi who is one with God is a saint with supernatural
powers, and already it has been said that Malaya is strewn with
the graves of miracle-workers. An eighteenth century history of
Perak records how when a Sultan of that State fell ill vows were
paid to "prophets and saints and the Poles," who stand at the head
of the Muslim hierarchy and are each in his generation the axis
whereon the sphere of existence revolves. The founder of the
orthodox Qadiri order was among the saints invoked, but while the
invocation of saints is allowed to Sunnis, it is commonest in
India and among the Shi'ahs. Again, the Sufi holds that the
esoteric teaching of the Quran was revealed by the Prophet to
'Ali, his son-in-law, to whom according to the Shi'ahs was
transmitted the Light of Muhammad. The name of 'Ali, our "Lord
'Ali," occurs in innumerable Malay charms.
It has been remarked that the conception of the tears of the
Archangel Michael creating countless cherubim in his likeness to
control the rain and guard the fruits and plants of the earth
exhibits a pantheistic tendency. The same may be said of the
diagnosis of the Kelantan medicine-man, who finds a hundred and
ninety demons for smallpox, each operating on a selected part of
the body, His Lordship Buzz on the ear, His Lordship Peg on the
joints, and so on. In Patani there are elders and midwives who
believe that all evil "spirits were really one, pervading the
whole world, only called by different names according to the
environment in which the universal spirit of evil was considered
for the moment. . . . As one old man expressed it, ' It may be hot
here and at Mecca at the same time, and the spirit is the same.'
He went on to explain that the spirit could break itself into one
hundred and ninety parts, and that the great medicine-man was the
person who could cause it to do this and could keep all the
different parts under his control. "
Elsewhere it has been noted how the Malay magician's idea of an
archetypal "world of the breadth of a tray and a sky of the
breadth of an umbrella" reminds one of Ibn 'Arabi's saying that
all the universe lies potential in God like the tree in the seed.
Drums and wild singing of interminable chants helped the shaman to
fall into a trance wherein he trafficked with the world of
spirits, just as Malay village mystics seek union with Allah by
roaring His praises in chorus and swaying head and body in giddy
contortions. The Brahmin ascetic attained hypnotic slumber by
counting his inhalations and exhalations and concentrating his
gaze on some object. Before completely losing consciousness and
gaining deliverance from the cycle of existence with power (like
Habib Noh of Singapore) to transport himself anywhere at will, he
"hears within his body (in the heart and throat, between the
eyebrows and in other parts) various sounds, those of a drum, the
roaring sea, the thunder, a bell, a shell, a reed, a lyre and a
bee."
The religious ascetic uses his trance to lose himself in God; the
Kelantan magician to discover if a warrior will win a fight or a
villager live another year. The warrior is to invoke thrice the
four Shaikhs at the corners of the world, the four first Caliphs
of Islam and the four archangels, the blessed saints, all
miracle-working rulers dead and alive, and pray them to intercede
with God to reveal the issue of the coming battle. Then he gazes
at his followers. If he sees them headless, they will perish. If
he sees them armless, they will suffer greatly in the fight. Or he
may listen three times. If he hears no sound, his men will perish;
and so on. Again: the four Caliphs have their seats in the human
frame, Abu Bakar in the liver, 'Omar in the spleen, 'Usman in the
lungs, 'Ali in the gallbladder. Each of them passes to his seat
along different parts of the right or left nostril. "If one wants
to cross a river without a boat, one consults Abu Bakar through
one's breath, inhaling and then exhaling; if there is a heavy
sensation, the water is deep and a boat required; if there is a
feeling of lightness in the inhalation, the water is shallow."
There are a number of ways of divination from observing the
breaths. One more charm of which breathing forms a part must
suffice:-
"To marry body and spirit draw all your breath into your heart and
recite the following:- "I am the true Muhammad. It is not I that
say it. It is Muhammad. First spirit was created, then the body.
Only if this night be destroyed, can I be destroyed. My being is
thy being. My being is one with thy being. I vanish in the fold of
the attestation, 'There is no God but Allah-He!' in the fold of my
mother the Light of Muhammad until dawn." If the charm is for
protection by day, then it commits the reciter to the fold of his
"father the Light of Allah." "Between the two eyebrows," said
Hamzah of Barus, a famous heterodox mystic of Sumatra, " that is
the spot where the servant meets his God," and unconsciously he
was quoting yogi ritual. Hamzah visited Pahang on the east coast
of the Peninsula about the beginnning of the seventeenth century.
So it is less surprising to find in a Kelantan charm book the
above assertion by the Malay villager of his participation in the
Islamic Logos, though it is only a mundane expedient for
protecting his skin!
Less learned but equally pantheistic is the magician who,
forgetting the terrific appearance of the archangels for the
orthodox, cries:-
I attest there is no God but Allah!
I attest that Muhammad is His Prophet!
Ho my brethren, Gabriel, Michael, Israfil and 'Azrail!
Ye are four but with me five!
I sit on the Seat of Allah!
I lean against the pillar of His Throne!
Is this a debased interpretation of al-Jili's description of the
Perfect Man? "his heart stands over against the Throne of God, his
mind over against the Pen, his soul over against the Guarded
Tablet, his nature over against the elements, his capability of
receiving forms over against matter. He stands over against the
angels with his good thoughts, over against the genies and devils
with the doubts that beset him, over against the beasts with his
animality. . . . To every type of existence he furnishes from
himself an antitype." A literal interpretation of mysteries is all
that a mind utterly untrained in metaphysics can compass. An
extraordinary mixture of Hindu sentiment and imagery and of Sufi
metaphysical speculations on the Perfect Man occurs in an old
Perak charm for giving a person a dominant personality:-
I sit beneath the Throne of Allah;
Muhammad my shelter is beside me,
Gabriel on my right, Michael on my left,
All the company of Angels following me.
Vicegerent of Allah . . .
Only if Allah suffer harm,
Can I suffer harm:
Only if His Prophet suffer harm,
Can I suffer harm.
A hooded snake is my loin-cloth,
A musty elephant my steed:
My ear-posy the lightning,
My shadow is that of a fierce tiger.
By virtue of this charm of Awang the Preeminent
In seated assembly
Preeminent I;
Erect, walking or talking
Preeminent I;
I, lord of all mortals,
Precious stone of the Prophet,
Pearl of God.
The same manuscript contains a tremendous love-charm to be recited
over seven blossoms, that must then be handed to the object of
one's passion:- "There is no God but God. I am God, the Divine
Reality, ruler who blesseth all the worlds. There is no God but
God, the King, the Divine Reality, the Revealed. There is no God
but Allah, lord of the heavens and the earth and of the great
Throne." Thirty years ago a Perak Malay was sentenced to gaol for
teaching an obscene form of pantheism based on the creed-"There is
no God but God. I am God. God Most High is only this self of
mine."
The claim of the magician that he is God or that he is the brother
of the four archangels seems hideously blasphemous to the orthodox
Malay villager, a claim allied with the blackest magic of the
spirit-raising shaman. But to the disciple the Malay exponent of
this crude popular pantheism explains and establishes his doctrine
by many far-fetched analogies. The invocations used by the
Kelantan magician are full of them. He calls, for example, upon
four winds of disease to go forth from the patient's body by the
four doors of the organs of the mystical life. Wind in skin and
pores corresponds with the first of the four steps towards union
with God, that is, with the observance of the law, which is the
outer mark of the religious and about which there is no secrecy.
Wind in sinews and bones corresponds with the second stage, that
is, the mystic path enjoined by his spiritual guide for the Sufi
novice. Wind in the flesh and blood corresponds with a third
stage, the plane of truth. Wind in the breath of life and the seed
of man corresponds with the plane of perfect gnosis. Or again,
analogies are discovered between the worlds of Sufi metaphysics
and parts of the physical frame. The material world is in the
tongue; the invisible intelligible world in the windpipe; the
world of power (wherein lie hidden the processes of the divine
nature) in the first stomach of ruminants! All this is abracadabra
to civilised men, even metaphysicians. But the process of thought
is clear. The archangels are four; the first Caliphs were four;
the elements out of which the human body is composed are four; the
limbs of the body are four. Therefore man and the archangels are
one! Adam, Muhammad, and Allah can each be spelt in Arabic with
four letters. Still the ever recurring number four! Therefore God
and man are identical! Other mystic numbers are three, founded on
Sufi speculations on the trinity of the lover, the beloved and
love, and seven, the number of the stages in the Neo-Platonic
theory of the emanation process of being, exemplified also in the
number of the Pleiades and the days of the week. All this is
puerile, but a charm from the Kelantan manuscript tract already
quoted so largely, a charm called "The Fortress of the Unity of
God," will show that it is wrong to suppose the Malay had no
serious intellectual interests until European protection provided
him with schools and colleges. The charm should be recited four
times a night from one Friday to the next "with a sincere vowing
of the heart to unity with Allah and the vision of Him implanted
in one's heart, until His Being permeates one and one has faith:
'I am lost in the universal and absolute Essence of God'; and one
is lost to self and one's self becomes absolute and universal
too:-
"In the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate. Oh God!
grant peace to our lord Muhammad and the household of Muhammad who
watcheth over my self and my friends and all my children and all
the contents of my house and my property and the possessions of my
hands with a sevenfold fortress from the fortress of God Most
High; its roof-'There is no God but God,' and my wall 'Muhammad
the Apostle of God,' and my key 'the might of God,' which may not
be opened for ever save with His permission. Muhammad is like man
and unlike man; he is like a chrysolite among stones.
"Now the meaning of the term 'fortress' is that we know we come
from not-being and to not-being shall return. For there is nothing
evidently save the Being of God. And of a surety the Being of God
never parts from His absolute essence, which carries out all His
will, according to His word: ' His desire is accomplished by
Himself and goes forth to no other than Himself save to
not-being.'
"The meaning of the term self is 'spirit,' one of the attributes
of God Most High, which parts not from His essence and it becomes
an individualized idea and is called man. Now the spirit is
particularized and fettered. Always the spirit yearns towards God.
"The meaning of 'the house ' is the body. The body is the place of
the spirit and so the veritable place that reveals God according
to the saying of the Prophet, on whom be the peace of God:
'Whosoever knows himself, knows his Lord.' The house was built of
itself and though it will pass away, yet He Whose house it is, is
the Reality Who with His absolute essence is eternal.
"The meaning of our 'property' is the liver and heart and lungs
and gall and all that God Most High has created: according to His
word:-'There is no strength in any one save the strength of Allah,
lord of all the worlds both as regards things revealed and things
hidden.'
"The meaning of our 'possessions' is the ten senses, firstly the
outward and secondly the inner. The outward arc five: the sight of
the eyes, the hearing of the ears, the taste of the tongue, the
smelling of the nose, and the touch of the hand. The inner also
are five: consciousness, faith, memory, perception and judgment.
"The meaning of the sevenfold 'fortress' is the creation by God
Most High of man with seven attributes: life, knowledge, power,
will, hearing, sight and speech. And seven parts of the body must
be bowed to God in prayer: the forehead, the palms of the hands,
the knees and the soles of the feet.
"The meaning of the 'lock' is because we have utter trust and
union by surrendering ourselves to God Most High, according to His
word: 'Hold yourselves fast to the cord of God which breaks not
neither is there concealment of His will from mystical knowledge';
as said the Prophet on whom be God's peace:-'Nothing at all moves
save by permission of Allah.' For we cannot behold aught if the
cord break and it cannot break save by the will of God Most High,
and there is no substitute for that cord.
"And the meaning of the 'key' is Muhammad Apostle of God. For God
is utterly hidden; none knoweth Him save in His own person.
Therefore to cherish His glory, God Most High was revealed in the
spirit of Muhammad our Prophet and from that spirit God Most High
created all this universe, and all the attributes of His secret
wisdom were revealed. So it is that Muhammad is called the 'key,'
because he opened the treasure-house that was hidden, according to
His word:-'I opened that which was closed.'
"And the meaning of the protection of God is according to His
word: 'God Most High is with thee wheresoever thou art,' according
to His word:
God is nearer to thee than the muscles of thy neck.' "And the
meaning of 'roof' is the power of God to cover any of His servants
with mercy according to His will, so that he be locked away from
all enemies and danger in this world and the next, neither shall
the lock be opened by genie or man save with the permission of God
Most High."
Was it to test the efficacy of some such charm as this that that
novice on the Sufi path, Sultan Mahmud of old Malacca, took his
spiritual guide with him into battle against the "white Bengalis,"
descendants of genies, the first European invaders of Malaya?
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