Spirits and ghosts in the East – Part Two

In the first part, we took a quick look at the many forms that spirits and ghosts can take in the East; considering that still many remain off the list.

But now I would like to dwell in particular on the Far East since that was the starting point of our history.

 

Malays, like all other Asian peoples, as we have seen, have always had a great interest in stories of ghosts and spirits. It should be emphasized that due to the animistic root of Malay folklore, these ghosts are seen as people who share the plane of existence with humans and are not always considered evil, even though the subtle co-inhabitation of the two planes of existence can result in a conflict which can lead to disorders such as possessions.

The Malay word for ghost is hantu, although this word also refers to all kinds of demons, goblins, and undead creatures that are thought to have actual physical bodies, instead of mere apparitions or specters. The most famous of these is the pontianak or matianak – the ghost of a stillborn girl who attracts men in the form of a beautiful woman.

I want to devote my attention to this ghost and to others similar to it.

First, to be specific, Kuntilanak (Indonesian name), also called Pontianak (Malay name), is a mythological creature in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. It is similar to Langsuir in other Southeast Asian regions. The Pontianak usually takes the form of either a baby girl, as mentioned above, or a pregnant woman who is unable to give birth to a boy. Alternatively, she is often described as a vampiric and vengeful female spirit.

 

Let's start right from the Langsuir.

The langsuyar is a female revenant in Malaysian and other Malay Archipelago mythologies and takes its name from the Malay word for eagle (helang).

A langsuyar is a type of vampire ghost of a woman who died during pregnancy or childbirth.

Her description is similar to that of other ghosts we have seen before: a beautiful woman, with long black hair down to her ankles, they have also sometimes been described as having impossibly long fingernails and hands that extend down to her feet. They prey on humans, preferring the blood of newborn males, but also consume newborn females.

In his book “Malay Magic”, Walter William Skeat, an English anthropologist, related the origins of the langsuyar myth, as told by the Malays at Selangor:

“The original Langsuir (whose embodiment is supposed to be a kind of night owl) is described as being a woman of dazzling beauty, who died from the shock of hearing that her child was stillborn, and had taken the shape of the Pontianak. On hearing this terrible news, she “clapped her hands”, and without further warning "lew whinnying away to a tree, upon which she perched”. She may be known by her robe of green, by her tapering nails of extraordinary length (a mark of beauty), and by the long jet-black tresses that she allows to fall down to her ankles—only, alas! (for the truth must be told) in order to conceal the hole in the back of her neck through which she sucks the blood of children! These vampire-like proclivities of hers may, however, be successfully combated if the right means are adopted, for if you are able to catch her, cut short her nails and luxuriant tresses, and stuff them into the hole in her neck, she will become tame and indistinguishable from an ordinary woman, remaining so for years. Cases have been known, indeed, in which she had become a wife and a mother until she was allowed to dance at a village merry-making when she at once reverted to her ghostly form and flew off into the dark and gloomy forest from whence she came.”

Langsuyars are also associated with a nighthawk or owl, which is said to perch on the roof of the house while a pregnant mother or child is attacked by the vampire. In some traditions, langsuyar takes the form of a nocturnal bird altogether, believing the owl's call to be the cry of a woman seeking her lost son.

The people of Kampung can prevent a deceased woman from returning as a langsuyar by placing glass beads in the mouth of the corpse, a chicken egg in the armpits, and needles in the palms of the hands: it is believed that in this way the deceased woman cannot become a langsuyar as she cannot open her mouth wide to shout or wave the arms and open and close her hands when flying.

Therefore, although with some similarities they are not the same as our Pontianak.

Pontianak derives from myths and folktales, some of which are especially popular in Kalimantan (Borneo). As one of the most famous myths in Indonesian folklore, it inspired the name of a capital city in the West Kalimantan region. The city of Pontianak, it is said, was always a land haunted by ghosts, until Syarif Abdurrahman Alkadrie chased them away with cannon shots; in that area in the forest, the sultanate planned to build the foundations of a mosque and a palace. That first Sultanate of Pontianak, in office from 1771 to 1808, was persecuted by these evil creatures. Today the place is covered in trees and the locals still believe it is haunted by the Pontianak.

The origin of the first Pontianak turns out to be in Selangor, Malaysia, and is related to the tragic events of a beautiful mother of Selangor who gave birth to her child only to see him die a moment later – in pain, she took flight and was lost in the forest in search of her lost child among the spirits that inhabited it. The term Pontianak literally means “ghost carrying a child”.

The Pontianak is often depicted as a long-haired woman dressed in white and represents local variations of a vampire. She lures unsuspecting men to instill terror and carry out her revenge. Signs that a Pontianak is nearby are the cry of a newborn baby and the smell of a rotting corpse or plumeria blossom.

In other legends it is said that it appears only during the full moon and that the signs of its presence – in addition to the cries of children – are female laughter: if these sounds are loud then it is far away, if they are low then it is very close, so it is even for a dog's howl, the louder the howl the farther the ghost is, but if the dog complains softly she is already a few steps away.

Her anger and vengeance arise from her inability to bear, when she was alive, her own stillborn child in her womb; in Malaysia, tradition describes them as bloodsucking vampires in the guise of beautiful women to attract men whose internal organs they then rip open.

Pontianak kills her victims by using her long fingernails to physically remove their internal organs to eat. If a victim has its eyes open when a Pontianak is nearby, it will suck them out of its head. The Pontianak is said to locate its prey by the smell of their clean laundry; for this reason, some Malays avoided leaving any article of clothing outside the house during the night.

 

In Indonesia, the Pontianak becomes Kuntilanak, similar to it but here it commonly takes the form of a bird that sucks the blood of virgins and young women.

Even this ghost can take on female features. When a man approaches her, attracted by her beauty, the Kuntilanak suddenly turns around and reveals that her back is hollow and from that hole, she devours her prey: she can be subdued by driving a sharp nail into the top of her head, or into the cavity behind the neck, which is its devouring mouth.

In the guise of a bird, which makes a “ke-ke-ke” sound as it flies, it can be sent through black magic to ill a woman, and the hallmark symptom of such a spell is vaginal bleeding.

Now, it certainly doesn't need Freud's science to read these legends in a psycho-analytic key. It's all extremely obvious.

That the dangerous “female entity” reveals her true nature, hidden by the tempting beauty, uncovering her cavity from the thick black hair that sucks in and devours men, is the clear translation into symbolic terms of the sexual act and of the fear that the power woman's lust exercises on the man.

Then the task, duty, and effort of the wise and pious man is to drive his stake, or nail, into that cavity to make her a docile and submissive woman.

Once again, then, menstrual blood appears as an ominous sign of disease and possession.

The maximum expression of this vision is the last demon I want to tell you about, which I discovered while studying this subject.

In this case, the symbol and its meaning go hand in hand. There's no need to bother with anthropology or psychology.

Kuntilanak shares her features with Sundel Belong, the ghost of the prostitute who devours her male prey with a large gaping hole on her back. Here, even in the name, we are in total frankness: the name “sundel bolong” comes from the physical appearance of the ghost, the word “sundel”, means prostitute or whore, and “bolong” in Javanese which literally means hole.

In Indonesian mythology, a sundel bolong, is a mythical ghost of the archipelago with the appearance of a woman with beautiful long black hair and a long white dress (her shape is similar to Pontianak). The myth is closely related to prostitutes, whose name can therefore be translated as “prostitute with a hole in her”, and refers to the large hole that is said to appear in her back.

In folklore, a sundel bolong is the soul of a woman who died when pregnant out of wedlock and then gave birth in her grave, or who died in childbirth and the child came out of her back (this is why she has the hole in the back) which is hidden from men by her long black hair.

The victims of sundel bolong are mainly men and children. As a vengeful spirit, if she is rejected by a man, she is said to castrate him while children, especially infants, are taken to replace the lost child.

Modern folklore studies believe that the myth was developed in Javanese culture to discourage prostitution that developed during the colonization of the Dutch East Indies.

 

This is exactly what I think too and what I have found in some books and in these stories. In other words, how certain myths and superstitions, regardless of what one believes in them, serve to codify and inject into the connective tissue of a people what are the values and taboos. What is good and bad.

Sticking in the brain, since childhood, through fairy tales and superstitions, what are believed to be the values of a society. For which menstrual blood is magical and a sign of misfortune, the woman is a demon and a vampire who must continually satisfy her sexual hunger, and if a woman fails in her “natural and ancestral” task – that is to give birth – then misfortune and touch of the devil will fall upon her.

Up to the myth, which is a pure legislative precept, of the “prostitute with a hole” that devours you if you get close to her.

Then everyone believes what he wants.

It is certainly very fun and interesting to know these myths because they also tell a lot about people and countries far away from us.

After all, as Campoli writes in her book, when she asked a Thai why they believed in ghosts and not in zombies, like us in the West, he replied: “Because zombies don't exist.”

Italian version