place among them, and when we have succeeded in identifying the vestiges of
Brahmanism which underlie the external forms of the faith of Muhammad, long
established in all Malay kingdoms, we are only half-way through our task.”
“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