Article

Charms

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Charms

Charms constitute a widespread and deeply embedded category of ritual practice across the Malay Peninsula and Borneo, encompassing incantations, talismans, and divination procedures employed for purposes ranging from agricultural fertility and personal protection to romantic attraction and the assessment of weapons. The documented record reveals a tradition of considerable antiquity and regional diversity, in which Islamic theological vocabulary, pre-Islamic animistic practice, and indigenous cosmological systems are frequently interwoven within single operational frameworks. From the Sufi-derived pantheist charms of the Kelantanese coast to the thumb-measuring divinations of the Jakun and Semai of the interior, and from the compulsion spells of Brunei’s archaic manuscripts to the love incantations recorded in the 1920s, the evidence points to a living tradition that colonial-era scholars regarded as both intellectually significant and, in several cases, in urgent need of documentation before its loss.

Scope and Historical Definition

The term “charm” in the literature of the period covers a broad spectrum of ritual objects and verbal formulae. Among the Ulun-no-Bokan (Murut) people of Borneo, H. G. Keith identified the generic Bokan dialect term tinogum for charms, and recorded four specific types, each with a distinct name and ritual application: susungug, a charm fed to dogs to improve their hunting ability by boiling a stone in water and pouring the liquid down the animal’s throat; pananam bilud, placed with padi (rice) seed to ensure a crop with fat grains; tambar, a preventive against sickness in which the charm is soaked in water for bathing; and panginging dapoh, used to bring good luck in trading or dowry negotiations, ensuring cheapness when buying and a low dowry when seeking a bride [1, p. 330].

In the Malay-speaking world, the category is equally diverse. A. W. Hamilton recorded six Malay love charms (pemanis) tied to specific domestic actions—reciting while combing hair, oiling the head, bathing under the moon, or preparing a cigarette—each employing characteristic poetic imagery of sweet limes, hawks, and swirling water, alongside references to Islamic figures such as Muhammad, David, and Solomon, to direct love toward the speaker and hatred away from rivals [2, pp. 136–138]. R. O. Winstedt, writing in 1922, presented a translation and analysis of a Malay pantheist charm called the Kota Tawhid (“Fortress of the Unity of God”), attributed to a practitioner named Maklab Setam, which he judged to derive from a manuscript approximately a century old, itself transcribed from an even older source [3, p. 262]. The charm is structured as a protective incantation in which the practitioner constructs a metaphorical fortress: its roof is the shahada, its wall is the name of Muhammad, and its key is the power of God [3, pp. 261–267].

In Borneo, G. T. MacBryan and Muhammad Yusof Shibli published translations of two Brunei magical charms (silah-silah) in 1947, the first systematic rendering of archaic Brunei manuscripts obtained on a pre-war visit to the sultanate [4, p. 48]. These texts belong to a genre of magical-practical literature traditionally circulated in rotation among leading Brunei households, and they reveal a syncretic religious cosmology in which Islamic angelology, prophetic genealogy, and pre-Islamic animistic practices are woven into a single operational framework [4, pp. 48–59].

Intellectual and Theological Frameworks

Winstedt’s analysis of the Kota Tawhid provides the most sustained intellectual genealogy of Malay charm literature. He traced the tradition from animist roots through Hindu-Brahminical mantra to Sufi pantheism, identifying the Shi’ite figure of Ali as the traditional repository of esoteric knowledge in Malay charms [3, pp. 261–267]. Drawing on Snouck Hurgronje’s Arabie en Oost-Indie (1907), Winstedt demonstrated that the “mystic four”—the four elements, winds, Khalifs, and legal schools—functioned as a popular symbolic system for expressing the indivisibility of the Divine, and that this system was not confined to learned circles but formed the “woof and warp” of popular belief across the archipelago [3, pp. 261–267]. A Kelantanese pawang (shaman) charm invoking the four winds mapped onto the four layers of the body—skin, flesh, sinew, soul—was cited as a concrete illustration of this numerological mysticism in practice [3, pp. 261–267].

The theological content of the Kota Tawhid is explicitly pantheist: the practitioner is instructed to recite until “I am lost in the universal and absolute Essence of God” and “my self becomes absolute and universal too,” a formulation Winstedt linked directly to the doctrine of the Perfect Man in the school of al-Jili [3, pp. 263–264]. The “sevenfold fortress” corresponds to seven attributes of the perfect human being—life, knowledge, power, will, hearing, sight, and speech—and seven parts of the body used in prostration: forehead, palms, knees, and toes [3, pp. 263–264]. The “ten senses” are divided into five outward (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch) and five inward (consciousness, faith, insight, perception, judgment) [3, p. 264].

Winstedt closed by connecting the charm to two historical episodes: the Sejarah Melayu account of Sultan Ahmad of Malacca taking his Sufi teacher into battle against the Portuguese, and a recorded case of heterodox pantheism in Perak roughly thirty years earlier, in which a preacher was imprisoned for teaching that “I am God” and for reducing Islamic ritual to sexual allegory [3, p. 265]. The contrast between the refined Sufi pantheism of the charm and the vulgar pantheism of the Perak case served Winstedt’s implicit argument that the same metaphysical source could produce either elevated mysticism or flagrant heresy depending on the practitioner’s intellectual capacity [3, p. 265].

The Brunei silah texts present a parallel but distinct syncretic pattern. The repeated formula mujarrab mustajab (“proved by experience, readily granted”) and the conditional clause “provided always that it pleases God” indicate an attempt to reconcile the magical with orthodox Islamic theology [4, pp. 48–59]. The second charm’s invocations name at least twenty prophetic and saintly figures, including Christ, Noah, Jonah, Joseph, Job, Moses, Solomon, Abdul-Kadir Jilani, Abu-Bakar, Ali, Omar, Othman, Hassan, and Hussain, alongside pre-Islamic elements such as the use of a widow’s personal effects and the ocean-launching of a model vessel [4, pp. 53–58].

Material Culture and Divinatory Practice

A substantial body of documentation concerns the physical and divinatory dimensions of charm practice, particularly in the context of weapons. P. D. R. Williams-Hunt’s 1952 fieldwork record, drawing on recordings made between 1949 and 1951 among the Jakun, Semai Semelai, Senoi (Sakai), and Malay informants, documents divination charms and physical measurement techniques used when assessing the suitability of weapons [5, pp. 56–61]. Williams-Hunt noted that although many of the charms used by the Aborigines for measuring weapons are obviously of Malay origin, they did not appear to have been recorded before, and that steps should be taken to put them on record before they were lost [5, p. 56].

Among the Jakun of the Maran area (Pekan District, Pahang), a thumb-measuring sequence for keris (dagger) comprised a series of words—kerakup, kanek, kanek, tumbok, atas, batu, rimeau, nanti, kampong, gajab, nanti, perabu—each carrying a specific valence ranging from “very bad” (kerakup: the owner will be prone to words rather than actions) to “very good” (rimeau: the owner will always be on the alert) [5, p. 56]. The mengkuang (pandanus) strip method, used by both Lowland and Hill Semai, involved measuring the blade, folding the strip in two, cutting it into segments the width of the blade’s centre, and laying them alternately cross and longitudinal; finishing on a cross section rendered the weapon unsuitable [5, pp. 59–60]. A Javanese informant from Pachitan provided a numerical classification system for keris based on the mengkuang count: certain numbers indicated a good weapon for fighting men, others for house protection, others for personal use, and a final set—3, 5, 13, 16, 21, 25—as dangerous weapons that might turn against their owner [5, p. 61].

J. D. Gimlette’s 1920 article examines a talismanic belt recovered from the body of an unidentified Malay robber killed during a break-in in Kelantan in 1917 [6, pp. 116–118]. The belt, concealed in the man’s sarong, consisted of a girdle of two twisted cords forming a central pouch, wrapped in orange calico dyed with jack-tree heartwood, and further encased in a long strip of white cloth whose inner surface bore Siamese inscriptions, numerals, and drawings [6, p. 116]. The talismans secured within included a wild boar’s tusk, several stones, a tuft of hair identified by police as chemara babi (a charm associated with protection from weapons and induction of sleep in victims), and a fragment of copper pyrites [6, pp. 116–118]. Gimlette subjected the hair tuft to microscopic examination and found it to be human hair (75 microns in breadth), not the coarse vegetable fibres (225–300 microns) that constitute genuine chemara babi charms, which he had separately examined in Kota Baharu [6, p. 118]. A genuine chemara babi charm in Kota Baharu consisted of approximately thirty stiff dark palm fibres tied into a bundle about fifteen inches long, enclosed in a red cloth bag, and valued at more than fifty dollars [6, p. 118]. The Siamese inscriptions on the cloth were assessed by Chow Kiew, the high priest of the Siamese community in Kelantan, who dismissed the design as a spurious, commercially produced charm made by a Siamese “witch doctor” for a few dollars, with letters and figures taken haphazardly from sacred texts [6, p. 118].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on charms spans more than three decades, from Gimlette’s forensic examination of a single talismanic belt in 1920 to Williams-Hunt’s urgent fieldwork record of 1952, and reveals a shifting set of priorities. The earliest contributions—Gimlette (1920) and Winstedt (1922)—emerged from the colonial administrative context: Gimlette’s object was recovered through a police case, and Winstedt’s manuscript was accessed through his official position in the Straits Settlements, its provenance deliberately obscured by a promise to its possessor [3, p. 262], [6, pp. 116–118]. Both articles reflect the period’s interest in cataloguing material culture encountered through administrative contact, with Gimlette’s forensic-microscopic approach distinguishing it from purely descriptive ethnography [6, pp. 116–118].

The 1930s and 1940s saw a broadening of geographic and ethnographic scope. Keith’s short note on Murut charms (1936) and Hamilton’s collection of Malay love charms (1926) extended the record to Borneo and to the intimate domestic sphere respectively [1, p. 330], [2, pp. 136–138]. MacBryan and Shibli’s translation of the Brunei silah texts (1947) represented a significant historiographical intervention: Tom Harrison’s introduction argued that Borneo had been systematically underrepresented in reconstructions of Malayan and Indonesian history, and that the Brunei manuscripts constituted a “treasure-trove of detail” capable of resolving contradictions that had previously confounded Winstedt and Wilkinson in their Perak history [4, p. 48].

Williams-Hunt’s 1952 article marks a distinct methodological turn toward urgent field documentation. His explicit concern that these oral traditions “are in active process of being lost” and his systematic recording of multiple informants across several ethnic groups and districts reflect a mid-century awareness of cultural change that the earlier, more archival contributions had not addressed [5, p. 56]. The article also documents the transmission pathway by which Malay-origin divination practices were adapted—and distorted—into Aboriginal contexts, a dynamic that earlier scholarship had largely overlooked [5, p. 56].

Across the full span of the record, no single comprehensive treatment of charms as a unified subject has been attempted. The literature remains a collection of discrete contributions, each addressing a particular object, text, or practice, and the absence of a synthetic study remains a notable gap in the Society’s published output on this theme.

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. H.G. Keith (1936). Some ulun-no-bokan (Murut) charms JMBRAS 14(3): 330.
  2. Hamilton A.W (1926). Malay love charms. Recorded and .W. Hamilton JMBRAS 4(1): 136–138. Read on JSTOR
  3. R.O. Winstedt (1922). A Malay pantheist charm JSBRAS 86: 261–267.
  4. G.T. MacBryan and Muhammad Yusof Shibli (1947). Two Brunei charms. Tr G.T. MacBryan and Mohd. Yusof Shibli JMBRAS 20(2): 48–59.
  5. P.D.R. Williams-Hunt (1952). Some Malay and aboriginal charms and methods of measuring weapons JMBRAS 25(1): 56–61.
  6. J.D. Gimlette (1920). A curious Kelantan charm JSBRAS 82: 116–118. Read on JSTOR