Malay Beliefs
the Malay Magician. By Richard Vinstedt. (Routledge and
Kegan Paul. 143.)
who Jive in China for many years (in it, that is, not on it) ;become in some measure Chinese, thinking in a Chinese way and 'paring Chinese prejudices. Similarly, Sir Richard Winstedt, in an intercourse with the Malays extending to nearly a half a century, has to an important extent and in a special sense himself become • Malay. He has, by dint of continuous labour and in the light of a kareful scholarship, built up a body of writings on this people and 7'Ihetr language which has projected the Malay personality through- put the learned world, and his grammars and his dictionaries have consolidated (and sometimes invented ?) the modern Malay language. myet with all his self-identification with the Malays and his immersion In their ethos, he has not abandoned his native Western scepticism 'MJeriving from Spinoza and Hume, and his interest in Eastern religions and magic is in their symbolic efficacy and ritual beauty. He par- ,ticipates in fact, not as a believer, but rather as Keats did in the Linyths of ancient Greece. Sir Richard himself quotes with approval [the following aphorism from Disraeli: "Few ideas are correct ones, nd what are correct, no one can ascertain ; but with words we Illgovern men." But we must absolve Sir Richard from the innate leymcism—or perhaps unillusion would be the better word—of Ipisracli whose supreme tour de force was to take colour like a ,chameleon from an alien civilisation. Sir Richard really does love Ijle Malays with the whole ardour of his being.
In his short cultural history of the Malays, Sir Richard surveyed ;their origins, language, beliefs and religion, social, political and 'economic systems, literature and arts and crafts, and adumbrated
tthe future of the race ; in the present book, based in part on an artier work, he develops the passages dealing with Malay beliefs —pagan, Hindu and Muslim—and he describes the function of an important member of Malay society., The Malay magician "held out the likelihood for rain for crops and of remedies for disease. He taught spells with precise iteration. . .. He instructed how to sacrifice with such stress on detail as to make men almoit forget the risk or disaster that called for the offering. He dwelt in charms and philtres that solaced unhappy lovers and brought excite- ment into dull village lives. . . . He was an indefatigable student of ' inaccessible concupiscences and transcendencies' and he whis- pered to clever neurotic adolescents secrets that fired vague imaginings. He tightened the bonds of communal union by district and state feasts, and, so maintained co-operation among rice-planters and fisher-folk "
These and a score of other things he did. He was, in fact, of his ' primitive society, the most indispensable member.
The Malays in the terms of their poetic animism have a better vision of the elusive spirit of Malaya" than most Europeans ever have. The Malay becalmed at sea (as Sir Richard told us in an earlier book) will invoke the wind to let down her long hair to fill the sails of his boat ; he propitiates the unseen maleficent powers of hill and forest, river and tree, beast and copse, that bring sickness or death ; before he plants house-pillars he propitiates the spirit of the soil he is violating. Before he begins to fish or bunt he addresses the spirits of sea or forest with conciliatory words, and to the fish and beast he declares that it is to his gun or net, and not to him, that they must attach the blame of molesting them. Tigers are called " grandsire," crocodiles " tree-log," snakes " living creepers." With the whole of animate nature he feels in sympathy. Even the seed-plant he plants tenderly, pretending he is restoring a child to its mother. Such are the aids which help the Malay to behold and to love nature, and by such innocent devices have they
captured Sir Richard's humanistic affections. VICTOR PURCELL.
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