dangerous moment in the life of its owner.
The pulut or glutinous rice is the kind of rice generally used for sacrificial
banquets, e.g. for banquets at “high places,” etc.
Lustration is generally accomplished either by means of fire or of water. The
best examples of the former are perhaps the fumigation of infants, and the api
saleian or purificatory fire, over which women are half-roasted when a birth has
taken place, but these being special and distinctive ceremonies, will be described
with others of the same nature in Chapter VI.
One of the forms of lustration by water, however, appears rather to take the place
of a sub-rite, forming an integral portion of a large class of ceremonies, such as
those relating to Building, Fishing, Agriculture, Marriage, and so forth. Hence it
will be necessary to give a general sketch of its leading features in the present
context.
The ceremony of lustration by water, when it takes the form of the sub-rite
referred to, is called “Tĕpong Tawar,” which properly means “the Neutralising
Rice-flour (Water),” “neutralising” being used almost in a chemical sense, i.e. in
the sense of “sterilising” the active element of poisons, or of destroying the
active potentialities of evil spirits.
The rite itself consists in the application^21 of a thin paste made by mixing rice-
flour with water: this is taken up in a brush or “bouquet” of leaves and applied to
the objects which the “neutralisation” is intended to protect or neutralise,
whether they be the posts of a house, the projecting ends of a boat’s ribs (tajok
p’rahu), the seaward posts of fishing-stakes (puchi kelong), or the forehead and
back of the hands of the bride and bridegroom.
The brush must be first fumigated with incense, then dipped into the bowl which
contains the rice-water, and shaken out almost dry, for if the water runs down the
object to which it is applied it is held to “portend tears,” whereas if it spreads
equally all round (benchar) it is lucky. The composition of the brush, which is
considered to be of the highest importance, appears to vary, but only within
certain limits. It almost invariably, in Selangor, consists of a selection of leaves
from the following plants, which are made up in small bouquets of five, seven,
or nine leaves each, and bound round with ribu-ribu (a kind of small creeper), or