Malay Magic / Being an introduction to the folklore and popular religion of the Malay Peninsula

by Walter William Skeat

Here take the first midrib, fumigate it, and lay it upon the head of the grave, repeating ‘Kur Allah’ (‘Cluck, cluck, God!’) seven times. You and your companion must now take up a sitting posture, one at the head and the other at the foot of the grave, facing the grave post, and use the canoe-paddles which you have brought. In a little while the surrounding scenery will change and take upon itself the appearance of the sea, and finally an aged man will appear, to whom you must address the same request as before.”

(b) High Places

“Although officially the religious centre of the village community is the mosque, there is usually in every small district a holy place known as the kramat,[6] at which vows are paid on special occasions, and which is invested with a very high degree of reverence and sanctity.

“These kramats abound in Malacca territory; there is hardly a village but can boast some two or three in its immediate neighbourhood, and they are perfectly well known to all the inhabitants.

“Theoretically, kramats are supposed to be the graves of deceased holy men, the early apostles of the Muhammadan faith, the first founders of the village who cleared the primeval jungle, or other persons of local notoriety in a former age; and there is no doubt that many of them are that and nothing more. But even so, the reverence paid to them and the ceremonies that are performed at them savour a good deal too much of ancestor-worship to be attributable to an orthodox Muhammadan origin.

“It is certain, however, that many of these kramats are not graves at all: many of them are in the jungle, on hills and in groves, like the high places of the Old Testament idolatries; they contain no trace of a grave (while those that are found in villages usually have grave-stones), and they appear to be really ancient sites of a primitive nature-worship or the adoration of the spirits of natural objects.

“Malays, when asked to account for them, often have recourse to the explanations that they are kramat jin, that is, “spirit”-places; and if a Malay is pressed on the point, and thinks that the orthodoxy of these practices is being impugned, he will sometimes add that the jin in question is a jin islām, a Muhammadan and quite orthodox spirit!

“Thus on Bukit Nyalas, near the Johol frontier, there is a kramat consisting of a group of granite boulders on a ledge of rock overhanging a sheer descent of a good many feet; bamboo clumps grow on the place, and there were traces of religious rites having been performed there, but no grave whatever. This place was explained to me to be the kramat of one Nakhoda Hussin, described as a jin (of the orthodox variety), who presides over the water, rain, and streams. People occasionally burned incense there to avert drought and get enough water for irrigating their fields. There was another kramat of his lower down the hill, also consisting of rocks, one of which was shaped something like a boat. I was informed that this jin is attended by tigers which guard the hill, and are very jealous of the intrusion of other tigers from the surrounding country. He is believed to have revealed himself to the original Pawang of the village, the mythical founder of the kampong of Nyalas. In a case like this it seems probable that the name attached to this object of reverence is a later accretion, and that under a thin disguise we have here a relic of the worship of the spirit of rivers and streams, a sort of elemental deity localised in this particular place, and still regarded as a proper object of worship and propitiation, in spite of the theoretically strict monotheism of the Muhammadan creed. Again, at another place the kramat is nothing but a tree, of somewhat singular shape, having a large swelling some way up the trunk. It was explained to me that this tree was connected in a special way with the prospects of local agriculture, the size of the swelling increasing in good years and diminishing in bad seasons! Hence it was naturally regarded with considerable awe by the purely agricultural population of the neighbourhood.

“As may be imagined, it is exceedingly difficult to discover any authentic facts regarding the history of these numerous kramats: even where there is some evidence of the existence of a grave, the name of the departed saint is usually the one fact that is remembered, and often even that is forgotten. The most celebrated of the Malacca kramats, the one at Machap, is a representative type of the first class, that in which there really is a grave: it is the one place where a hardened liar respects the sanctity of an oath, and it is occasionally visited in connection with civil cases, when the one party challenges the other to take a particular oath. A man who thinks nothing of perjuring himself in the witness-box, and who might not much mind telling a lie even with the Korān on his head, will flinch before the ordeal of a falsehood in the presence of the Dato’ Machap.”[7]