FASCICULI MALATENSES 
47 
based on superstition. Where innumerable remedies are in use, some 
must chance to be really beneficial, whatever their theoretical basis may be. 
Of odours the most attractive to spirits are those of incense and of 
sacrifices, while they are repelled by limes and peppercorns, especially by the 
latter ; indeed, a Patani man told me that he had once driven out a spirit, by 
which a person had become possessed, merely by pretending that he held a 
peppercorn in his hand, though he was ignorant of the very rudiments of the 
bSmors art. The substance that is most repellent to spirits is iron, of the use 
of which several instances have already been recorded; the following is another— 
when we were travelling to Senggora from Nawngchik we noticed that our 
porters were most particular never to go out without their jungle knives, and 
when we pointed out that our route lay along the sea-shore where there would 
be no need of jungle knives, they said that they were afraid of spirits if they 
travelled without their * iron.* They told us, moreover, that although they 
were accustomed to carry jungles knives to keep themselves safe, iron In any 
other form would be equally efficacious. 
The question of the coercion of spirits by the use of images is a very wide 
one, which the space at my disposal will only permit me to deal with in outline. 
Perhaps the commonest form that the practice takes is the offering of sham 
sacrifices, which deceive spirits other than familiars as infallibly as sham threats. 
In the Patani States sacrifices are of several kinds, there are offerings made on 
the graves of saints or living shrines (who, of course, are not really dead), those 
made to spirits still in the flesh (for example, the weekly offering of 1 turmeric 
rice' to the boat souls), and those made to familiars. None of these need detaiu 
us, as they are all real; for a mortal body claims mortal food : the sacrifices 
which are of importance in medicine are those made in fulfilment of a promise 
to a wild spirit, and those by means of which sickness or misfortune is cast 
away, the offerings being in both cases at least partly of a counterfeit nature. 
I have given an extreme instance of the former kind of sacrifice above, in the 
case where a spirit was promised wives and was given little female figures 
modelled in dough. At the same time it was presented with a complete set of 
domestic utensils and a number of animals, both wild and tame, all of which 
were represented in the same fashion, the whole collection being laid out for 
its delectation on the embankment of a rice-field just outside the village. At 
the same time, however, a tray containing the bodies of several newly-hatched 
chickens, parts of them raw and parts roasted over the fire, and little heaps of real 
rice of different colours, was also suspended from a tree, the miserable fledglings 
being represented as fat capons.' The spirit to which these offerings were nude 
The art of canonizing fowls it frequently practised by the Patani Malays. 
