A pawang ( sou, โต๊ะปะหวัง; ) is a type of

shaman Shamanism is a religious practice that involves a practitioner (shaman) interacting with what they believe to be a spirit world through altered states of consciousness, such as trance. The goal of this is usually to direct spirits or spiritu ...

from

Indonesia Indonesia, officially the Republic of Indonesia, is a country in Southeast Asia and Oceania between the Indian and Pacific oceans. It consists of over 17,000 islands, including Sumatra, Java, Sulawesi, and parts of Borneo and New Guine ...

and

Malaysia Malaysia ( ; ) is a country in Southeast Asia. The federation, federal constitutional monarchy consists of States and federal territories of Malaysia, thirteen states and three federal territories, separated by the South China Sea into two r ...

. The pawang deals with magic involving weather, wild animals and spirits, but they may also be employed for cases of sorcery. Pawang are usually associated with mountains and sky in contrast to the traditional healers (

dukun A dukun is an Indonesian term for shaman. Their societal role is that of a traditional healer, spirit medium, custom and tradition experts and on occasion sorcerers and masters of black magic. In common usage the dukun is often confused with ...

bomoh A ''bomoh'' ( sou, โต๊ะบอมอ; ) is a Malay shaman and traditional medicine practitioner. The term is used mainly in Malaysia and parts of Sumatra, whereas most Indonesians use the word ''dukun''. It is often mistranslated into Engl ...

) who are most often linked to rivers. Particular variations of pawang exist. Some specialise in controlling weather such as the ''pawang hujan'' (rain pawang). Others prevent attacks from animals (especially a dangerous ones) such as the ''pawang harimau'' (tiger pawang) and the ''pawang buaya'' (crocodile pawang). Some of them are able to do particular rituals and chants for ensuring good luck, such as bountiful hunt, having a safe trip, or success in

mining Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the Earth, usually from an ore body, lode, vein, seam, reef, or placer deposit. The exploitation of these deposits for raw material is based on the economic via ...

construction Construction is a general term meaning the art and science to form objects, systems, or organizations,"Construction" def. 1.a. 1.b. and 1.c. ''Oxford English Dictionary'' Second Edition on CD-ROM (v. 4.0) Oxford University Press 2009 and com ...

. A pawang is said to control elements and entities by chanting and usually by having spirit servants to do his bidding. Practitioners believe the spirits can perform healings, seek missing persons and things or even investigate reasons for bad luck. They further claim that spirits can be used to possess people, cause sickness and miseries and many other bad things. The British colonial administrator

Frank Swettenham Sir Frank Athelstane Swettenham (28 March 1850 – 11 June 1946) was a British colonial administrator who became the first Resident general of the Federated Malay States, which brought the Malay states of Selangor, Perak, Negeri Sembilan and ...

wrote about the role of the pawang in late nineteenth century Malaya in a chapter on 'Malay Superstitions' in his volume of essays ''Malay Sketches'' (1895). Swettenham described how the supposed victim of a bajang would employ a pawang to use various methods to determine the identity of their attacker, such as scraping an iron bowl with a razor to produce a corresponding loss of hair in the guilty party, divination by use of a water bowl or

dowsing Dowsing is a type of divination employed in attempts to locate ground water, buried metals or ores, gemstones, oil, claimed radiations (radiesthesia),As translated from one preface of the Kassel experiments, "roughly 10,000 active dowsers in Ge ...

References

{{Mythology of Malaysia Asian shamanism Religion in Malaysia Traditional healthcare occupations Austronesian spirituality

See also

References