Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/163

Rh have been so incautious as to ask the sufferer the simple question, "What is the matter? Have you got a Polong?" are instantly affected in a similar manner. Mr. Thomson (of Singapore) saw a man who positively assured him that he had seen no less than twenty individuals thus seized at the same time.

The soothsayer or physician is called in to the patient in order to exorcise the spirit. He draws a representation of it in a white basin, and pouring water on to it, desires the patient to drink the same. He then holds the ends of the possessed person's thumb, in order to prevent the escape of the Polong (that being the door by which it makes its exits and entrances), and questions it as to its motives for tormenting the individual. Having received its replies through the mouth of the possessed, he proceeds to search all over the body for the lurking place of the spirit, which, notwithstanding its invisibility, is supposed to be perfectly tangible, and to be lodged between the skin and the flesh. As soon as the magician has discovered the spot in which the Polong is concealed, he exacts an oath of it to the effect that its previous replies were true, and that it will never re-enter the body of the person from whom it is about to be expelled. The sorcerer sometimes, indeed, exerts so great a power over the Polong, as to compel it to enter into and destroy its own master.

According to Malay accounts, the proper way to secure a Polong is to deposit the blood of a murdered man in a small bottle or flask, and recite sundry conjurations over it for the period of seven or fourteen days, when a noise will be heard in the bottle resembling the chirping of young birds. The operator then cuts his finger and inserts it into the bottle, when the Polong sucks it. This is repeated daily, and the person who thus supports the Polong is