5° 
FASCICULI MALA TENSES 
saintliness. There are other practices, of the nature of black magic, which 
are looked upon universally as wrong and morally indefensible. Under 
this category fall not only matters connected with the making and keeping of 
familiars, but also attempts to injure another person by the use of images or 
pictures, in other words, by sympathetic magic. Seeing that a man’s soul does 
not differ in character from any other spirit, free or embodied, and that spirits 
are incapable of distinguishing between an object and its counterfeit, it 
naturally follows that, provided only the soul is weak, or can be weakened, 
much harm may be wrought, directly on the soul and indirectly on the body, 
by the use of images. Thus, as in this country and elsewhere, a man can be 
caused to suffer pain if pins are stuck into a wax image of him in which hairs, 
nail-pairings, or the like from his body have been enclosed. As a rule it is 
not sufficient to make the image in his likeness and then to use pins ; but a 
form of exorcism must also be employed by means of which his soul is 
rendered ‘soft’ and, therefore, sick. Another common practice in Patani is 
for a jealous wife to have images made of her husband and her rival and to 
bury them, arranged back to back, at the foot of her rival’s house-ladder, 
having had the proper formula uttered over them. The husband and the 
rival will then part and go their diverse ways. Many Patani men refuse to 
put a face upon the dolls they make for their children, not solely because of 
the Mahommedan prohibition against images, but also in the fear that the face 
might chance to resemble someone, and the doll might, therefore, be used to 
work magic against this person, or might even, were it injured or did it 
become decayed, produce, as it were automatically, a similar effect upon him. 
I have already mentioned a charm used at Cape Patani to steal a woman’s 
soul and make her mad, and 1 now propose to note one or two extremely 
interesting points with regard to it. It is reproduced in facsimile in the plate 
accompanying this section of the paper. 
The principle of the charm would appear to be as follows :—It repre¬ 
sents the soul of the woman, which is drawn, as a soul should be, without 
feet, joined to the person of her enemy or of the magician who is acting as 
his agent. The man is depicted in royal attire, with the name of a powerful 
personage written on his brow, and a number of little signs seem to indicate 
that the direction of motion is from the soul towards him. His internal 
anatomy and that of the woman, or rather of her soul—for the soul pervades 
the whole body*—is indicated in a diagrammatic fashion generally adopted by 
Malay doctors. Had the woman trodden upon the charm, her soul would 
have gone out of her body to the magician, who would, doubtless, have 
caught it and preserved it in safety, or else dismissed it to some safe place. 
