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FASCICULI MALATENSES 
the spirit may be here and at Mecca at the same time, and the spirit is the 
same.’ Nor was this old man an educated person, or even a particularly good 
Mahommedan. He went on to explain that the spirit could break itself into 
one hundred and ninety parts, and that the great bbmor was the person who 
could cause it to do this and could keep all the different parts under his 
control. I asked him whether the spirits of dead men were also part of the 
universal spirit, but he said that they were different. Several other old men 
in Jalor afterwards corroborated this view of the spirit of evil, which, they 
said, was subordinate to Tuhan Allah, but when I chanced to mention it to an 
intelligent Kelantan Malay, he looked at me in surprise and remarked, 
* Those who know the origin of things are very strong,*" so that I am inclined 
to regard it as a kind of esoteric knowledge which only old men, whose souls 
are stronger than those of * new men,* as youths are often called, would dare 
to mention. It certainly is not a view peculiar to the bbmor> as my informants 
in Jalor laid no claim to any knowledge of magical art. 
With regard to the origin of spirits I usually got such answers as the 
following :— 1 We don’t know.’ € They are the slaves of the Lord Allah, who 
made them.* * Ask the medicine-men 1 ; they know the origin of the spirits, we 
do not.* Some supposed that spirits generated their kind like human beings, 
pointing out the Hantu Parai, which, in Jalor, are said to be spirits of the 
cliffs, conducted marriage processions from one cave to another. Others 
replied that spirits, especially these same Hantu Parai, had been known, in the 
days of old, to marry human beings and to have children by human husbands ; 
while others, again, said that many spirits originated from the magical apparatus 
of medicine-men who had died without instructing a pupil in their art. The 
old man who first told me that the spirit of evil was universal also told me 
that this same spirit was, originally, the Earth Spirit {Hantu Tanab, Jimbalam 
Burnt , or Strtku Bump —he used the three names indifferently), and that the 
Earth Spirit again was the son of another, whose name was Jinn Semujan. 
An actor at Ban Sat Kau gave me the following legend regarding the origin 
of the Earth Spirit, which he described as a female 4 in form like the shadow 
of a person,* but it is doubtful whether he spoke of the same Earth Spirit as 
the Jalor man : — 4 The Earth Spirit, which actors fear, is the daughter of 
Seretang Bogoh, who sits in the sun and guides the winds, and Sang Siuh, 
the mother of the earth, who sits at the navel of the world {Pusat Burnt). 
Seretang Bogoh visits Sang Siuh in wind and thick darkness, and then there 
is storm and fog, with thunder and lightning : of these he is the cause. Sang 
Siuh brought forth four children to Seretang Bogoh, of whom the one 
1. Cf. Virgil’s * Fthx qui potuit etrum cogtutsctrt can tut.' 
2, The home's explanations are mere equivocations, mostly derived From Hindu legends. 
