46 
FASCICULI MALATENSES 
resemblances, often of a far-fetched or superficial nature, or upon influences 
which we educated white men can only call mysterious, though to the medicine¬ 
man himself, if he takes his profession seriously, they are as much a part 
of the ordinary course of nature as heat, light or sound, even when they act 
in the first instance on a soul and only indirectly on a body. 
Medicine, then, as I have defined the term, consists largely in influencing 
spirits, whether those inherent in organized bodies or those which, having no 
bodies of their own, are perpetually attempting to attain one by ousting its 
proper soul, whose place they take. But in order to have control of spirits it 
is necessary to understand that the natural laws to which they are subject are 
not quite the same as those which govern organized bodies, for they are 
attracted or repelled by many objects and influences, such as verbal and 
arithmetical formulae, colours, odours, the mere presence of certain substances, 
and, above all, images, which have little or no direct effect, as even Malays 
acknowledge, on human beings, animals, plants, minerals, houses, and boats, 
however striking may be their compelling power in the case of the souls of 
these very organisms, I do not propose to deal with magical formulae, 1 
whether verbal or mathematical, for such matters need a very special study 
and are of no very great interest in the present enquiry, except in the case of 
one kind of verbal formulae, which is merely a threat, generally combined 
with a lie. We have a good instance of this kind of formula in the threat to 
turn the heavens and the earth upside down, which occurs repeatedly, in 
identical words, in charms and incantations. Another variety is to tell a 
spirit that one will reveal its name or origin if it makes itself unpleasant, for 
the man who knows the true name or origin of any being gains power thereby 
which may be directed against that being, while spirits have no means of 
knowing whether what a man says is true or a lie, and therefore obey him 
when he pretends to be in a position to reveal such terrifying secrets. 
With regard to colours, those which attract spirits are yellow and, in a 
less powerful degree, red ; white is rather the colour of Mahommedanism, of 
purity and of the righteous dead. For this reason medicine-men when 
conjuring spirits frequently wear a yellow veil over their heads, while the 
charms preserved with the < rice-sour are wrapped m yellow cloth. When a 
person is suffering from smallpox he frequently asks, in the name of the spirit 
which is the direct cause of this disease, for a red or yellow mosquito net and 
for hanging of the same colour for his bed, and these are at once supplied, 
though of course the Malays of Patani are quite ignorant of the science 
of phototherapy, their knowledge that red or yellow light—for that is what 
it comes to—benefits a smallpox patient being quite empyrical and wholly 
I. They are mostly the dreg* of some highly organized and philosophical culture. 
