The washed and saffron rice are generally used for scattering either over the persons to be benefited by the ceremony, or else upon the ground or house-floor.
With reference to the selection of rice for this purpose, it has been suggested that the rice is intended to attract what may be called the “bird-soul” (i.e. the soul of man conceived as a bird) to the spot, or to keep it from straying at a particularly dangerous moment in the life of its owner.
The pulut or glutinous rice is the kind of rice generally used for sacrificial banquets, e.g. for banquets at “high places,” etc.
Lustration is generally accomplished either by means of fire or of water. The best examples of the former are perhaps the fumigation of infants, and the api saleian or purificatory fire, over which women are half-roasted when a birth has taken place, but these being special and distinctive ceremonies, will be described with others of the same nature in Chapter VI.
One of the forms of lustration by water, however, appears rather to take the place of a sub-rite, forming an integral portion of a large class of ceremonies, such as those relating to Building, Fishing, Agriculture, Marriage, and so forth. Hence it will be necessary to give a general sketch of its leading features in the present context.
The ceremony of lustration by water, when it takes the form of the sub-rite referred to, is called “Tĕpong Tawar,” which properly means “the Neutralising Rice-flour (Water),” “neutralising” being used almost in a chemical sense, i.e. in the sense of “sterilising” the active element of poisons, or of destroying the active potentialities of evil spirits.
The rite itself consists in the application[21] of a thin paste made by mixing rice-flour with water: this is taken up in a brush or “bouquet” of leaves and applied to the objects which the “neutralisation” is intended to protect or neutralise, whether they be the posts of a house, the projecting ends of a boat’s ribs (tajok p’rahu), the seaward posts of fishing-stakes (puchi kelong), or the forehead and back of the hands of the bride and bridegroom.
The brush must be first fumigated with incense, then dipped into the bowl which contains the rice-water, and shaken out almost dry, for if the water runs down the object to which it is applied it is held to “portend tears,” whereas if it spreads equally all round (benchar) it is lucky. The composition of the brush, which is considered to be of the highest importance, appears to vary, but only within certain limits. It almost invariably, in Selangor, consists of a selection of leaves from the following plants, which are made up in small bouquets of five, seven, or nine leaves each, and bound round with ribu-ribu (a kind of small creeper), or a string of shredded tree bark (daun t’rap).
The following is a list of the leaves generally used:—
1. Leaves of the grass called sambau dara, which is said to be the symbol of a “settled soul” (ʿalamat mĕnĕtapkan sĕmangat), and which hence always forms the core of the bouquet.[22]