FASCICULI MALAYENSES 
55 
Conclusions 
I do not propose to occupy valuable space by weaving ethnological 
theories out of the threads of convergent development and genetic relation¬ 
ship that run through the records I have made. These records, however, 
throw light on certain points in comparative religion which should not be 
passed over in silence. 
It is clear from them, in the first place, that the Malays of the Patani 
States have been profoundly influenced by a culture higher than that to which 
they have attained themselves. We can strip away Mahommedanism from 
them and leave their magic and practical religion almost intact, their folk-lore 
merely.derived of certain names and references ; but we cannot rid them so 
easily of the relics of Hindu teaching that permeate all their beliefs—the 
superstitions of ignorant peasants as well as the theories of the medicine-men. 
To take one or two instances of this Hindu influence—the story, told me in 
Patani town, of a man whose soul got accidentally shut up in a jar of water 
is but a corrupt version of a tale current in different parts of India, 1 whence 
also comes the belief that spirits have extra power on Friday, with many of 
the popular names of ghosts and spirits. 
In spite of this highly cultured influence, much remains among the 
Patani Malays of what may be regarded as the common heritage of primitive 
man, namely, the faith in a materialistic animism, which attributes to all 
natural and many artificial objects a very definite personality. This personality 
seems to us mysterious only because we have not been brought up to regard 
it as a natural fact, a kind of potential energy individualized and almost 
rendered concrete, what we call a soul. In all things, therefore, soul as well 
as body must be considered. Souls are spirits, akin to those which have no 
body, or even recruited from their ranks. Spirits and bodies alike are subject 
to some barely imagined Necessity or Law, the existence of which is half 
realized in practice, if not in theory, by the savage, although he cannot give 
his ideas a name or a form. Primitive man, with the superior cunning which 
experience teaches him that he possesses as regards the powerful brutes that 
often form his prey, thinks that he, 1 a tiny little thing which can give orders 
to an elephant,' as 1 once heard a Siamese youth exclaim, can bend even 
Necessity to serve his ends. Under the influence of Mahommedanism, 
Necessity itself has become personified—Tuhan Allah, the Lord God 
Omnipotent, who reigns in the Heavens far away. 
Hence, too, we get magic becoming religion, so that it is impossible to 
draw an exact line between them. Hindus, Buddhists, and Mahommedans 
I. Fraztr, Tkt Crtldtt t Bought 2nd fd., p. 256 et ptitta. 
