Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/157

Rh Malay women on Keeling Island, who held a wooden spoon, dressed in clothes like a doll; this spoon had been carried to the grave of a dead man, and becoming inspired at full moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively, like a table or a hat at a modern spirit seance." This is of course an automatism, not a case of movement without contact.

II. In the next class I place these motor-automatisms in which a definite purpose, easily discernible by the uninitiated, is consciously pursued. In this case also the objects are put in motion by the unconscious muscular action of those in contact with them.

The Divining Lemon.—For divinatory purposes the Penang Malay takes a "rough-coated" lemon, a hen's egg, a wax taper, four bananas, four cigarettes, four rolled-up quids of betel-leaf, several handfuls of sacrificial rice, one of the prickles of a thorn-back mudfish, a needle with a torn eye (selected from a packet containing a score of needles, out of which, however, it must be the only one so damaged), and a couple of small birches made of the leaf-ribs of palms—one with seven twigs and the other with twelve. From among the foregoing articles, with the exception of the lemon, the fish-prickle, and the needle, two equal portions are made up, one portion, together with the birch of seven twigs, being deposited under a tree outside the house. When deposited, the egg must be cracked, and the cigarettes and the taper be lighted. The taper is then taken up between the outspread fingers of the joined hands, and "waved" slowly towards the right, centre, and left. It is then deposited on the ground, and the taper presently commences to burn blue, this being regarded as an "acknowledgment" on the part of the spirit. The fish-prickle and the needle are now thrust horizontally through the lower part of the lemon, at right angles to each other, and left so that their four ends are slightly projecting. A silken cord of seven different-coloured strands is then slipped round these ends, and