FASCICULI MALATENSES 
97 
himself on her. If she had trodden on it she would have become mad, and 
would probably have died. It was impossible that any of them could have 
buried the charm, as we were merely spending the day on Cape Patani, but 
they seemed quite concerned about it, and very indignant against the 
perpetrator. At first sight this also would have appeared to be a love charm, 
but our Malay and Siamese followers denied that it could possibly be one. 
The sketch upon it represents a man in royal Siamese attire, with the name of 
an Arabic prophet ( Nabi ) written on his brow. Lines join his head and his 
heart, or more precisely his liver, to those of a female figure, representing the 
woman to be bewitched, and from this it may seem, as there is other evidence 
to show, that the head and the liver, the seat of the mind and the emotions, 
are regarded as the special abode of the semangat , though I believe that this 
soul is often conceived of as permeating the whole body, in some indeterminate 
way, even those parts which are physiologically dead. Perhaps we may see 
in this idea some explanation of the world-spread superstition that he who 
has possessed himself of a man’s hair, the parings of his finger nails, or even 
of some object that has been in intimate contact with his body, is enabled, by 
means of this acquisition, to work magic against him. I hope to reproduce 
the charm from Cape Patani in facsimile, and describe it more in detail in 
another part of the present paper. 
According to the Jalor bidan already mentioned, the semangat enters a 
child at the moment the umbilical cord is severed, and it is interesting 
to note that iron is never used in performing the operation, for which 
a special knife of bamboo is made, and that black cotton must be em- 
ployed in ligaturing the cord. Iron frightens spirits, as will be shown 
later, and though I am not aware of the symbolical meaning of black cotton, 
it is probably of a similar nature. The result of infringing either of these 
rules would be that the baby would be ‘ affected by fever ’ or delirium (kena 
demam ), caused, it is reasonable to conclude, by the absence of the semangat , 
which would be scared away at the moment it was about to enter the infant. 
It would seem to follow that the semangat is already in existence, only waiting 
the appointed moment to enter its appointed body ; but I have been able to 
obtain no evidence on this point, though it has been one on which I have 
questioned many Malays. Their invariable answer, about the semangat as 
about other souls, was that it ‘became of itself’ ( jadi sendiri ), whence and 
how it ‘ became ’ did not appear to be a question they had ever asked them- 
selves, and when further pressed for an answer, they would fall back upon 
Islam, saying that ‘ we are all like frogs under half-cocoanut shells,’ ‘no one 
can tell the wonders of Tuan Allah,’ or using some such phrase, 
o 
6/3/03 
