Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/173

Rh way of attempting to get at the true inner meaning of these ceremonies is to compare them, not with the ceremonies of any distant and unrelated race or races, but with the ceremonies of the Jakuns of the Peninsula itself, who are an unconverted branch of this same Malayan race though in a much more backward and undeveloped state of culture.

I will take the Fish-trap first, as being the more difficult performance to explain.

The Bĕsisi are one of the more important of these Jakun tribes, and I have on several occasions been fortunate enough to be present when they were engaged in their tribal feasts, which took place at the sowing of their rice-crops, as well as when the padi began to bloom, and again at the beginning, middle, and end of the rice-harvest. On occasions of this sort a simple kind of fermented liquor was brewed from various wild jungle fruits, such as the p'rah, and a banquet follows, after which both sexes, crowning themselves with sweet-smelling wreaths of fragrant leaves and flowers, and covering their persons with cunningly-plaited leaf-festoons and tassels, indulge in singing and dancing to a late hour; the proceedings terminating in a sexual orgy.

Before the commencement of the banquet, when all the tribe have been called together, benzoin is burnt by the chief of the tribe, a portion of cooked rice deposited on the top of a tree-stump in the neighbouring jungle, and the spirits of the animals and insects which are designated as the "enemies of the rice" are at the same time invited to a solemn truce by the following charm which the chief himself pronounces:

Partake, O 'Round-foot' (a taboo-name for the elephant). Partake, O Rats, Partake, O Blight,