A thousand miles on an elephant in the Shan States

by Holt S. Hallett

CHAPTER X.

CHOW OO-BOON, A SPIRIT-MEDIUM—CONSULTING ANCESTRAL SPIRITS—AN EXORCIST—SPIRIT OF WITCHCRAFT—ILL-TREATING A PATIENT—TREATMENT OF WITCHES—FALSE CHARGES—MISSIONARY DESTROYS AN IMAGE—EXECUTION OF CHRISTIANS—PROCLAMATION IN FAVOUR OF CHRISTIANS—MISSIONARIES PROTECT WITCHES—UNDERMINE SUPERSTITION—GHOSTS PERCHING ON TREES—A MISSIONARY GHOST—HEADLESS DEMONS—A DEMONIAC.

After breakfast I went next door to have another chat with Mr Wilson. He told me that Chow Oo-boon had great power with the members of the Government, who were all connected with the royal family; because, besides being the queen’s sister, she was the spirit-medium of the family. As an instance of her power, he stated that when called in to consult the spirits after the late Chow Hona, or second king, was struck down with sickness, she boldly told him that the spirits were displeased at his oppression of the people, and advised him at once to abolish certain vexatious taxes, particularly the monopoly of arrack, or rice-spirit.

The method practised when consulting the beneficent spirits—who, like mortals, are fond of retaliating when provoked—is as follows: When the physician’s skill has been found incapable of mastering a disease, a spirit-medium—a woman who claims to be in communion with the spirits—is called in. After arraying herself fantastically, the medium sits on a mat that has been spread for her in the front verandah, and is attended to with respect, and plied with arrack by the people of the house, and generally accompanied in her performance by a band of village musicians with modulated music.

Between her tipplings she chants an improvised doggerel, which includes frequent incantations, till at length, in the excitement of her potations, and worked on by her song, her body begins to sway about, and she becomes frantic, and seemingly inspired. The spirits are then believed to have taken possession of her body, and all her utterances from that time are regarded as those of the spirits.

On showing signs of being willing to answer questions, the relations or friends of the sick person beseech the spirits to tell them what medicines and food should be given to the invalid to restore him or her to health; what they have been offended at; and how their just wrath may be appeased. Her knowledge of the family affairs and misdemeanours generally enables her to give shrewd and brief answers to the latter questions. She states that the Pee—in this case the ancestral, or, perhaps, village spirits—are offended by such an action or actions, and that to propitiate them such-and-such offerings should be made. In case the spirits have not been offended, her answers are merely a prescription; after which, if only a neighbour, she is dismissed with a fee of two or three rupees, and, being more or less intoxicated, is helped home.

In case the spirit-medium’s prescription proves ineffective and the person gets worse, witchcraft is sometimes suspected, and an exorcist is called in. The charge of witchcraft means ruin to the person accused, and to his or her family. It arises as follows: The ghost or spirit of witchcraft is called Pee-Kah. No one professes to have seen it, but it is said to have the form of a horse, from the sound of its passage through the forest resembling the clatter of a horse’s hoofs when at full gallop. These spirits are said to be reinforced by the deaths of very poor people, whose spirits were so disgusted with those who refused them food or shelter that they determined to return and place themselves at the disposal of their descendants to haunt their stingy and hard-hearted neighbours. Should any one rave in delirium, a Pee-Kah is supposed to have passed by.

Every class of spirits—even the ancestral spirits, and those that guard the streets and villages—are afraid of the PeeKah. At its approach the household spirits take instant flight; nor will they return until it has worked its will and retired, or been exorcised. Yet the Pee-Kah, as I have shown, is itself an ancestral spirit, and follows as their shadow the son and daughter, as it followed their parents through their lives. It is not ubiquitous, but at one time may attend the parent and at another the child, when both are living. Its food is the entrails of its living victim, and its feast continues until its appetite is satisfied, or the feast is cut short by the incantations of the spirit-doctor or exorcist. Very often the result is the death of its victim.

When the exorcist, spirit-doctor, or witch-finder is called in and asked whether he considers the patient is suffering from a Pee-Kah, he puts on a knowing look, and after a cursory examination of the person, generally declares it to be so. His task is then to find out whose Pee-Kah is devouring the sick person. After calling the officer of the village and a few head-men as witnesses, he commences questioning the invalid. He first asks, “Whose spirit has bewitched you?” The person may be in a stupor, half unconscious, half delirious from the severity of the disease, and therefore does not reply. A pinch or a stroke of a cane may restore consciousness. If so, the question is repeated; if not, another pinch or stroke is administered. A cry of pain may be the result. That is one step towards the disclosure; for it is a curious fact that, after the case has been pronounced one of witchcraft, each reply to the question, pinch, or stroke is considered as being uttered by the Pee-Kah through the mouth of the bewitched person.

A person pinched or caned into consciousness cannot long endure the torture, especially if reduced by a long illness. Those who have not the wish nor the heart to injure any one often refuse to name the wizard or witch until they have been unmercifully beaten.

On the sick person naming an individual as the owner of the spirit, other questions are asked—such as, “How many buffaloes has he?” “How many pigs?” “How many chickens?” “How much money?” &c. The answers to the questions are taken down by a scribe. A time is then appointed to meet at the house of the accused, and the same questions as to his possessions are put to him. If his answers agree with those of the sick person, he is condemned and held responsible for the acts of his ghost.

The case is then laid before the judge of the court, the verdict is confirmed, and a sentence of banishment is passed on the person and his or her family. The condemned person is barely given time to sell or remove his property. His house is wrecked or burnt, and the trees in the garden cut down, unless it happens to be sufficiently valuable for a purchaser to employ an exorcist, who for a small fee will render the house safe for the buyer; but it never fetches half its cost, and must be removed from the haunted ground. If the condemned person lingers beyond the time that has been granted to him, his house is set on fire, and, if he still delays, he is whipped out of the place with a cane. If he still refuses to go, or returns, he is put to death.

The late King of Zimmé, on hearing from the villagers of the Karen village of Ban Hta, that their head-man was bewitching them and would not leave the village, allowed the people to club him to death. About three years before my visit another case came to the knowledge of the missionaries, where two Karens were brought to the city by some of their neighbours, charged with causing the death of a young man by witchcraft. The case was a clear one against the accused. The young man had been possessed of a musical instrument, and had refused to sell it to the accused, who wished to purchase it. Shortly afterwards he became ill, and died in fourteen days. At his cremation, a portion of his body would not burn, and was of a shape similar to the musical instrument. It was clear that the wizards had put the form of the coveted musical instrument into his body to kill him. The Karens were beheaded, notwithstanding that they protested their innocence, and threatened that their spirits should return and wreak vengeance for their unjust punishment. Witches and wizards in the Shan States are free agents and have made no compact with the devil. The old Burman custom for the trial of witches was similar to that practised in former times in England: the thumbs and toes being tied together, the suspected person was thrown into the water, and sinking was a proof of innocence, floating of guilt.

In Mr Wilson’s opinion, the charge of witchcraft often arises from envy, or from spite; and sickness for the purposes of revenge is sometimes simulated. A neighbour wants a house or garden, and the owner either requires more than he wishes to pay, or refuses to sell it at all. Covetousness consumes his heart, and the witch-ghost is brought into action. Then the covetous person, or his child, or a neighbour, falls ill, or feigns illness; the ailment baffles the skill of the physician, and the witch-finder is called in. Then all is smooth sailing and little is left to chance.

In the early days of the Mission at Zimmé, Christians were very unfavourably looked on by the officials. This may partly have arisen from what I consider to have been, under the circumstances, an injudicious act of a missionary. An old temple-ground was handed over to the missionaries as a compound for their houses and schools. The temple was in ruins, but a sandstone image of Buddha, five feet in height, was intact, and was much reverenced by the people, who placed offerings of fruit and flowers before it. The missionaries used the ruins of the temple for levelling the ground, and buried the image under the débris. One day during some alterations it was dug up, and the people swarmed into the compound to pay their respects to it, although it had lost its head. The missionary then took an axe and knocked it to pieces before the people, who were naturally horrified and offended at the, to them, sacrilegious deed. The people were still more disgusted by seeing the pedestal upon which the image had been seated turned into a garden seat, and the fragments of the image made into a rockery.

Another cause of friction arose in 1869 from two new converts neglecting to aid in repairing the palisading round the outer city when instructed to do so by the officials. The missionaries believed that the affair arose merely from a misunderstanding. Anyhow, the two converts were seized, and fastened with ropes passed through the holes in their ear-laps to the upper beams of a house, and next day clubbed to death. The missionaries complained to the King of Siam, and a Siamese official was sent up to inquire into the case. The King of Zimmé, being bound to Siam only so far as tribute and his foreign relations were concerned, answered the commissioner by stating that it was his affair and not Siam’s, and that he intended to kill as many of his own people as he chose. It was not till nine years afterwards, in the present king’s reign, five years after the appointment of the Siamese commissioner at Zimmé, that a proclamation, issued by the Siamese Government, declaring that any of the Siamese Shans might change their religion with impunity, was allowed to be placarded up in the Court of Zimmé. At the time of my visit, the missionaries had made nearly two hundred converts and were much respected by the princes and the people.

Besides converting the people and opening schools for their education, the missionaries have been doing their utmost to conquer the belief of the people in witchcraft; and I was glad to hear that it had become a custom with several of the princes of Zimmé and the neighbouring States, as well as other intelligent people, to call in the aid of the physician attached to the Mission in cases of serious illness in their families. Another blow has been given to superstition by the missionaries sheltering those who lie under the accusation of witchcraft. At the time of my visit sixteen accused families were residing in the Mission grounds, some of whom had been converted to Christianity; and most of the children were attending the schools.

The people account for no harm having happened to the missionaries through their harbouring witches by saying that the Pee-Kah are afraid of Europeans, and clamber up the tamarind-trees near the gate of the Mission when the witches go in, and wait until they leave the yard to enter them again.

One of the trees outside the compound was much dreaded by people who had to pass near it. The cries of the spirits were often heard from its branches at night. At times the spirits descended to the ground and confronted passers-by. One of them resembled a child about a year old; then, in a second, its form would expand and grow until it was taller than the tree, when it would vanish after forcing a scream of horror from the affrighted beholder. This ghost for some reason assumed the appearance of a missionary.

A Shan ghost.

One day Mr Wilson saw a fire built close to the tree, and two men squatting near it. On approaching them he noticed that one was holding two small chickens over the flames, whose feathers were already half consumed. The other had a bundle of bamboo splints, which he was sticking into the ground to support a platform, upon which the fowls, when roasted, were to be offered to the spirits. This was too much for the embodied missionary, who, much to their dismay, insisted upon their taking their offerings out of his compound.

When visiting Dr Peoples, the physician attached to the Mission, he told me of a strange case of hysteria which arose from the belief of the Shans in evil spirits. There was a man living in the northern quarter of the city who possessed a garden of areca palms and plantains. In the garden was a well, the abode of a Pee-Hong, or headless spirit: all deceased murderers, adulterers, and other people who have been executed become Pee-Hong. In its way to and from this well the Pee-Hong passed through a grove of trees, which the owner, against the wishes of his neighbours, who feared the wrath of the demon, determined to cut down. A short time after the trees had been destroyed he became very uneasy and unwell; and whenever thinking or talking on the subject, figures appeared on his limbs and body, in the form of regular welts, shaped like leaves and trunks and whole trees—sometimes resembling plantain-trees, at others areca palms. Having tried every form of exorcism, he applied to Dr Peoples for help through his medical assistant, but refused to display the spirit manifestations before him, saying that they would not appear before Christians. The doctor prescribed for the man, and went to visit him the next day at his house, but he had left his family and started for a famous shrine. Many months had passed since then, but nothing further had been heard of the demoniac.

The belief in the transmigration of the soul into the bodies of animals is apt to give rise to a peculiar form of hallucination. In one of the Siamese books a tale is told of a wife plotting the death of her affectionate husband with her paramour, and, on the success of the plot, marrying the latter. Soon afterwards the woman noticed a snake in the house, which she thought must be her late husband, as she imagined it looked lovingly upon her. After killing the snake she had a cow which she killed for the same reason. Then she had a dog which followed her everywhere with affectionate watchfulness, and she, thinking her husband’s soul must be in it, killed it. After the dog’s death a child was born, who, because it looked at her with loving eyes, she thought must be her husband. Not daring to cut short its life, and unable to bear the sight of it, she gave it out to be nursed. When the child grew up, it is said to have remembered the various migrations of its soul from the time that it was the husband of its own mother, and to have told the story to its grandmother.