The Place of your Penance the Sea of Balongan Darah;
The Place of your Penance is a Pond in every stream;
The Place of your Birth was the Bay where the Wind Dies;
Ho, Child of the Solitary Jin Salaka,
Come hither at this time, this very moment,
I wish to make you a propitiatory offering, to banquet you on arrack and toddy.
If you do not come hither at this very moment
You shall be a rebel unto God,
And a rebel unto God’s Prophet Solomon,
For I am God’s Prophet Solomon.”No other metals, so far as I am aware, are worked to any extent in the Peninsula,
yet there is the clearest possible evidence of animistic ideas about Iron. Thus for
the Sacred Lump of Iron which forms part of the regalia of more than one of the
petty Sultans in the Peninsula, the Malays entertain the most extraordinary
reverence, not unmingled with superstitious terror.^272 It is upon this “Lump of
Iron,” when placed in water, that the most solemn and binding oath known to
those who make use of it is sworn; and it is to this “Lump of Iron” that the
Malay wizard refers when he recites his category of the most terrible
denunciations that Malay magic has been able to invent.^273
It is possible that there may be, in the Malay mind at all events, some connection
between the supernatural powers ascribed to this portion of the regalia and the
more general use of iron as a charm against evil spirits. For the various forms of
iron which play so conspicuous a part in Malay magic, from the long iron nail
which equally protects the new-born infant and the Rice-Soul from the powers of
evil, to the betel-nut scissors which are believed to scare the evil spirits from the
dead, are alike called the representatives (symbols or emblems) of Iron (tanda
bĕsi). So, too, is the blade of the wood-knife, or cutlass, which a jungle Malay
will sometimes plant in the bed of a stream (with its edge towards the source)
before he will venture to drink of the water. So, too, is the blade of the same
knife, upon the side of which he will occasionally seat himself when he is eating
alone in the forest; both of these precautions being taken, however, as I have
more than once been told, not only to drive away evil spirits, but to “confirm”
the speaker’s own soul (mĕnĕtapkan sĕmangat).
Even Stone appears to be regarded as distinctly connected with ideas of