(buleh di-tengo’ orang-nya didalam puchok api). The charm runs as follows:—
“I know the origin from which you sprang,
From the glitter of the White Blood.
Come down then to your mother,
Stemming both ebb and flood tides,
Cluck! cluck! souls of Somebody,
Come all of you together unto me.
Whither would ye go?
Come down to this house and house-ladder of yours.
This solitary taper is your house and house-ladder,
Since already the liver, stomach, heart, spleen, and great maw
Of all of you have been given into my care,
So much the more have the body and life
Of all of you been given into my care.
Grant this by the grace of my use
Of the prayer called divination by (secret) cognizance (tilek maʿrifat) of
Somebody.
“Next you take a fathom’s length of thread, with seven strands, and seven
colours running through the strands (bĕnang tujoh urat, tujoh warna mĕlintang
bĕnang), and a pen made of a splinter of the sugar-palm (puchok kabong), and
draw a portrait of the person you wish to charm (mĕnulis gambar orang itu).
When the portrait is finished you suspend it from the end of a pole by means of
the parti-coloured thread, and make fast the lower end of the pole to the branch
of a tree, fixing it at an angle, so that the portrait may hang free and be blown to
and fro without ceasing by every breath of wind. This will cause her heart to
love you.”
It will be noticed that a general similarity underlies these several methods of
soul-abduction in spite of their apparent variety, and the diversity of the objects
in view in the different cases. On this point it is impossible to enlarge here: the
purpose of this book has been primarily to collect authentic specimens of the
various magic practices in vogue among the Malays of the Malay Peninsula, and
to indicate the nature of the beliefs on which these practices are based, leaving it
for others to draw from them such inferences and to make such comparisons as