The pawan then
exorcised the devil, and burned strong-smelling drugs under the woman's
nose, after which he came out of her, and she fell asleep, the "wise
man" receiving a fee.
I never heard of any country of such universal belief in devils,
familiars, omens, ghosts, sorceries, and witchcrafts. The Malays have
many queer notions about tigers, and usually only speak of them in
whispers, because they think that certain souls of human beings who
have departed this life have taken up their abode in these beasts, and
in some places, for this reason, they will not kill a tiger unless he
commits some specially bad aggression. They also believe that some men
are tigers by night and men by day!
The pelisit, the bad spirit which rode on the tail of Mr. Maxwell's
horse, is supposed to be the ghost of a woman who has died in
childbirth. In the form of a large bird uttering a harsh cry, it is
believed to haunt forests and burial-grounds and to afflict children.
The Malays have a bottle-imp, the polong, which will take no other
sustenance than the blood of its owner, but it rewards him by aiding
him in carrying out revengeful purposes. The harmless owl has strange
superstitions attaching to it, and is called the "specter bird;" you
may remember that the fear of encountering it was one of the reasons
why the Permatang Pasir men would not go with us through the jungle to
Rassa.
A vile fiend called the penangalan takes possession of the forms of
women, turns them into witches, and compels them to quit the greater
part of their bodies, and flyaway by night to gratify a vampire craving
for human blood. This is very like one of the ghoul stories in the
_Arabian Nights Entertainments_. Then they have a specter huntsman with
demon dogs who roams the forests, and a storm fiend who rides the
whirlwind, and spirits borrowed from Persia and Arabia. It almost seems
as if the severe monotheism to which they have been converted compels
them to create a gigantic demonology.
They have also many odd but harmless superstitions: For instance, that
certain people have the power of making themselves invulnerable by the
agency of spirits; that the regalia of the States are possessed of
supernatural powers; that the wearing of a tiger claw prevents disease;
that rude "Aeolian harps" hung up in trees will keep the forest goblins
from being troublesome; that charms and amulets worn or placed about a
house ward off many evils; that at dangerous rapids, such as those of
Jerom Pangong on the Perak river, the spirits must be propitiated by
offerings of betel-nut and bananas; that to insure good luck a betel-
chewer must invariably spit to the left; that it is unlucky either to
repair or pull down a house; that spirits can be propitiated and
diseases can be kept away by hanging up palm leaves and cages in the
neighborhood of kampongs, and many others.
