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

by Walter William Skeat

“There yet remain the powerful influences of the still earlier indigenous faith to be noted and accounted for. Just as the Buddhists of Ceylon turn in times of sickness and danger, not to the consolations offered by the creed of Buddha, but to the propitiation of the demons feared and reverenced by their early progenitors, and just as the Burmese and Talaings, though Buddhists, retain in full force the whole of the Nat superstition, so among the Malays, in spite of centuries which have passed since the establishment of an alien worship, the Muhammadan peasant may be found invoking the protection of Hindu gods against the spirits of evil with which his primitive faith has peopled all natural objects.”[2]

“What was the faith of Malaya seven hundred years ago it is hard to say, but there is a certain amount of evidence to lead to the belief that it was a form of Brahmanism, and that, no doubt, had succeeded the original spirit worship.”[3]

The evidence of folk-lore, taken in conjunction with that supplied by charm-books and romances, goes to show that the greater gods of the Malay Pantheon, though modified in some respects by Malay ideas, were really borrowed Hindu divinities, and that only the lesser gods and spirits are native to the Malay religious system. It is true that some of these native gods can be with more or less distinctness identified with the great powers of nature: the King of the Winds (Raja Angin) for instance; “Mambang Tali Harus,” or the god of mid-currents (the Malay Neptune); the gods of thunder and lightning, of the celestial bodies, etc.; but none of them appear to have the status of the chief gods of the Hindu system, and both by land and water the terrible Shiva (“Batara Guru” or “Kala”) is supreme. Yet each department of nature, however small, has its own particular godling or spirit who requires propitiation, and influences for good or evil every human action. Only the moral element is wanting to the divine hegemony—the “cockeyed,” limping substitute which does duty for it reflecting only too truthfully the character of the people with whom it passes as divine.

I will first take, in detail, the gods of Hindu origin. “Batara (or Bĕtara) Guru” is “the name by which Siva is known to his worshippers, who constitute the vast majority of the Balinese, and who probably constituted the bulk of the old Javanese.”[4]

In the magic of the Peninsular Malays we find Vishnu the Preserver, Brahma the Creator, Batara Guru, Kala, and S’ri simultaneously appealed to by the Malay magician; and though it would, perhaps, be rash, (as Mr. Wilkinson says), to infer solely from Malay romances or Malay theatrical invocations (many of which owe much to Javanese influence), that Hinduism was the more ancient religion of the Malays, there is plenty of other evidence to prove that the “Batara Guru” of the Malays (no less than the Batara Guru of Bali and Java) is none other than the recognised father of the Hindu Trinity.[5]

Of the greater deities or gods, Batara Guru is unquestionably the greatest. “In the Hikayat Sang Samba (the Malay version of the Bhaumakavya), Batara Guru appears as a supreme God, with Brahma and Vishnu as subordinate deities. It is Batara Guru who alone has the water of life (ayer utama (atama) jiwa) which brings the slaughtered heroes to life.”[6]

So to this day the Malay magician declares that ’Toh Batara Guru (under any one of the many corruptions which his name now bears[7]) was “the all-powerful spirit who held the place of Allah before the advent of Muhammadanism, a spirit so powerful that he could restore the dead to life; and to him all prayers were addressed.”

Mr. Wilkinson, in the article from which we have already quoted, deals with another point of interest, the expression sang-yang, or batara, which is prefixed to guru. After pointing out that yang in this case is not the ordinary Malay pronoun (yang, who), but an old word meaning a “deity,” he remarks, that so far as he has been able to discover, it is only used of the greater Hindu divinities, and not of inferior deities or demi-gods. Thus we find it applied to Shiva and Vishnu, but never to the monkey-god Hanuman, or a deity of secondary importance like Dermadewa. Such inferior divinities have only the lesser honorific “sang” prefixed to their names, and in this respect fare no better than mere mortals (such as Sang Sapurba and Sang Ranjuna Tapa) and animals (such as, in fables, Sang Kanchil, Mr. Mousedeer; and Sang Tikus, Mr. Rat).

“The expression batara is also limited to the greater Hindu divinities (except when used as a royal title), e.g. Batara Guru, Batara Kala, Batara Indra, Batara Bisnu, etc. Thus the expressions sang-yang and batara are fairly coincident in their application.[8] But there are a few deities of whom the honorific sang-yang is used, but not batara, e.g. sang-yang tunggal, ‘the only God,’ sang-yang sokma, etc.

“Thus batara would seem to be limited in use to the actual names of Hindu deities as distinct from epithets describing those deities. “Batara Guru” would seem to be an exception—the only one—to this rule, and to point to the fact that the original meaning of guru had been lost sight of, and that the expression had come to be regarded only as a proper name.”