spots is said to have been situated upon the “Mount Ophir” of Malacca, which is
about 4000 feet high, and on which a certain legendary Princess known as Tuan
Pŭtri Gunong Ledang is said to have dwelt, until she transferred her ghostly
court to Jugra Hill, upon the coast of Selangor.^13
Such fasting-places are usually, as in Java, either solitary hills or places which
present some great natural peculiarity; even remarkable trees and rocks being, as
has already been pointed out, pressed into the service of this Malay “natural
religion.”
(c) Nature of Rites
The main divisions of the magico-religious ceremonies of the Malays are prayer,
sacrifice, lustration, fasting, divination, and possession.
Prayer, which is defined by Professor Tylor as “a request made to a deity as if he
were a man,” is still in the unethical stage among the Malays; no request for
anything but personal advantages of a material character being ever, so far as I
am aware, preferred by the worshipper. The efficacy of prayer is, however, often
supposed to be enhanced by repetition.
“As prayer is a request made to a deity as if he were a man, so sacrifice is a gift
made to a deity as if he were a man.... The ruder conception that the deity takes
and values the offering for itself, gives place, on the one hand, to the idea of
mere homage as expressed by a gift, and, on the other, to the negative view that
the virtue lies in the worshipper depriving himself of something prized.”^14
A general survey of the charms and ceremonies brought together in this volume
will, I think, be likely to establish the view that the Malays (in accordance with
the reported practice of many other races) probably commenced with the idea of
sacrifice as a simple gift, and therefrom developed first the idea of ceremonial
homage, and later the idea of sacrifice as an act of abnegation. Evidences of the
original gift-theory chiefly survive in the language of charms, in which the deity