The Magic of Malay Medicine

The natives of the Malay Peninsula in the district of Selangor employ a Pawang, magician or medicineman, to perform the ceremonies that cure the sick.(1) Such ceremonies involve in their rationale the notion that is found in virtually all primitive communities, namely, that sickness is due to some spirit cause, such as the loss of one's own soul, or to the intrusion of an evil spirit, or to the insertion of some dematerialized object into the body.

We of the Occidental world generally leave soul or spirits and dematerialized substances out of consideration when treating the sick, so that the average physician treats the body alone; whereas the Orientals far more than ourselves are prone to leave the body out of consideration while they attempt to expel the spirit intruder, extract the dematerialized object, or restore the lost soul. Their theory seems to be that if one can put the soul in a state of comfort, it will reflect its happy condition upon the body in the aspect of good health. Under either type of treatment, one meets with both success and failure.

The Malays, it should be mentioned, are converts to Mohammedanism. Mohammedans came under the teachings of ancient Assyria and of Egypt. To grasp the fundamentals in the background of the medicineman's rites, one has to look to Egyptian religious ideas especially. Ancient Egyptians believed that a man has seven souls, or perhaps we should say that his soul has seven distinct attributes or functions. At any rate, these seven components, when they integrate in harmonious interactions, comprise the total soul of man. The “breath-soul,” “heart-soul,” “name-soul,” etc., were such components; and probably they were thought to govern the activities of the breath, the heart, and the speaking of words or names.

But to Egyptian thinking every living man was accompanied by a mystic sort of an afterbirth, which was to him a sort of double or twin-soul; and which was given to hateful tendencies. It was called the ka. In Semitic