96 
FASCICULI MALATENSES 
act on the body through the semangat , and it is only when the semangat 
is ‘ sick ’ (sakit) that evil spirits can enter a man. The semangat is made 
‘ sick ’ by bodily illness, by care or worry, and, above all, by fear, so that 
spirit and body interact in such a way that it is often impossible to say which 
is affected first. Herein, according to Malay ideas, lies the superiority of the 
European over the Oriental— the white man is not affected by spirits, his soul 
is strong, for, in the words of an intelligent Malay with whom I had many 
conversations on such matters in the New Territory of Upper Perak, ‘no spirit 
can affect us unless we give it entrance.’ To put the matter into every-day 
language, and at the same time to put it in a way that no Malay peasant 
would understand, the Oriental is more hysterical than the European. It 
would almost seem as if the extraction of a man’s semangat was believed to 
give room of necessity to some other spirit, which immediately occupied its 
place ; for the Malays of Patani recognize two main divisions of madness, 
‘ burning madness ’ {gila bakar '), which is sent by the Lord Allah, is rather a 
holy state, is quite incurable, and may be diagnosed by the redness of the 
sufferer’s eyes ; and ‘ spirit madness ’ {gila bantu), which is caused by the 
entrance of a wandering spirit {bantu), and can be easily remedied by the use 
of the proper exorcisms. Gila bantu is of many kinds, as gila babi or ‘ pig 
madness’ ( antea , p. 82), and gila bodob , ‘fool madness’ or idiocy. It must 
be noticed in this connexion that the Malays conceive the world to be full of 
bantu or wandering spirits, seeking for a body, into which they cannot enter 
unless something grants them the power, this something being sickness, or 
comparative weakness of the body’s own individual soul. 
Mr. Skeat, discussing the incantation from which a passage is retrans- 
lated above, points out that though it has the appearance of a love charm, it 
is probably nothing of the kind. In this I agree with him, though it may be 
doubted whether, as he suggests, it might under any circumstances be used 
as a love charm. On the beach at Cape Patani, in the State of Jhering, I 
kicked up from the sand a crumpled piece of the coarse grey paper that the 
Malays call kretas arab. It had certain rough drawings upon it, the meaning 
of which I did not understand, so I took it to our men who were seated 
under a tree some yards away. When I showed it them they looked startled, 
and one of them, a Malay, remarked that some Siamese had done it, and that 
it was a great sin. After a little pressing they explained that the paper was 
a charm to steal a person’s soul, and that it had probably been buried in the 
sand by a man whom some woman had repulsed, and who wished to revenge 
I. Or perhaps gila baka, ‘original’ or ‘natural madness,’ on the analogy of dosa baka, ‘original sin’ 
(Favre, loc. cir., vol. ii, p. 1 51). The addition of a final ‘r’ is not uncommon in the dialect of Patani. 
