FASCICULI MALATENSES 
99 
very little camphor, gutta, or other jungle produce is collected in the Patani 
States, other vegetable souls do not often concern the natives. 
Passing from vegetable to mineral souls, the latter play but a small part 
in the popular religion of the Patani Malays, except in certain districts where 
tin mines are worked by Chinese or Siamese owners. It is believed, however, 
that each mine has a semangat , the bomor or ‘doctor ’ of which — one is tempted 
to call him the ‘priest’ — is often a Malay. Mine-owners, as we experienced 
on at least two occasions, do not like strangers to come near their mines, 
unless the semangat or, as it is also called, the bantu , has been duly warned ; 
otherwise it might be scared away. In the mine, too, no one must wear 
shoes, carry an umbrella, or have iron about his person. We were invited to 
visit a tin mine on the Jalor-Rhaman border by the Luang Chin , or head of 
the Chinese community at Patani, to whom it belonged ; but he begged us 
not to take from the neighbourhood of the mine any animal or bird, and 
especially not to kill any snake. This had been made a condition of our 
coming by his bomor , who feared, apparently, that the tin spirit might have 
temporarily taken up its abode in an animal’s body, a snake’s being the one 
that there was most probability of its choosing. The result of injuring or 
insulting the semangat would be that the tin ore would disappear. 
The bomor of this mine was a Rhaman Malay, who had succeeded his 
father, and was assisted in his ministrations by several apprentice magicians. 
Once every seven years he presided over a great sacrifice to the tin spirit, 
living for a month in a little hut at the top of the hill from the side of which 
the ore was extracted. Whenever the mineral seemed more scanty than 
usual he sacrificed a white buffalo, a most acceptable offering to all spirits, in 
order to strengthen the semangat of the ore. 
As I have noted elsewhere, 1 2 the hibu mas and the hibu perak (‘the mother 
of gold ’ and ‘ the mother of silver ’) are believed to lie in two earthenware 
pots, guarded by a monstrous ape, on Gunung Tahan, a great mountain on 
the borders of Kelantan and Pahang ; and I have little doubt that hibu here 
is but another name for semangat , though it has often a more material sense 
in mineralogy, viz. : ‘ mother-lode.’ At a place called Berusong, in that part 
of Upper Perak which was separated from Rhaman in 1899, profitable gold 
mines formerly existed, as it is hoped they may exist again. It is said that a 
Malay actually captured the hibu mas in this neighbourhood, and that it had 
1. Proc. Roy. Phys. Soc. Edinburgh , 1900-1901, p. +51. 
2. The word hibu means ‘ parent,’ more often ‘ mother,’ in either a literal or a metaphorical sense (e.j\, 
the porcupine is the hibu of its quills and the stag of its horns). Hence it comes to mean living cause or centre. 
The spider is the hibu of its web ; and the young birds, by a stretch of meaning, the hibu of the nest, of which they 
are the living centre. Hence, again, the meaning is further extended to include ‘parasite’ ; Hibu burong are bird- 
lice, and tape-worms are called the hibu of the animal they infest. 
