SPECIMENS OF "HENTÁ-KÓI."
Made and first used in times of sickness to frighten away the offending evil spirits.
Nicobarese Talisman.
“Scare-devil,” or device for exorcising evil spirits (Kachal).
The natives have no temples or any form of worship, but there have come into being shamans or priest-doctors, known as tamiluanas and menluanas, who have the power of communicating with the spirits, and by means of certain ceremonies, in conjunction with the use of rods, particular leaves, and ashes, periodically, by open warfare and by magic, drive the malignant demons from such places in man's neighbourhood as they may have intruded into, or defeat them when prevailing disease or misfortune can be traced to their agency.
These practices and beliefs, which it would be incorrect to class together under the name of religion, are not accompanied by any moral element. Their code of ethics has no connection whatever with the form of malevolent spiritualism which they entertain, but is entirely an affair of public opinion and social convention.
The cult of the natives as it exists in the south, with its multiplicity of charms, "medicine," and demon-scaring figures and objects, is probably only an isolated case of a practice widely spread throughout the Malayan Archipelago—in Sumatra, Borneo, and other islands, and even amongst the Papuans still further east.[157]
On the other hand, it is not at all impossible, in view of the natives' acquisitiveness of foreign ideas, that most of their practices arise from a corrupted interpretation of the, in other respects, futile teachings of the numerous missionaries who have laboured in vain in the islands, complicated by an additional jumble of tenets adopted from other strangers with whom they have come into contact, while, in particular, the figures, pictures, and charms of many localities may be to some extent merely a degraded survival of the religious paraphernalia of the Jesuit missionaries.
