Pelesit

Also Known As: older romanisation Pĕlĕsit
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Malaysian Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A small insect-bodied familiar that flies where its owner sends it and enters a victim’s body tail first, chirping to call in the larger spirit it serves.
Role in Mythos: It is private property rather than a wandering ghost, the scout and plaything of the polong and the working end of a grudge between households.
Relation to Humans: A woman keeps it in a bottle, feeds it on parched or saffron-stained rice or on blood pricked from the tip of her fourth finger, and sends it into whoever she wishes to harm. Its victim raves about cats, and a medicine man can force the creature to speak with the sick person’s voice and name the woman who owns it.

The worst sound a Malay house can produce is a chirp that comes from inside a person.

Someone is lying on a mat with a fever, talking nonsense about cats. Cats on the roof beam, cats under the floor, cats nobody else can see. Then, from somewhere beneath the ribs, a dry insect note starts up, the sort of scraping you would ignore in a doorway and cannot ignore at all coming from a human chest. Everyone in the room understands what it means. Something has been sent, it has arrived, and it did not come alone.

The creature making that noise is about the size of a house cricket, and even the men who collected these beliefs could not agree on what it was. Walter Skeat, a colonial officer who wrote down more of this material than anyone else working in English, calls it a kind of grasshopper, then attaches a question mark and offers cricket instead, and the question mark never really goes away. It flies in a headlong, tumbling fashion, here and there, this body and that one, until it finds the person it was told to find. The Malay phrase for its flight has the sound of something falling over itself in the air.

It rarely travels for its own sake. The pelesit is the pet of the polong, and the polong is a different order of horror altogether: a tiny female figure, a mannikin roughly as long as the top joint of a little finger, kept hidden outside the house by its owner and fed on blood pricked from a finger. When the polong wants a new body it does not go first. It sends the plaything ahead. The pelesit enters, almost always tail foremost, and begins to chirp, and the chirping is the signal. Only then does the small woman follow her scout inside. The order matters, and so does the direction: harm is done when the thing goes in tail first, which is exactly how it prefers to travel.

Getting one is not a matter of finding it. It has to be made, and the making is the ugliest thing in the whole account. Go to the graveyard at night and dig up a child who was firstborn and whose mother was firstborn too, and who has been in the ground less than forty days. Carry the body out to an ant hill in open country and dandle it there, the way you would jog an infant on your knee, until it shrieks and its tongue lolls out. Bite the tongue off. Take it home. Find a solitary green coconut palm, take a shell from it, carry the shell to a place where three roads meet, and build a fire under it until the oil sweats out. Dip the tongue in the hot oil, bury it at the heart of the crossroads, and leave it alone for three nights. Dig it up on the fourth and there is your pelesit.

After that it lives in glass. Women caught and kept them in bottles, feeding them on parched rice or rice stained yellow with saffron, or on blood drawn from the tip of the fourth finger, pricked for the purpose. It is a small, regular, domestic obligation, which is the part that unsettles. The bottle sits somewhere in the house and the thing inside it has to eat. To be rid of one, the owner buries the bottle in the ground.

The cure begins with a question. When a sick person starts raving about cats, the medicine man comes, sits with the patient, addresses the creature that has taken up residence in the body, and asks it who its mother is. The pelesit answers. It uses the patient’s own throat, pitched up into a thin falsetto, and it gives the name of the person who sent it, at which point the household knows precisely which neighbour to lean on to call her property home.

The charms said over the sick turn the creature’s own origin into a weapon. One counter-spell recites the four things a body is made of, life, blood, flesh, and rest, then tells the spirit what it came from: a ghost of a human being, white earth, the filth of Adam. The version reserved for the pelesit is blunter still, and names the green coconut oil it was born in before threatening it with iron and with the whole thirty parts of the Koran. Another asks it to go back where it came from, and the old glosses on that charm explain that the route is under the tongue and along the roof of the mouth: the spirit is being invited to fly back down its owner’s throat.

Its powers are entirely powers of trespass. It goes where it is pointed, passes into a body without a wound, opens a door for something worse, and can speak through a mouth that is not its. Nothing about it is grand. Its limits are the limits of any tool. It cannot choose its target, only find one. It has to be fed. It can be buried. And it carries a flaw that no amount of skill on its owner’s part can breed out, because when it is asked directly it will say who sent it, in the sick woman’s voice, in front of witnesses. A weapon that names the hand that threw it is not much of a weapon.

None of this stayed in 1900. In Kelantan, researchers interviewing people in the present day record the pelesit among the spirits caught up in saka, the inherited familiar, a word taken from pusaka, meaning inheritance. The problem described there is not attack but succession: a dying holder must find an heir willing to take the thing on, and if nobody will, the trouble starts among the living relatives. Treatment comes from Islamic healers now, Quranic recitation and baths steeped with bidara leaves, and the creature is folded into the category of jinn. The bottle has gone. The obligation has not.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a pelesit?

A pelesit is a familiar spirit in Malay folklore that takes the form of a small insect, either a grasshopper or a house cricket depending on the account. It belongs to a specific owner rather than roaming freely, is kept in a bottle, and is sent out to enter the bodies of people its owner wants to harm.

How is a pelesit created?

The recorded method is to exhume a firstborn child of a firstborn mother who has been buried less than forty days, dandle the body at an ant hill until it shrieks and its tongue protrudes, and bite the tongue off. The tongue is then dipped in oil heated from the shell of a solitary green coconut palm, buried where three roads meet, and left three nights, after which it has become a pelesit.

What happens to a person attacked by a pelesit?

The classic sign is that the sick person raves about cats. The pelesit enters the body tail first and chirps, which calls in the polong, the far more dangerous spirit it serves, and the victim can be driven into frenzy or unconsciousness.

What is the difference between a pelesit and a polong?

The polong is a tiny female figure about the size of the top joint of a little finger, and the pelesit is its pet and plaything. The pelesit is the scout that goes in first and signals by chirping; the polong follows it into the victim. They are frequently confused, but they are two distinct beings in a fixed working relationship.

How do you get rid of a pelesit?

A medicine man asks the spirit who its mother is, and it replies through the patient’s mouth in a high falsetto, naming its owner, who is then pressured to recall it. Counter-charms recite the creature’s origin back at it, including the green coconut oil it was made in, and an owner who wants to be rid of her pelesit buries its bottle in the ground.