27 h 13 minAudiobook8 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What does daily life look like when birth, marriage, work and death each call for a ritual?
In Malay Magic, Walter William Skeat explores the beliefs and customs of the Malay Peninsula. Drawing on villagers, magicians and earlier writers, he records ideas about souls, spirits and the rites that shape ordinary life. Trees, hills and rivers appear as places inhabited by spirits, according to the beliefs he describes.
Skeat follows ceremonies from the protection of mother and child to the planting and harvesting of rice. He introduces the magician and traces how older beliefs sit beside Islamic and Hindu ideas. Published in 1900, this detailed study also carries a British colonial outlook: it offers much to explore, but asks to be read with care.
What you’ll discover
- The wandering soul Explore semangat, the life spirit believed to wander or be frightened away from a person.
- Rites at life's thresholds Follow the customs surrounding birth, marriage and death, where family life meets beliefs about spirits.
- Rice and ritual Discover the careful ceremonies addressed to the rice spirit at planting and harvest.
- Magicians and their roles Meet the pawang and bomoh through Skeat's accounts of charms, cures and dealings with spirits.
- Layers of belief See how Skeat describes older traditions alongside Islamic and Hindu ideas in village life.
Who will love it
Readers who love folklore, anthropology, spirits and charms, old travel writing, or the meeting of Islam with older village beliefs, and anyone curious how ordinary people once explained storms, sickness, harvests and luck.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- The world rests on tales of creation
- Kings are divine and their things can kill
- The body and the soul need careful guarding
- The magician stands between villagers and spirits
- Holy places and rites keep the unseen at peace
- A crowded pantheon of gods, genii and ghosts
- Hunting, farming and mining are bargains with spirits
- Life from birth to burial is wrapped in ritual
- Healing, play and fortune-telling reveal the Malay mind
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- Large print hardcover
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Read and hear Malay Magic in 25 languages and switch at any time. Or read two side by side, paragraph by paragraph: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Malay Magic
by Walter William Skeat · 1900
A Selangor magician holds a Rice-soul in a cradle basket, while a king's trumpet strikes down the careless.
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In short
What do you do when the moon is being swallowed? In Malay villages, you beat gongs and drums until the monster lets go.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
The world rests on tales of creation
Malay stories of creation mix Islamic, Hindu and older village ideas. One version says light flowed from the Supreme Being and became the ocean, while the mountains of Kaf ringed the earth like a wall. Another, copied from a magician's charm-book, makes God the Eldest Magician who made an earth the width of a tray and a heaven the width of an umbrella.
The details grow stranger. The earth rides on the horns of a great buffalo, and earthquakes come when it tosses the world from one horn to the other. The tides are caused by a gigantic crab that blocks and unblocks a hole at the Navel of the Seas, beside the magic tree Pauh Janggi. Eclipses happen when a dragon eats the sun or moon, so villagers make a din to scare it away.
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What is Malay Magic about?
It collects the folklore, popular religion and magic of the Malays of the Peninsula, covering creation myths, kings, spirits, charms, farming, hunting, mining, birth, marriage, death, medicine, games, theatre and divination.
Who was Walter William Skeat?
He was a British colonial civil servant in the Federated Malay States who lived mainly in Selangor, collected charms and objects, and wrote this book, published in 1900 with a preface by Charles Otto Blagden.
What does semangat mean in this book?
Semangat is the Malay word for the soul or life-force. It is pictured as a thumb-sized human figure that can leave the body, and is also found in rice, trees, animals and minerals.
The author
Walter William Skeat
1835–1912 · British anthropologist
British etymologist and professor.
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