292 SEA DYAK RELIGIOxV. 



down in the path near the cemetery to stop any departed spirit 

 who may be starting on questionable wanderings; others plant 

 bits of stick to imitate bamboo caltrops to lame their feet should 

 they venture in pursuit, and so obstruct their advance. 



Interment is the usual, but not universal, mode of disposing 

 of the dead. Manungs, or medicine men, aie suspended in 

 trees in the cemetery ; * and amongst the Balau tribe, children 

 dying before dentition has developed enjoy the same distinction, 

 having a jar for their coffin. Some eccentric individuals have a 

 dislike to be put underground, and request that after death 

 they may be laid upon an open platform in the cemetery; the 

 result of which is that a most offensive exudation soon oozes 

 from the badly made coffin ; and after a year or two the posts 

 become rotten, and the whole structure tumbles down, the 

 coffin bursting in pieces, adding to the already large stock of 

 exposed bones, which, with broken pots, jars, baskets, and 

 other miscellaneous articles, swell the property of grim death, 

 and make the place a 'vast charnel awesome and gloomy, well 

 calculated to frighten the superstitious Dyak. Occasionally, 

 a man has a fancy to have his body put on the top of a moun- 

 tain, and the relatives probably dare not refuse to carry out 

 the wish through fear of imaginary evil consequences. Among 

 the Kayans, this burial above ground is the general practice, 

 but they carry it out in a more substantial manner. The 

 baiya is put in the coffin, but heads of slain enemies are hung 



* Even among the Malays of the Peninsula, this practice of keeping the 

 the body of a paioang, or medicine-man, above ground is not unknown. It 

 exists also probably among the Sakai tribes. Blian taun is the Sakai name 

 for the original tiger-spirit or man- tiger. A man who has a tiger-spirit as 

 his familiar is a pawang blian, and may not be buried in the ordinary Malay 

 way, but his body must be placed leaning against aprah tree, in order that 

 the spirit may enter into another man. 



In Pcrak, it is said that in the time of Sultan J'afab. there was a 

 pawang of the Jiantu Wan, named Along Dewasa. "When he died (at 

 JBuluh Minyak in Ulu Perak) his relations would not permit his body to be 

 setup against a tree, but buried it. Soon afterwards the ground was found 

 disturbed, and since then Alang Dewasa has frequently appeared as a 

 Jiantu blian, when invoked by paicangs of that class (See Journal No. 12, 

 p 224). He comes down in the shape of a tiger, with one eye closed, the 

 effect of an injury he received when buried, or when leaving the earth to 

 assume his animal form. — Ed. 



