Bajang

Also Known As: also hantu bajang, “the bajang ghost”; one of the three familiar spirits of Malay sorcery, alongside the polong and the pelesit
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Malaysian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: The bajang is a bound familiar that carries sickness at its owner’s direction, striking victims with convulsions, delirium and unconsciousness.
Role in Mythos: It is the instrument of private malice in Malay village life, the answer to the question of why a healthy child in a quiet house suddenly could not be woken.
Relation to Humans: The bajang belongs to one man, who conjures it, houses it in a stoppered length of bamboo and feeds it eggs and milk, and it goes wherever he sends it. Everybody else in the village is a potential target, and the youngest are the likeliest.

The grave is fresh and it is very small. A man kneels beside it in the hour after midnight with a length of bamboo in his hands, stoppered at one end, and he says over the loose earth the words he has paid somebody to teach him. If he has them right, something answers. What comes up is not a child. It has a long body, a ringed tail and a low sloping head, and it moves like the civets that raid the fruit trees behind the houses, and it goes into the bamboo, and the bamboo is closed.

That is one account of how a bajang is made. It is not the only one. Some Malays held that the bajang was simply a malignant spirit of the forest, out there already, owned by nobody, and that the whole business of grave-conjuring was a later refinement on a wilder and older thing. Others said the familiar was not conjured at all in most cases but inherited, handed down inside a family the way a boat or a set of tools is handed down, so that a man might come into possession of a bajang the same week he came into possession of his father’s house. R. O. Winstedt, collecting this material in the Peninsula in the 1920s, set the three explanations side by side without choosing between them and noted something else that complicates the picture further: plenty of his informants insisted that the bajang, the polong and the pelesit were not three creatures at all, only three district words for one.

The animal is the fixed point. Walter Skeat, writing out of Selangor and Perak in 1900, recorded that the bajang generally takes the form of a pole-cat and disturbs the household by mewing like a great cat. Pole-cat is a European weasel and not remotely what anyone meant. The creature in the Malay is the musang, the palm civet, a shy nocturnal animal with a musky smell and a habit of walking along roof beams, and the horror of the description is entirely in the second half of it. A civet does not sound like that. What the household hears in the dark is a cat’s voice coming out of a body too small to hold it, close, somewhere above the sleeping mats.

Kept, it wants very little. Eggs and milk, given regularly, poured into the bamboo. A familiar has to be fed. Owners were said to attend to this without ceremony, in the ordinary intervals of an ordinary day, the way a man feeds chickens, and the mundane quality of that is most of what makes the belief unpleasant to sit with: somewhere in a village of forty houses, one person is doing a small domestic chore that the other thirty-nine would kill him for.

Sent, it does not fight. It arrives, and a few hours later a child in a house across the compound is rigid and burning and will not answer to her name, and by the following night she is talking to people who are not in the room. Skeat’s contemporaries and Winstedt’s both report the same cluster of symptoms, sickness and delirium and loss of consciousness, and both report the same bias in the victims: the bajang can be aimed at any enemy its owner names, but it is considered particularly dangerous to infants and to young children. Malay mothers acted on that. Children were given bracelets of black silk thread, gelang bajang, tied at the wrist, and scissors and other sharp iron were laid near a sleeping baby, iron being one of the few things in the world the spirit was thought to have no argument with.

The powers follow from what the thing is. It was made out of a death that came too early, so it goes after the young; it was bound into a vessel by a formula, so it can be aimed by the man who holds the vessel; it has no body of its own, so it borrows a shape common enough in a Malay village that nobody looks twice. Its limits follow from the same logic. It has to be housed, and it has to be fed, and the accounts of familiars of this kind agree that one left unfed does not politely fade but turns on the house that has been keeping it. It can be blocked by black thread and cold iron, which is to say by a mother who is paying attention. And it cannot own itself: for as long as the sources describe it, the bajang is somebody’s property, and its owner is always a man, which is the neat structural counterpart to the pelesit, a cricket-shaped familiar that only women keep.

The belief did not stay in 1900. Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, Malaysia’s national language authority, still carries bajang as a class of ghost that troubles pregnant women and children. In the 2010s the office of the Mufti of the Federal Territories was asked, in a routine ruling on a routine domestic question, whether it was permissible to tie a black thread on a baby who cries a great deal. The answer was no, that this was tamimah, an amulet worn in the belief that it can benefit or avert harm, and the ruling cited Skeat’s page on the bajang by way of explaining exactly which harm the mothers of Malaya had in mind. Malaysian papers still run the creature in their seasonal lists of things the country grew up frightened of, filed as the Civet Cat Ghost, still fond of children out too late, still audible, they say, under the sound of rain.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a bajang in Malay folklore?

A bajang is a familiar spirit in Malay tradition, kept by a male sorcerer and sent out to make people ill. It appears as a musang, the Southeast Asian civet, and is stored in a stoppered length of bamboo, where its owner feeds it eggs and milk.

Where does a bajang come from?

The most commonly recorded account has a man conjure it at dead of night from the newly dug grave of a stillborn child. Other Malays said the bajang was originally just a malignant forest spirit, and it was also widely held that a bajang could be inherited, passed down within a family as hereditary property.

What does a bajang do to its victims?

It causes sickness, convulsions, delirium and loss of consciousness in whomever its owner directs it against. It is considered especially dangerous to infants and young children, which is why so much of the protective practice around it concerns babies.

How do you protect a child from a bajang?

Malay families tied bracelets of black silk thread, called gelang bajang, around a child’s wrist, and placed scissors or other sharp metal near a sleeping baby. The office of the Mufti of the Federal Territories has since ruled the black thread impermissible as an amulet, while acknowledging it as the old Malay practice against the bajang.

What is the difference between a bajang, a polong and a pelesit?

All three are familiar spirits created from the dead, and many Malays regarded the three names as regional words for a single creature. Where they are distinguished, the bajang takes the form of a civet and is always a man’s familiar, the polong is raised from the blood of a murdered man and fed from its owner’s finger, and the pelesit takes the shape of a house cricket and is kept only by women.