"One of the principles of sympathetic magic is that any effect may be produced by imitating it.... If it is wished to kill a person, an image of him is made and then destroyed; and it is believed that through a certain physical sympathy between the person and his image, the man feels the injuries done to the image as if they were done to his own body, and that when it is destroyed he must simultaneously perish." [150] The principle thus described is perhaps the most important of all those which underlie the "Black Art" of the Malays. CHAPTER IV The Malay Pantheon (a) Gods A careful investigation of the magic rites and charms used by a nation which has changed its religion will not unfrequently show, that what is generally called witchcraft is merely the débris of the older ritual, condemned by the priests of the newer faith, but yet stubbornly, though secretly, persisting, through the unconquerable religious conservatism of the mass of the people. "There is nothing that clings longer to a race than the religious faith in which it has been nurtured. Indeed, it is impossible for any mind that is not thoroughly scientific to cast off entirely the religious forms of thought in which it has grown to maturity. Hence in every people that has received the impression of foreign beliefs, we find that the latter do not expel and supersede the older religion, but are engrafted on it, blent with it, or overlie it. Observances are more easily abandoned than ideas, and even when all the external forms of the alien faith have been put on, and few vestiges of the indigenous one remain, the latter still retains its vitality in the mind, and powerfully colours or corrupts the former. The actual religion of a people is thus of great ethnographic interest, and demands a minute and searching observation. No other facts relating to rude tribes are more difficult of ascertainment, or more often elude inquiry." [151] "The general principle stated by Logan in the passage just quoted receives remarkable illustration from a close investigation of the folk-lore and superstitious beliefs of the Malays. Two successive religious changes have taken place among them, and when we have succeeded in identifying the vestiges of Brahmanism which underlie the external forms of the faith of Muhammad, long established in all Malay kingdoms, we are only half-way through our task."