Take parings of nails, hair, eyebrows, saliva, etc. of your intended victim (sufficient to represent every part of his person), and make them up into his likeness with wax from a deserted bees’ comb. Scorch the figure slowly by holding it over a lamp every night for seven nights, and say:—
“It is not wax that I am scorching,
It is the liver, heart, and spleen of So-and-so that I scorch.”
After the seventh time burn the figure, and your victim will die.
The description of the next ceremony is taken word for word from a charm-book which I obtained from a Langat Malay (named ’Che Indut), and which is still in my possession. As it illustrates several new points about these wax figures, and as such charms are exceedingly rare and all but impossible to obtain, I here give a word for word translation of the whole text, the original Malay version of which will be found in the Appendix:[254]—
“This refers to making images to harm people. You make an image to resemble a corpse out of wax from an empty bees’ comb,[255] and of the length of a footstep. If you want to cause sickness, you pierce the eye and blindness results; or you pierce the waist and the stomach (lit. the waist) gets sick, or you pierce the head and the head gets sick, or you pierce the breast and the breast gets sick. If you want to cause death, you transfix it from the head right through to the buttocks, the ‘transfixer’ being a gomuti-palm[256] twig; then you enshroud the image as you would a corpse, and you pray over it as if you were praying over the dead; then you bury it in the middle of the path (which goes to) the place of the person whom you wish to charm, so that he may step across it. This refers to when you want to bury the image—
“Peace be to you! Ho, Prophet ’Tap, in whose charge the earth is,
Lo, I am burying the corpse of Somebody,
I am bidden (to do so) by the Prophet Muhammad,
Because he (the corpse) was a rebel to God.