away. He declared that the offending demon was sitting in his skull, at the back
of his head, and that it dragged up and devoured everything that he swallowed.
Hence he refused at length to eat any sort of solid food, and gradually wasted
away until he became a mere skeleton, and went about imploring people to take
a hatchet and split his skull open, in order to extract the demon which he
believed it to contain. Gradually his strength failed, and at length I learned from
H.H. the Sultan (then Raja Muda) that all the Malays in the neighbourhood had
assembled to wail at his decease. As we strolled among the cocoa-nut palms and
talked, I told him of the many miraculous cures which had attended cases of
faith-healing in England, and suggested, not of course expecting to be taken
seriously, that he should try the effect of such a cure upon his uncle, and “make
believe” to extract some “mantises” from the back of his head. To my intense
astonishment some days later, I learned that this idea had been carried out during
my temporary absence from the district, and that the Muhammadan priest, after
cupping him severely, had shown him seven large mantises which he pretended
to have extracted from the back of his head. The experiment proved
extraordinarily successful, and Raja Kahar recovered at all events for the time.
He declared, however, that there were more of these mantises left, and
eventually suffered a relapse and died during my absence in England on leave.
For the time, however, the improvement was quite remarkable, and when Said
Mashahor, the Pĕnghulu of Kerling, visited him a few days later, Raja Kahar,
after an account of the cure from his own point of view, declared that nobody
would now believe that he had been so ill, although “no fewer than seven large
mantises” had been “extracted from his head.”
I now give a specimen of the ceremonies used for recalling a wandering soul by
means of a dough figure or image (gambar tĕpong). It is not stated whether any
of the usual accessories of these figures (hair and nails, etc.) are mixed with the
dough, but an old and famous soul-doctor (’Che Amal, of Jugra) told me that the
dough figure should be made, in strictness, from the ball of kneaded dough
which is rolled all over the patient’s body by the medicine-man during the
“sucking-charm” ceremony (mĕngalin). The directions for making it run as
follows:—
Make an image of dough, in length about nine inches, and representing the
opposite sex to that of the patient. Deposit it (on its back) upon five cubits of
white cloth, which must be folded up small for the purpose, and then plant a