Two Religious Ceremonies in Vogue among 
the Milanos of Sarawak. 
By the Rev. Fr. Bernard Mulder and John Hewitt, B.A. 
I, The Payun Ceremony. 
This important functicn, known to'the Malays as Berayun 
or Brayune, has been several times described and we are only 
emboldened to add further to the literature on this subject 
because as yet no complete account has been written: No 
doubt the explanation of the imperfections of other writers is 
to be attributed to the fact that this ceremony is only very 
rarely witnessed by a HKuropean and then not in its entirety : 
it has, however, been the lot of one of us to be present at 
scores of Payuns. For the relationship of the Payun to the 
other religious ceremonies of the Milanos we shall refer the 
reader to a recent paper on Milano religion by Messrs. Lawrence 
and Hewitt (J. A. I. Vol. 38, 1908): in which paper too will be 
found a more complete account of Bayoh’ and of ‘Dakans’ 
than we are proposing to give here. 
As a general rule, the Payun is undertaken as a last resort 
for severe illness and sometimes the ceremony is repeated as a 
kind of thanksgiving feast when the patient has regained good 
health. We may mention that the Milanos have no medical 
practice of their own and it is only within recent years that 
these people have had acquaintance with Malay or European 
medicines : now-a-days the Payun is becoming more and more 
a luxury of the well to do, and the poorer pecple who cannot 
bear the heavy expenses of a respectable Payun have perforce 
to swallow the white man’s. medicine or to peer themselv es 
to fate. 
Jour. S. B. R.A. Soc., No. 57, 1910. 
