Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/148

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Malay Spiritualism.

and truer one, and both contribute to enrich popular fancy and poetry.

Only a careful first-hand investigation of documentary evidence will succeed in sifting the so-called ancient remnants existing in the minds of the people, and in determining whether they are to be looked upon as such "relics of an unrecorded past" or as fragments of recent origin. I have tried here to join link to link in the chain of tradition in order to show how deep the influence of this form of the Antichrist legend has been, and how far-reaching in its results upon the religious and political development of the nations of Europe during the last thousand years, in the course of which the Letter of Toledo has played an important part. Other investigations will doubtless show how much it has enriched the people's knowledge and has contributed to bring about that state of mind which strikes us as archaic and "folkloric."


MALAY SPIRITUALISM.

BY WALTER SKEAT, M.A.

(Read at Meeting, 26th March, 1902.)

When I recently had the honour of being invited by the Council to read a paper before this Society, I had nothing ready which seemed suitable for the purpose. It appeared to me, however, that it would be a useful piece of work to bring together in one paper the main facts concerning the spiritualistic beliefs of the Peninsular Malays, with special reference to motor-automatisms of the type of the Divining-Rod, where the motions of an inert object in contact with a human being may be regarded as externalisations of subconscious knowledge. Out of this idea the present paper