4.Personal Ceremonies and Charms
Project Gutenberg EPUB3 edition
Skeat, Walter William
Ceremonies and charms for protecting or rendering the person more attractive or formidable, form one of the largest, but not perhaps the most interesting or important division of the medicine-man’s repertory.
The following remarkable specimen of the charms belonging to the first of these classes was given me by ’Che ʿAbas of Klanang in Selangor, a Kelantan Malay:—
“If the corpse in the grave should speak,
And address people on earth,
May I be destroyed by any beast that has life,
But if the corpse in the grave do not speak,
And address people on earth,
May I not be destroyed by any beast that has life, or by any foe or peril, or by any son of the human race.
And if the chicken in the egg should crow,
And call to chickens on earth,
May I be destroyed by any beast that has life,
But if the chicken in the egg do not crow,”
(etc. etc., as before.)
As a general rule, however, this particular class of charms shows particularly strong traces of Arabic influence, most often, perhaps, taking the form of an injunction (addressed to Jins or Angels) to watch over the person of the petitioner.
To rightly understand charms of the second class, which includes Bathing and Betel-charming charms,49 we must have some idea of the Malay standard of beauty. This, I need hardly say, differs widely from that entertained by Europeans. In the case of manly beauty we should, perhaps, be able to acquiesce to some extent in the admiration which Malays express for “Brightness of Countenance” (chahia), which forms one of the chief objects of petition in almost every one of this class of charms;50 but none of our modern Ganymedes would be likely to petition for a “voice like the voice of the Prophet David”;51 or a “countenance like the countenance of the Prophet Joseph”; still less would he be likely to petition for a tongue “curled like a breaking wave,” or “a magic serpent,” or for teeth “like a herd of (black) elephants,” or for lips “like a procession of ants.”52
Malay descriptions of female beauty are no less curious. The “brow” (of the Malay Helen, for whose sake a thousand desperate battles are fought in Malay romances) “is like the one-day-old moon,”53 her eyebrows resemble “pictured clouds,”54 and are “arched like the fighting-cock’s (artificial) spur,”55 her cheek resembles “the sliced-off-cheek of a mango,”56 her nose “an opening jasmine bud,”57 her hair the “wavy blossom-shoots of the areca-palm,”58 slender59 is her neck, “with a triple row of dimples,”60 her bosom ripening,61 her waist “lissom as the stalk of a flower,”62 her head “of a perfect oval” (lit. bird’s-egg-shaped), her fingers like the leafy “spears of lemon-grass,”63 or the “quills of the porcupine,”64 her eyes “like the splendour of the planet Venus,”65 and her lips “like the fissure of a pomegranate.”66
The following is a specimen of an invocation for beautifying the person which is supposed to be used by children:—
“The light of four Suns, five Moons,
And the seven Stars be visible in my eye.
The brightness of a shooting star be upon my chin,
And that of the full moon be upon my brows.
May my lips be like unto a string of ants,
My teeth like to a herd of elephants,
My tongue like a breaking wave,
My voice like the voice of the Prophet David,
My countenance like the countenance of the Prophet Joseph,
My brightness like the brightness of the Prophet Muhammad,
By virtue of my using this charm that was coeval with my birth,
And by grace of ‘There is no god but God,’” etc.
When personal attractions begin to wane with the lapse of years, invocations are resorted to for the purpose of restoring the petitioner’s lost youth. In one of the invocations referred to (which is said to have been used by the Princess of Mount Ophir, Tuan Pŭtri Gunong Ledang, to secure perpetual youth), the petitioner boasts that he (or she) was “born under the Inverted Banyan Tree,” and claims the granting of the boon applied for “by virtue of the use of the “Black Lĕnggundi Bush,” which when it has died, returns to life again,”67 the idea being, no doubt, that a judicious use of black magic will enable the petitioner to “live backwards.”
The third class of invocations, for rendering the person formidable, belong rather to the chapter on war, under which heading they will be included.