BENEDICT, BAGOBO CEREMONIAL, MAGIC AND MYTH 269 



Like the Bagobo, they resort to lustration in cases of sickness ; at 

 weddings the ceremony of bathing the bride and the bridegroom is 

 present, and the essential ceremonial object in purification is a 

 medicine-brush made up of a wide variety of magic plants by 

 means of which rice-paste is applied to the candidate, 489 just as 

 water is poured from the green sagmo bouquet in the Bagobo rite 

 of Pamalugu at the river. At first sight, perhaps it might seem 

 that lustration by water held no noteworthy place in Filipino rites, 

 or some record of such custom would have been made by the 

 missionaries; yet it is also true that purification ceremonies might 

 not have come forcibly to the attention of the Fathers for the 

 reason that ritual bathing, if it were like the same rite among 

 wild people, would not have involved accessories of permanent value, 

 such as religious zeal was hunting down for destruction. A bunch 

 of magic twigs and leaves would hardly be brought to a priest, 

 along with a white china dish. 



That peculiar form of shrine called tambara that is used every- 

 where by the Bagobo^ and apparently was a frequent type of altar 

 among some of the Filipino groups in their pagan days, consists 

 of a slender rod of bamboo split at the upper end to hold a dish 

 for offerings. A shrine of essentially the same type was found by 

 Sir W. Maxwell at several kramats in Perak, the shrines being- 

 formed by little stands made of bamboo rods, one end being "stuck 

 in the ground and the other split into four or five, and then opened 

 out and plaited with basket work so as to hold a little earth," on 

 which incense is burned. 19 ° From this account, it would appear 

 that if the dish were ever an element of the shrine, it has now 

 gone out of use. Small pieces of white cloth are used by the Perak 

 Malays as votive offerings, just as white cotton textile is a favorite 

 gift to Bagobo gods. 



Regarding the nature of the soul, the Bagobo and the peninsular 

 Malay, like primitive groups all over the world, fancy the soul of 

 man to be a tenuous, unsubstantial image or phantom 401 that sep- 

 arates itself from the human body in sleep, in trance and finally 

 at death, and that functions during these absences like the physical 

 body. The Malay notion, however, of the soul as a manikin, or 



' 89 W. W. Skeat: Malay magic, pp. 77—80. 



190 Cf. ibid., p. 67. 



191 Cf. ibid., pp. 47—50. 



