Raja Kumbang. My Theories, Thoughts and Practicalities…

I was thinking about divinity the other day.

About God.

I was think about mortality.

And Immortality.

Of human beings, and other beings.

Is there any other sentient life-forms other than us humans? Aliens maybe?

How about supernatural folk?

From the Holy Qur’an, it is understood that there are two races, humans and the Djinn. Among muslims, this is undisputed and wholly accepted as fact.

In the Malay culture (which is strongly imbued with Muslim perceptions and traditions), it is believed that spirits and ghosts (called jembalang and hantu respectively) are part of the Djinn race.

As man is made from earth, the Djinns are made of fire. They have no corporeal (material plane) form such as us, but do sometimes have the ability to transgress into our dimension and influence it physically and/or psychically.

Why am I talking about this?

Hey, it’s my blog, I’ll write what I want.

I have this Irish friend called Brian (can’t seem to find him any more. Maybe he went back to Ireland). We used to talk about a whole lot of stuff. Football. Rugby. Fighting. Girls.

One day, the topic of the supernatural came up and we saw that in both our cultures, their is a fair amount of common ground on this topic.

Which kind of crept us out.

But here’s some stuff on what we found are similar.

Common Folk

In the Malay culture, all manner of supernatural folk fall under the category of Djinns. In the Irish culture, all manner of supernatural folk fall under the category of Faerie (or Sidhe, pronounced shee)

The Pontianak and the Banshee

The most infamous character among the supernatural folk in the Malay culture is the pontianak.

From wikipedia:

A Pontianak or Kuntilanak or Matianak (as known in Indonesia, sometimes shortened to just kunti) is a type of vampire in Malay folklore, similar to the Langsuir. The pontianak is usually a woman who died during childbirth and becomes undead, seeking revenge and terrorizing villages.

In folklore, Pontianak often appears as a beautiful and at times seductive woman, usually accompanied by the strong scent of frangipani. According to myth, men who are not wary will be killed or castrated when she morphs into a hideous being; she will also eat babies and harm pregnant women and has been said to cause miscarriages.

People believe that having a sharp object like a nail helps them fend off potential attacks by pontianaks, the nail being used to plunge a hole at the back of the pontianak’s neck. It is believed that when a nail is plunged into the back of a pontianak’s neck, she will turn into a beautiful woman, until the nail is pulled off again. The Indonesian twist on this is plunging the nail into the apex of the head of the kuntilanak.

Pontianak is associated with banana trees, and its spirit is said to reside in them during the day.

Langsuir is a version of pontianak, popular in Malaysia as one of the deadliest banshees in Malay folklore. Different from a pontianak, which always appeared as a beautiful woman to devour the victim, langsuir would possess the victim and suck blood from the inside, slowly causing a fatal end. It is believed that langsuir are from women who had laboring sickness (meroyan) as a result of suffering the death of their children and who themselves died afterwards. Portrayed as hideous, scary, vengeful and furious, the Langsuir is further characterized as having red eyes, sharp claws, long hair, a green or white robe (most of the time), a rotten face and long fangs. These are the common images described by people who claimed to have seen one. Pontianaks are sometimes claimed to be the still-born children of langsuir.

The most infamous character among the supernatural folk in the Irish culture is the banshee.
From wikipedia:

In Irish legend, a banshee wails around a house if someone in the house is about to die. There are particular families who are believed to have Banshees attached to them, and whose cries herald the death of a member of that family. Traditionally, when a citizen of an Irish village died, a woman would sing a lament (in Irish: caoineadh, [ˈkiːnʲə] or [ˈkiːnʲuː], “caoin” meaning “to weep, to wail”) at their funeral. These women singers are sometimes referred to as “keeners” and the best keeners would be in much in demand. Legend has it that, for five great Gaelic families: the O’Gradys, the O’Neills, the O’Briens, the O’Connors, and the Kavanaghs, the lament would be sung by a fairy woman; having foresight, she would sing the lament when a family member died, even if the person had died far away and news of their death had not yet come, so that the wailing of the banshee was the first warning the household had of the death.

In later versions the banshee might appear before the death and warn the family by wailing. When several banshees appeared at once, it indicated the death of someone great or holy.^[2] The tales sometimes recounted that the woman, though called a fairy, was a ghost, often of a specific murdered woman, or a woman who died in childbirth.^[3]

Banshees are frequently described as dressed in white or grey, and often having long, fair hair which they brush with a silver comb, a detail scholar Patricia Lysaght attributes to confusion with local mermaid myths. This comb detail is also related to the centuries-old traditional romantic Irish story that, if you ever see a comb lying on the ground in Ireland, you must never pick it up, or the banshees (or mermaids – stories vary), having placed it there to lure unsuspecting humans, will spirit such gullible humans away. Other stories portray banshees as dressed in green, red or black with a grey cloak.

The thing these two have in common would be that both usually wear white. The banshee may only wail, but the pontianak, she wails and laughs. And shrieks. And calls out your name. While the pontianak is often referred to as the malay vampire, I think it is more similar to the banshee. Brian (his surname is O’Connor, by the way) told me that if you see a banshee in the mirror with hollow eyes crying tears of blood, that means somebody is gonna die soon. I told him if you see a potianak with hollow eyes grinning with saliva strings of blood, you gotta run cos maybe you’re gonna die soon.

There are actually a lot more similarities in folklore between the two cultures. Too much for me to write here. I might as well write a research paper on this. I believe that there’s something to it. It’s just gotta be more than coincidence. I really want to do more research on it, but.. if only somebody would pay me to. Hmm..