Winstedt —Shaman, Saiva, and Suti:

Sir Frank Sweettenham has described how a spirit-raising séance was conducted by a royal female shaman during the illness of a ruler of Perak some thirty years ago. The magician, dressed like a man, sat with veiled head before a taper in her right hand a sheaf of grass cut square at top and bottom. This sheaf she took convulsively. The taper flared, a signal that the spirit invoked was entering the candle. The magician, now supposed to be in a trance, bowed to the taper “and to each male member of the reigning family present!” After many spirits had been invoked, the sick raja was brought out and seated on a sixteen-sided stand (an improvement on the double pentacle called Solomon’s seat) to await, with shrouded head and a square bunch of grass in his hand, the advent of the spirits of the State. Conducted back to bed, His Highness fell later into a swoon attributed to possession by those spirits! At this royal séance the magician’s daughter led an orchestra of “five or six girls holding native drums, instruments with a skin stretched over one side only” and beaten with the fingers.

In an account of yet another séance in Selangor, where to cure an ailment the magician became possessed by the tiger-spirit, it is said that the ceremony usually took place on three nights and that the same odd number of persons should be present each time. For the reception of the spirit an artificial bouquet of flowers, doves and centipedes, all made of palm-leaf, was prepared. After an invocation the magician bathed himself in incense, suffered spasmodic convulsions, spoke a spirit language, became possessed, sat with shrouded head, lit tapers on the edges of three jars of water, and rubbed the patient with a bezoar stoner. Then donning a white coat and head-doth, he fumigated a dagger, dropped silver coins into the three jars, and gazed to see their position under the three tapers, declaring that it indicated the gravity of the patient’s illness. Scattering handfuls of charmed rice round the jars, he put into them improvised bouquets of areca-palm blossom, and plunged his dagger into each bouquet to dispel lurking spirits of evil. Another sheaf of palm-blossom he anointed with oil and used for stroking the patient from head to heel. Next he was possessed by the tiger-spirit, scratched, growled, and licked the naked body of the patient. He drew blood from his own arm with the point of the dagger and fenced with his invisible spirit foe. Once more he stroked the patient with the sheaf of blossom and with his hands. Again he stabbed the bouquets, stroked the patient, and after lying still for an interval recovered consciousness.

Psychopomp. Term for god or entity responsible for guiding souls to the afterlife. In Greece, Hermes. In Norse myth, the Valkyries. In Egypt, Anubis. Voodoo traditions, going back to their African roots, offer the Ghede. Irish, Ankou. In most shamanic traditions, the shaman is a sort of psychopomp both at the beginning of life and at the end. He or she was present at birth to usher the child into the world, and present at death to see the soul on its journey. Medieval legends of the scythe-bearing Grim Reaper perhaps connected to practice in some parts of Europe whereby the dead were stabbed or buried with sickles. The real reapers are purely psychic entities, with power over time and perception. They can change the way a human sees his surroundings, and change their own appearance, usually to ease the transition from life into death. The reaper’s true form is hard to pin down, but most accounts suggest that the natural way for a living person to see a reaper is as a wraith-figure wearing tattered winding sheets or burial cloth.

Black dogs are also psychopomps sometimes. Buried in the foundations of churches to guard and protect the gates between here and the afterlife.