Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/177

Rh Hale of a Sakai chief at one of those fruit festivals so characteristic of the Malay peninsula. "To the Hantus (spirits)," he replied—"the Hantus of the forest, of the mountains, of the rivers, the Hantus of the Sakai chiefs who are dead, the Hantus of head-ache and stomach-ache, the Hantus that make people gamble and smoke opium, the Hantus that send disputes, and the Hantus that send mosquitoes." Now^ are all these Hantus, animistically speaking, on a par, or are some original, others derived? I take it that I am at one with most orthodox upholders of Animism in supposing the Hantus of the dead to be the original animæ whence the rest have derived their distinctively animistic, that is to say ghostly, characteristics. For this view it will perhaps be enough to allege a single reason. The revenant of dream and hallucination in its actual appearance to the senses, presents so exactly and completely the type to which every spirit, however indirect its methods of self-manifestation, is believed and asserted to conform, that I am personally content to regard this conclusion as one amongst the few relative certainties which Anthropology can claim to have established in the way of theory. Suppose this granted, then we find ourselves confronted with the following important train of questions, yielding us a definite nucleus and rallying-point for our present inquiry: " How came an animistic colour to be attached to a number of things not primarily or obviously connected with death and the dead? What inherent general character of their own suggested to man's mind the grouping together of the multifarious classes of so-called 'spiritual' phenomena as capable of common explanation? Was not this common explanation the outcome of a common regard, a common and yet highly specific feeling or emotion? And is not this feeling related to the ideas wherein it finds as it were symbolical expression—as for example to the animistic