The Ibans are by nature a less serious-minded and less religious people than the Kenyahs and Kayans, and they have a greater variety of myths and extravagant superstitions; nevertheless, they use the fowl and the pig as sacrificial animals in much the same way as the other tribes. They eat the fowl and both the wild and domestic pig freely, except in so far as they are restrained by somewhat rigid notions of economy in such matters. The fowl plays a larger part than the pig in their religious practices, and its entrails are sometimes consulted for omens.
Ibans will kill and eat all kinds of deer, but there are exceptions to this rule. The deer are of some slight value to them as omen-givers. Horned cattle they will kill and eat, but they are not accustomed to their flesh, and few of them relish it.
Ibans have numerous animal fables that remind one strongly of AEsop's fables and the Brer Rabbit stories of the Africans. In these KORA, the land-tortoise, and PLANDOK, the tiny mouse-deer, figure largely as cunning and unprincipled thieves and vagabonds that turn the laugh always against the bigger animals and man.[142]
The NGARONG or Secret Helper
An important institution among some of the Ibans, which occurs but in rare instances among the other peoples, is the NGARONG[143] or secret helper. The NGARONG IS one of the very few topics in regard to which the Ibans display any reluctance to speak freely. So great is their reserve in this connection that one of us lived for fourteen years on friendly terms with Ibans of various districts without ascertaining the meaning of the word NGARONG, or suspecting the great importance of the part played by the notion in the lives of some of these people. The NGARONG seems to be usually the spirit of some ancestor or dead relative, but not always so, and it is not clear that it is always conceived as the spirit of a deceased human being. This spirit becomes the special protector of some individual Iban, to whom in a dream he manifests himself, in the first place in human form, and announces that he will be his secret helper; and he may or may not inform the dreamer in what form he will appear in future. On the day after such a dream the Iban wanders through the jungle looking for signs by which he may recognise his secret helper; and if an animal behaves in a manner at all unusual, if a startled deer stops a moment to gaze at him before bounding away, if a gibbon gambols about persistently in the trees near him, if he comes upon a bright quartzcrystal or a strangely. contorted root or creeper,[144] that animal or object is for him full of a mysterious significance and is the abode of his NGARONG. Sometimes the NGARONG, then assumes the form of an Iban and speaks with him, promising all kinds of help and good fortune. If this occurs the seer usually faints away, and when he comes to himself again the NGARONG will have disappeared. Or, again, a man may be told in his dream that if he will go into the jungle he will meet his NGARONG in the form of a wild boar. He will then, of course, go to seek it, and if by chance other men of his house should kill a wild boar that day, he will go to them and beg for its head or buy it at a good price if need be, carry it home to his bed-place, offer it cooked rice and kill a fowl before it, smearing the blood on the head and on himself, and humbly begging for pardon. Or he may leave the corpse in the jungle and sacrifice a fowl before it there. On the following night he hopes to dream of the NGARONG again, and perhaps he is told in his dream to take the tusks from the dead boar and that they will bring him good luck. Unless he dreams something of this sort, he feels that he has been mistaken, and that the boar was not really his secret helper.
Perhaps only one in a hundred men is fortunate enough to have a secret helper, though it is ardently desired by many of them. Many a young man goes to sleep on the grave of some distinguished person, or in some wild and lonely spot, and lives for some days on a very restricted diet, hoping that a secret helper will come to him in his dreams.
When, as is most commonly the case, the secret helper takes on the form of some animal, all individuals of that species become objects of especial regard to the fortunate Iban; he will not kill or eat any such animal, and he will as far as possible restrain others from doing so. A NGARONG may after a time manifest itself in some new form, but even then the Iban will continue to respect the animal-form in which it first appeared.
In some cases the cult of a secret helper will spread through a whole family or household. The children and grandchildren will usually respect the species of animal to which a man's secret helper belongs, and will perhaps sacrifice fowls or pigs to it occasionally, although they expect no help from it; but it is asserted that if the great-grandchildren of a man behave well to his secret helper, it will often befriend them just as much as its original protege.
The above general account of the secret helper is founded on the descriptions of many different Ibans, and we will now supplement it by describing several particular instances.
Anggus (an Ulu Ai Iban of the Batang Lupar) says that every Iban who has no NGARONG hopes to get some bird or beast as his helper at the BEGAWAI, the feast given to the PETARA. He himself has none, but he will not kill the gibbon because the NGARONG of his grandfather, who died twenty years ago, was a gibbon. Once a man came to his grandfather in a dream and said to him, "Don't you kill the gibbon," and then turned into a grey gibbon. This gibbon helped him to become rich and to take heads, and in all possible ways. On one occasion, when he was about to go on the war-path, his NGARONG came to him in a dream and said, "Go on, I will help you," and the next day he saw in the jungle a grey gibbon which was undoubtedly his NGARONG. When he died he said to his sons, "Don't you kill the gibbon," and his sons and grandsons have obeyed him in this ever since. Anggus adds that when a man dreams of a NGARONG. for the first time he does not accept it, and will still kill animals of that kind; nor is a second dream enough; but when he dreams the same dream a third time, then his scepticism is overcome and he can no longer doubt his good fortune.