May you be drowned in the swell of this my dough-boat.
By the grace of,” etc.
A second charm of great length follows, the object of which is to drive out the evil spirit in possession of the man.
An example of this form of cure as practised by Malay medicine-men is referred to by Mr. Clifford, who, in speaking of his punkah-puller, Umat, says:—
“It was soon after his marriage that his trouble fell upon Umat, and swept much of the sunshine from his life. He contracted a form of ophthalmia, and for a time was blind. Native Medicine Men doctored him, and drew sheaves of needles and bunches of thorns from his eyes, which they declared were the cause of his affliction. These miscellaneous odds and ends used to be brought to me at breakfast-time, floating, most unappetisingly, in a shallow cup half-full of water; and Umat went abroad with eye-sockets stained crimson, or black, according to the fancy of the native physician. The aid of an English doctor was called in, but Umat was too thoroughly a Malay to trust the more simple remedies prescribed to him, and though his blindness was relieved, and he became able to walk without the aid of a staff, his eyesight could never really be given back to him.”[144]
In the above connection I may remark that, whether from the working of their own imaginations or otherwise, those who were believed to be possessed by demons certainly suffered, and that severely. H.H. Raja Kahar, the son of H.H. the late Sultan of Selangor, was attacked by a familiar demon during my residence in the Langat District, and shortly afterwards commenced to pine away. He declared that the offending demon was sitting in his skull, at the back of his head, and that it dragged up and devoured everything that he swallowed. Hence he refused at length to eat any sort of solid food, and gradually wasted away until he became a mere skeleton, and went about imploring people to take a hatchet and split his skull open, in order to extract the demon which he believed it to contain. Gradually his strength failed, and at length I learned from H.H. the Sultan (then Raja Muda) that all the Malays in the neighbourhood had assembled to wail at his decease. As we strolled among the cocoa-nut palms and talked, I told him of the many miraculous cures which had attended cases of faith-healing in England, and suggested, not of course expecting to be taken seriously, that he should try the effect of such a cure upon his uncle, and “make believe” to extract some “mantises” from the back of his head. To my intense astonishment some days later, I learned that this idea had been carried out during my temporary absence from the district, and that the Muhammadan priest, after cupping him severely, had shown him seven large mantises which he pretended to have extracted from the back of his head. The experiment proved extraordinarily successful, and Raja Kahar recovered at all events for the time. He declared, however, that there were more of these mantises left, and eventually suffered a relapse and died during my absence in England on leave. For the time, however, the improvement was quite remarkable, and when Said Mashahor, the Pĕnghulu of Kerling, visited him a few days later, Raja Kahar, after an account of the cure from his own point of view, declared that nobody would now believe that he had been so ill, although “no fewer than seven large mantises” had been “extracted from his head.”
I now give a specimen of the ceremonies used for recalling a wandering soul by means of a dough figure or image (gambar tĕpong). It is not stated whether any of the usual accessories of these figures (hair and nails, etc.) are mixed with the dough, but an old and famous soul-doctor (’Che Amal, of Jugra) told me that the dough figure should be made, in strictness, from the ball of kneaded dough which is rolled all over the patient’s body by the medicine-man during the “sucking-charm” ceremony (mĕngalin). The directions for making it run as follows:—
Make an image of dough, in length about nine inches, and representing the opposite sex to that of the patient. Deposit it (on its back) upon five cubits of white cloth, which must be folded up small for the purpose, and then plant a miniature green umbrella (made of cloth coated thickly with wax, and standing from four to five inches in height) at the head of the image, and a small green clove-shaped taper (of about the same height) at its feet. Then burn incense; take three handfuls each of “parched,” “washed,” and “saffron” rice, and scatter them thrice round the figure, saying as you do so:—
“O Flying Paper,
Come and fly into this cup.