Hantu Demon

Also Known As: Malay and Indonesian hantu, “ghost” or “spirit”; a whole class rather than one being, including hantu raya, hantu belian, hantu beruk, hantu rimba, hantu musang and many more
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Malaysian Mythology, Indonesian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Demons and Devils
Mythical Attributes: A hantu can enter a living body and hold it, and the seizure shows itself as convulsions, delirium, sickness or madness that no ordinary remedy touches.
Role in Mythos: The hantu are the resident spirit population of the Malay world, filling the forests, graves, rivers, trees and empty places, and standing as the explanation for misfortune that has no visible cause.
Relation to Humans: People live alongside them rather than at war with them, keeping to the courtesies that stop a spirit taking offence and paying for peace with offerings when it does. When the boundary is crossed, the hantu strikes through the body, and the household sends for a bomoh to bargain, name it and drive it out.

The drum starts slowly, and the woman lying on the mat has not moved for two days. The house smells of benzoin smoke and hot lamp oil. The bomoh sits at her head, speaking in a low voice, not to her but to the thing in her, and when the answer comes it comes out of her mouth in a voice that is not hers. This was normal medicine in the Malay Peninsula, and in parts of Kelantan and Trengganu it still is. Something got in. Someone has to talk it out.

Hantu is the Malay and Indonesian word for a spirit, and it is older than any of the religions now layered over it. It descends from an Austronesian root that also gives the Filipino anito, the Polynesian atua and the Bunun hanitu, which means the belief was already travelling in the canoes. It is not a name. It is a category, and the category is enormous.

Nobody agrees on how many kinds there are. When Walter Skeat spent his years as a district officer in Selangor at the end of the nineteenth century and set the whole system down in writing, he catalogued spirit after spirit, each with its own address and habits: the hantu rimba of the deep forest, the hantu beruk that wears the shape of an ape, the hantu belian that moves as a tiger, the hantu air that owns the water, the jembalang in the soil, and above them the hantu raya, the great one, which can command the lesser spirits and can be bound by a magician to serve him. The hierarchy runs like the hierarchy of a forest. Small things are tied to a single tree, a single grave, a single stretch of ditch. Big things go where they like.

Because they are ordinarily invisible, the hantu are described by their effects rather than their anatomy, and the effects are physical. A hantu is not a wisp or a haze. Malay belief gives these beings bodies, real ones, capable of touching and being touched, which is why a spirit can be trapped, fed, beaten out or carried around in a bottle. When one does show itself, it shows itself as an animal or as a familiar human silhouette, and the choice of shape tells the trained eye which spirit it is. The hantu raya has the worst habit of all. It takes the appearance of the man who owns it, so a villager may see his neighbour walking the path at an hour when his neighbour is asleep at home.

Their origins are as various as their names. Some are the dead who did not go quietly, the ones whose deaths were violent or unclean or who left an unfinished appetite behind them. Some were never human at all and belong to the older animist stock, the nature spirits of the trees and the ground and the tideways, present long before anyone thought to be frightened of them. Others are manufactured. A bomoh can make a familiar spirit and keep it, feeding it and inheriting it and being fed on in return, which is the sort of arrangement that looks profitable right up until the day it does not.

The seizure itself has a shape. A person walks past the wrong tree at dusk, or spills hot water carelessly onto the ground, or takes something from the forest without asking, and by nightfall the fever is climbing. The Malay phrase for it is plain: kena hantu, struck by a spirit. Children playing at possession would call the hantu musang, the civet ghost, into one of their number, and the game had a way of stopping being a game, ending in convulsions, unconsciousness and a delirium that had to be sung out of the child. Paul Brewster wrote that game up in 1958 and traced its cousins across Indonesia and Indochina, which tells you how deep the pattern runs.

Then the bomoh comes. In the healing seance the shaman works with a musician and a drum and a spike fiddle, the sound running all night, and the patient goes into a trance while the spirits are called by name and questioned. Carol Laderman sat through these ceremonies in Trengganu in the 1970s and 1980s, and found that the sickness was not always a spirit at all. It could be angin, the inner wind, the pressure of a nature or a talent that has never been allowed out. The cure in that case is not exorcism. It is being permitted, for one night, to be what you are.

The powers of a hantu follow from what it is. It is invisible, and can therefore go anywhere. It is unbound by flesh, and can therefore take flesh that is not its own. It has an appetite, usually for blood or breath or the vitality of the living, and it collects. Against a farmer, a fisherman, a woman in childbirth, it holds every advantage.

The weaknesses follow just as neatly. A spirit that lives on being fed can be paid off, and the offering tray of woven palm fronds, with its rice, its eggs and its betel leaves, is a bill settled. A spirit that must be named to act can be named against, and the incantations Skeat collected work exactly that way, addressing the hantu by its own name and title until it has no room left to stand in. A spirit that is bound to a place can be avoided by anyone with the sense to ask leave before cutting a tree. And a spirit that has entered a body can be argued out of it, because it has, in the end, made itself a guest, and a guest can be asked to leave.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a hantu?

Hantu is the Malay and Indonesian word for a spirit or ghost, and it names a whole class of beings rather than one individual. It covers spirits of the dead, nature spirits of forests, water and soil, and manufactured familiars kept by magicians. The word comes from an old Austronesian root shared with the Filipino anito and the Polynesian atua.

What does a hantu do to people?

A hantu possesses people and animals, and the possession is blamed for convulsions, delirium, fever, wasting sickness and madness. Malay belief treats these as the visible sign of a spirit that has entered the body, usually after a person has trespassed on its ground or offended it. The Malay phrase for it is kena hantu, meaning struck by a spirit.

What are the main types of hantu?

Among the many recorded types are the hantu raya, the great spirit that commands lesser ones and takes the appearance of its owner; the hantu belian, which moves as a tiger; the hantu beruk, which wears the shape of an ape; the hantu rimba of the deep forest; the hantu air of the water; and the hantu musang, the civet spirit invoked in possession games. Walter Skeat recorded dozens of them in the Malay Peninsula in the 1890s.

How do you get rid of a hantu?

The traditional remedy is the bomoh, the Malay shaman or medicine man, who identifies the spirit, calls it by name in incantation, and either bargains with it or forces it out. Offerings are laid on a woven tray, incense is burned, and in the healing seances of Kelantan and Trengganu the patient is put into a trance to the sound of drum and spike fiddle so the spirit can be questioned directly.

Are all hantu evil?

No. Because Malay spirit belief is animist at its root, hantu are understood as sharing the world with the living rather than opposing them, and many are neutral residents of a place. They become dangerous when a boundary is crossed, an offering is neglected, or a person trespasses on the ground a spirit holds.