44 
FASCICULI MALA TENSES 
familiar. These familiars will also bring their c mothers * the food that their 
neighbours are cooking, or will prevent a neighbour’s snares or traps from 
catching game. If a snare or a trap does not work when the quarry has 
entered it, the hunter takes for granted that someone has sent a familiar to 
prevent it doing so, and submits it to a ceremony of exorcism, brushing out the 
evil spirit from it with the branch of a tree. 
A very intimate sympathy exists between the pelesit and its ‘ mother/ 
who becomes pale and ill if it has not sufficient people’s souls to devour and 
feels in her own person anything that the medicine-man, who is summoned 
to cast it forth from a victim, may inflict upon it. Jflfhen a person becomes 
possessed, the medicine-man 1 locks up ’ the spirit in the patient’s body, 
causing it to materialize in the form of a hard nodule under the skin of the 
arm. He then tortures it, by pinching and hitting it, until it confesses the 
name of its * mother ’ or € father.’ He has no guarantee, however, that it 
may not be lying, and so he shaves off 1 half the patient’s hair, with the result 
that the corresponding hair falls off the witch’s head. When the familiar of a 
Siamese witch enters a Malay who knows no Siamese, the possessed man 
immediately begins to speak that language, and similarly if the nationalities 
arc reversed : a Chinese familiar would cause its victim to speak Chinese, or 
a Kling familiar, Tamil. 
The modern Siamese law forbids the persecution of witches, but a stronger 
safeguard for their personal inviolability is the belief that if they are sick or 
wounded their control over their familiars is at an end, A woman may feed 
many pelesit , and she may leave them at different places with any garment she 
has worn herself, bidding them to possess people in her absence.' 
4 Medicine 1 
I have refrained from heading this section of the paper * Magic/ because 
it does not seem to me to be possible to draw any satisfactory distinction 
between magic and religion among a people even so advanced as the Patani 
Malays, Indeed, if magic be an attempt to coerce the forces of nature by 
means of cunning, combined with a skilful application of knowledge of the 
supposed laws to which the spiritual essences, or t souls/ of things are subject; 
if religion consists in reverence for spiritual beings superior to man, and in 
the performance of rites whereby such spirits may be gratified or appeased ; 
then it is impossible to say to which of the two systems of thought and 
practice many of the beliefs and actions already described most properly 
belong. 
t. Man, 1903, pp, 100-103, No. 56. 
