has grown.[1] I shall therefore now endeavour in the first place to put the details of the Malay performances before you as clearly as possible. I shall then proceed to state the problem, in so far as it concerns ethnology, and shall only refer incidentally to the few, and, I fear, somewhat negative results which may be of general psychical interest. Speaking generally, most forms of spiritualism known to us in Europe are most likely known in some form or other to Malay magicians, even though they may not all have been yet recorded. Devil-dancing is practised, and apparitions, and what maybe called Pelting Spirits (Poltergeistern) are certainly most strongly believed in. Houses are left uninhabited on account of phenomena of the classes referred to, and I myself once lived for many months in a Malay house which, according to the Malays, was unmistakably haunted.
Of spirit-writing and levitation, no purely Malay accounts are yet to hand. It would be unsafe to assume the absence of the first till we know for certain if there is any really automatic form of planchette practised in China, beside the case described by Professor Giles as long ago as 1879, in which a poem was composed for the writers. As to the second, there are many references in Malay literature to the flying performances of Malayan heroes, whilst to this day it is alleged in Selangor that people possessed by the Pontianak[2] (one of the tremendous birth-demons of Malay
- ↑ For many of the notes, and for much valuable assistance in the compiling of this paper, I am indebted to Mr. N. W. Thomas.
- ↑ In the Malay Peninsula the Pontianak (or Mati-anak) is usually distinguished as the ghost of a child who has died at birth, the ghost of a woman who has died in child-birth being called "langsuir," and credited with all the attributes which elsewhere belong to the Pontianak. Cf. Col. J. Low on Siamese Customs J. A. I., vol. i., p. 361, which I had not seen when I wrote to the above effect in Malay Magic, pp. 318 and 327. There is no doubt that the two are often confused, but the belief in the langsuir, as distinguished from the Pontianak, is certainly the usual explanation in the Peninsula. [Cf. Kruijt in Med. Ned. Zend., xxxix., p. 17, and xlii., p. 433; also Riedel, 57, 58, 81, 184, 239, 267 (and in several other passages), though in none of these is the langsuir once mentioned. N. W. T.]
