Badi
The next class of medicinal ceremonies consists of rites intended to effect the
expulsion from the patient’s body of all kinds of evil influences or principles,
such as may have entered into a man who has unguardedly touched a dead
animal or bird from which the badi has not yet been expelled, or who has met
with the Wild Huntsman in the forest.^133
Badi is the name given to the evil principle which, according to the view of
Malay medicine-men, attends (like an evil angel) everything that has life. [It
must not be forgotten when we find it used of inert objects, such as trees, and
even of stones or minerals, that these too are animate objects from the Malay
point of view.] Von de Wall describes it as “the enchanting or destroying
influence which issues from anything, e.g. from a tiger which one sees,^134 from
a poison-tree which one passes under, from the saliva of a mad dog, from an
action which one has performed; the contagious principle of morbid matter.”
Hence the ceremony which purports to drive out this evil principle is of no small
importance in Malay medicine. I may take this opportunity of pointing out that I
have used the word “mischief” to translate it when dealing with the charms, as
this is the nearest English equivalent which I have been able to find; indeed, it
appears a very fairly exact equivalent when we remember its use in English in
such phrases as “It’s got the mischief in it,” which is sometimes used even of
inanimate objects.
There are a hundred and ninety of these mischiefs, according to some, according
to others, a hundred and ninety-three. Their origin is very variously given. One
authority says that the first badi sprang from three drops of Adam’s blood
(which were spilt on the ground). Another (rather inconsistently) declares that
the “mischief” (badi) residing in an iguana (biawak) was the origin of all
subsequent “mischiefs,” yet adds later that the “Heart of Timber” was their
origin, and yet again that the yellow glow at sunset (called Mambang Kuning or
the “Yellow Deity”) was their origin. These two latter are, perhaps the most
usual theories, but a third medicine-man declares that the first badi was the
offspring of the Jin (“genie”) Ibn Ujan (Ibnu Jan?), who resides in the clouds (or
caverns?) and hollows of the hills. Thus do Malay medicine-men disagree.