Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/414

 372 Collectanea.

favourite game, played on moonlight nights, based on this power of transformation. The game is called Hantu miisang, — hantu meaning a spirit or demon, and miisang the common civet-cat which plunders the orchards and fowl-houses of the villagers. The game, (of which variants have been described by Mr. Skeat for Selangor,^ and by Mr. D. F. A. Hervey for Malacca,^) consists in nothing less than turning a boy temporarily into such a beast by possessing him with the '•'■ hanhi of the musangs." His outward appearance, of course, is unchanged, but one must be careful, I am told, to bring him back to the normal state within an hour or so, or he will turn into a real mnsa7tg ior good. The boy is first hypnotised, — though of course there is no such word or idea among Malays. A dull, stupid lad, the nearer half-witted the better, is invariably chosen. The experi- ence of Malay boys does not at all agree with Moll's statement ^ that "intellectual people and those who have strong wills are more easily hypnotisable than the dull, stupid or weak-willed."

The subject sits down cross-legged, and his head, at least, is wrapped in a cloth, preferably a white one. (White cloth figures very frequently in Malay magic and divination.) His ears are closed by the thumbs of one of the others, and he is told to remain motionless, not even swallowing a drop of saliva. Then he is monotonously patted on the back, or, more usually, swung backwards and forward by his arms or the ends of the enfolding cloth, while the others sing over and over again an appropriate

1 Malay Magic, pp. 498-9. [For a very similar specimen of the ' Monkey Dance' {Main Bro), see il>id., p. 465, App. p. 647 ; and for similar facts as to (presumably) hypnotic personation of animals, see ibid., pp. 160-3, 436-44 5 Pagan Races of the Malay Penitisula, vol. ii., pp. 227-9, ^11 describing imper- sonations of the tiger spirit. Mr. Skeat writes to me : " Mr. O'May's descrip- tion of the civet-cat game is cordially to be welcomed, because no one has yet made a speciality of studying hypnotism as practised by the Malays, a subject which much requires attention. Mr. O'May would be doing yeoman's service if he could send for publication in Folk-Lore at some future period a detailed statement as to any instances of actual hypnotism, (not solely cases of beast- personation), that he has himself witnessed, and tested by any of the usually approved methods, amongst the Malays of the Peninsula." Ed.]

^ 7'ke Journal of ike Royal Anthropological Institute etc., vol. xxxiii., PP- 299-300.

'Myers, Human Personality, vol. i., p. 438.