Another very simple form of “propitiation” is called ambang-ambangan, and is performed as follows:—
Take seven “chews” of betel-leaf, seven native cigarettes (rokok), seven bananas, an egg, and an overflowing chupak (half cocoa-nutful) of parched rice (bĕr’tih sa-chupak abong),[128] roll them all up together in a banana leaf (which must be a cubit in length and of the same variety of banana as the first), and deposit them in a place where three roads meet (if anything “a little way along the left-hand road of the three,”) and repeat this charm:—
“Jĕmbalang Jĕmbali, Demon of the Earth,
Accept this portion as your payment
And restore So-and-So.
But if you do not restore him
I shall curse you with the saying,
‘There is no god but God,’” etc.
The above ceremony is generally used in the case of fever complaint.
Counter-charms for “neutralising” the active principle of poisons form, as a rule, one of the most important branches of the pharmacopœic system among the less civilised Malay tribes. A settled form of government and the softening of manners due to contact with European civilisation has, however, diminished the importance (I speak, of course, from the Malay point of view) of this branch of the subject in the Western Malay States of the Peninsula, where poisoning cases are very rarely heard of. Malay women have always possessed the reputation of being especially proficient in the use of poison; ground glass and the furry spicules obtained from the leaf-cases of some kinds of bamboo being their favourite weapons.