#YISHREADS October 2025

By Ng Yi-Sheng / @yishkabob

October’s usually a horror-themed month for this column, but this year, I thought I’d go for something a teensy bit different. Rather than tales of spooks and spirits, I’m listing nonfiction works about the very real people who channel and summon them: pawangs and tang kees in Malaysia, babaylans in the Philippines, maa khii in Thailand, nat kadaw in Myanmar—plus a fun final volume by a Belgian occultist in Indonesia.

So this is a celebration of Southeast Asian magic—but not an uncritical one. By and large, the works I’ve chosen aren’t written by practitioners explaining their cultures as insiders. Instead, the authors tend to be Westerners and Western-educated scholars, subjecting these traditions to academic analysis. Alongside the imaginative wonder of these diverse mysticisms, they’re reporting on the tensions and ethical complexities that come with the practice.

All of which means there’s plenty of insights that’ll surprise and enlighten you, whether you’re credulous or skeptical towards esoterica. Ours is a world where magic is real as a social phenomenon—and as you know, reality tends to be stranger than fiction.

You Shall Be as Gods: Anting-Anting and the Filipino Quest for Mystical Power, by Dennis Santos Villegas
Vibal Foundation, 2017

Heard about this via The Gods Must Be Crazy: A Philippine Mythology Podcast [1]—it’s an exploration of contemporary Philippine occult culture in all its weirdness!

Honestly, I’d hoped for a more scholarly work: Villegas spends entirely too long discussing basic Philippine history and obvious parallels to global occult traditions, and there’s a strange vacillation between memoir and cold ethnography—he opens with an account of his initiation into the Haring Bakal, through being slashed with a bolo without his skin breaking, but doesn’t return to first person narration for most of the book. Plus, as the aforementioned podcast notes, there’s been criticism of the ethics behind this—does he really have the right to share what’s considered secret knowledge by so many societies?

Still, that’s outweighed by the breadth of information here, from the lists of prominent babaylans and cult leaders from the 17th century to the present, many of whom began revolts and political campaigns—Tamblot, Tapar, Hermano Pule, Eusebio Di-Mabunggo, Flor Intrencherado, Valentin de los Santos, Nardong Putik, Maria Bernarda Balitaan of the Ciudad Mistica. And all the customs—not just anting-anting or protective amulets, which are forged, blessed, tested by gunshot—but also oraciones or utterances, holy tattoos and shirts, mutya (which may be swallowed or surgically implanted in the skin), transfigurations of the Santo Niño statue (sex workers often use the one in which he has an erection!).

Not to mention the incredibly syncretic mythologies of Bathalismo, i.e. worship of the supreme precolonial god Bathala, now Hispanised under the name Infinito Dios, often pictured as a winged eye in a pyramid, credited with creating the sacred trinity of creator gods Magob, Mariagob and Magobab (aka the Santísima Trinidad or Tres Personas), balancing his energy with the supreme goddess Infinita Dios, who takes the form of the Virgin. Plus so many deifications, reincarnations and supposed immortal reigns of José Rizal (who, as an atheist, would’ve been shocked by this perversion of his thought!).

By the way, I’ve just realised that the version I read isn’t the most up-to-date: a second edition was published in 2022. I wonder if that one deals with the reservations I expressed?

The Way That Lives in the Heart: Chinese Popular Religion and Spirit Mediums in Penang, Malaysia, by Jean DeBernardi
NUS Press, 2011

I’ve been curious about this book for a while, ever since I heard it served as the inspiration for Zen Cho's Black Water Sister. [2] What insights, I wondered, might this book give me in my own quest to better understand my native religious culture?

Alas, I’ve gotta report: this isn’t quite mind-blowing. DeBernardi writes from a critical, outsider perspective, never becoming a credulous initiate of the Taoist movements she’s studying, highlighting the inaccuracies of the mediums’ predictions, never confirming if anything they said was true—there’s just the slightest tinge of dismissiveness in her tone, in contrast to the more sympathetic, insider perspectives of Singaporean scholars like Terence Heng, Margaret Chan, Jonathan Lim.

Nevertheless, this is frickin’ informative. DeBernardi conducted her research from the late 1970s onwards, learning Mandarin, Hokkien and a smattering of Malay to communicate with her informants—not only the mediums, but the gods-in-mediums, whom she realised she had to inform independently about her research process. Though her broad findings are familiar wisdom—of course modernisation doesn’t lead to rationalist disillusionment in religion—she’s able to document details about the antilanguage of a Ji Gong medium and his taste for Guinness stout (the original Ji Gong ate black dog meat; Guinness’s nickname in Penang is black dog), the multiethnic manifestations not only of Malay datuk spirits (who may be warded off in the name of the Sultan) but also the Virgin Mary, Jesus and St. Anne, the longwinded monologues of male mediums on morality and metaphysics (very recognisable uncle behaviour), theories of how one becomes a god or a ghost, taboos of menstruation.

This comes along with some fascinating academic insights—one of which is that there are aspects of Hokkien spirit worship that are paralleled in Southeast Asian shamanism, but not in the rest of Chinese religion. Which is very comforting to me as a Southeast Asianist of Hokkien descent—this idea that there's been a cultural exchange between Fujian and Nanyang that predates documentation, that complicates the dichotomy between bumiputera and pendatang. [3] Our gods may be from China, but their magic comes from these lands, these winds, this flesh.

Deities and Divas: Queer Ritual Specialists in Myanmar, Thailand and Beyond, eds. Peter A. Jackson and Benjamin Baumann
NUS Press, 2021

This is my jam! A meeting of queer studies and religious studies in the context of mainland Southeast Asia!

I’ve yapped before about the traditional sacred role of queer folks in Southeast Asia as mystics—bissu among the Bugis, sida-sida among the Malays, babaylan among the Tagalogs—and how it’s part of our non-patriarchal heritage that got dispelled by Western colonial modernity. But these anthropological essays challenge that a little by revealing that mainland Southeast Asia is experiencing a new wave of queer mystics since the 90s, with gay men and trans women (and a few butch lesbians) taking over the roles of maa khii and nat kadaw previously dominated by cis women. These are folks who go to gay clubs and occasionally have histories of involvement in queer activism, and they’re part of a post-secular trend in queer Southeast Asia, where spirit worship isn’t a reclamation of tradition but an expression of modernity. (Seriously: while TV damaged the attendance of the Nora dance drama of southern Thailand, Tiktok’s actually making it more popular!)

By the way, this isn’t a localised version of the Radical Faerie or Wicca movement. The mystics are tapping on living traditions that are kinda gender essentialist in their outlooks, seeing only women and queer people as having “soft hands and bodies of glass” that spirits can penetrate, as Visisya Pinthongvijayakul notes. Furthermore, as Bénédicte Brac de la Perrière notes in his study of the young activist-turned-Ma Ngway Taung medium Hpyo, they’re sometimes doing it cos this life grants you more mainstream acceptance than secular queer life (his own boyfriend helped him with the ceremony where he married the goddess!). Not to mention the fact that there’s some possible abuse involved, as seen in Narupon Duangwises’ study of the controversial Phor Khun Chang Inburi, who posts pics about himself creeping out over young men on social media (cheered on by his followers), and Eduardo Siani’s study of Joe, a queer hairdresser who ends up rebranding himself as an acharn (teacher) based on his spiritual channelling of Paris Hilton.

Kind of on the fence about the effort this work makes to tie this to Western-centric queer culture (there’s a beautiful essay, Brett Farmer’s “The Fabulous Sublimity of Diva Worship”, which invokes Joan Crawford and Maria Callas, but has nothing to do with Southeast Asia). But I’m also grateful for the connections it makes to the queerness of Vietnamese lên đồng practitioners and Philippine horror icons.

Also, as a Singaporean, I can’t help but wonder if these trends could happen here! The cover pic is of a Nine Emperor Gods Festival in Phuket, a holiday which is currently being celebrated here, as we speak, and there’s Buddhist and Taoist and Hindu mediums in the book too. Maybe I need to hang out at temples more and see if my hands are soft enough, my body sufficiently glass.

Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya, by Teren Sevea
Cambridge University Press, 2020

I met this author over a decade ago, when he was exhibiting “The Sufi and the Bearded Man” at the NUS Museum: a documentation of the demolition of the Keramat Siti Maryam al-Aydurus and the practices of its caretaker, the bomoh Wak Ali Janggut, to whom this book is dedicated. [4] He led us on a walk through the Tanjong Pagar area, discussing the living history of keramat and miracleworkers in Singapore, which shifted my perspectives on our colonial period—basically, it made me realise how enchanted our past was, and how that extends to our present.

Now, with this book, he’s challenging my views again. I’ve developed an over-romanticised view of Malay magic, seeing in its tropes a celebration of nature and a connection to our pre-Islamic, pre-patriarchal heritage. [5] Sevea, however, draws on Jawi manuscripts and colonial reports from the 19th and early 20th century, revealing that bomohs and pawangs functioned as important players in industrial modernity—i.e. they weren’t tree-hugging traditionalists, but canny agents who were, for a while, able to navigate the shifting tides of the colonial economy.

Sevea cites examples of pawangs, both men and women, of many races and various combinations thereof, who used their rituals and expertise to guide rice farming and tin mining, where they were actually better at discovering the locations of ore than European surveyors (until technology improved). Loads of violence against the environment and coolie/enslaved labour involved, which the magical manuals do not care about. And just in case that isn't brutal enough for you, there's also chapters on their involvement in the practice of capturing and taming jungle elephants, as well as their use of firearms: blessing them, creating spiritual practices around their handling.

Loads of fascinating stuff here, but I'll focus on just two points. First, the way everything is subsumed into Islamic myths—Hindu gods are repurposed as the minions of Muhammad and Noah, and there’s a legend that Muhammad begged God for a magical weapon to use in a time of martyrdom, whereupon he was told to extract a gun named Peteri Hernyn from a heavenly cave—wherein “Peteri” is puteri, princess, and Hernyn is the Henry flintlock rifle. All this, Sevea reminds us, isn’t some return to a pre-Islamic past, because it parallels the Middle Eastern practice of subsuming old gods within an Islamic theology—not to mention the passion with which historical pawangs defended their Islam against those who claimed they were heretical.

Second, is the surprising presence of Black people in this cosmology. Sevea notes the mentions of Zanggi, East Africans, in the manuscripts, with the knowledge that they (as well as similar-looking Orang Asli) would've been used for labour in farms and mines, and argues that Black Jinn are meant to reflect their identity, as well as the fabled whirlpool of Pauh Jangi into which demons may be dispelled. He even mentions meeting three African American bomohs in 21st century Philadelphia, who practise silat and mediate American guns and bullets, while diagnosing their society as suffering from the new penyakit/pathology of Trump.

Sevea's principal argument is that we can’t read the history of Malaya without incorporating the role of mysticism—and he actually notes cases where historians seem to have wilfully refused to repeat the accounts of magic in their sources! But at the same time, he’s speaking about the present, continually returning to his fieldwork and friendship with contemporary bomohs, making evident his respect for the practice (more than DeBernardi, I'd argue!), even opening with the case of the infamous Raja Bomoh Ibrahim Mat Zin, who went viral in 2014 with his coconut rituals to track down the lost Malaysian Airlines flight MH370.

And I think he’s saying that Malay magic has always been with us, from pre-coloniality to postmodernity, not especially morally pure or consistent, but worthy of being taken seriously. Makes a lot of sense—we don’t treat Chinese practices like feng shui or acupuncture as being all that esoteric or primitive. Why treat Malay traditions as being more sacred?

Pilgrimage to Java: An Esoteric History of Buddhism, by Olivia de Haulleville
iUniverse, 2000

Written by a Belgian-born niece of Aldous Huxley who visited Indonesia with the Dalai Lama in 1982 (using the Buddhist name of “Tara”), this book is rare enough that even the National Library doesn’t stock a copy in its Southeast Asia collection.

And honestly, I’d argue that most of the book isn’t worth the read. De Haulleville's 100% open about her lack of scholarly credentials—seems local Buddhists pushed her to write this cos she’s good at English—and aside from specific refs to primary resources like Sanghyang Kamahayanan (the Javanese Buddhist “Bible”, she calls it) and context about Borobudur’s spatial-symbolic relationship to Candi Mendut and Candi Kalasan, this was just stuff I'd read in other Indonesian history books already. Nice intimate touches, though—she speaks of her sponsor, Bu Saradjono, who foresaw her own death when she invited the writer to Indonesia.

But then, oh wow—in her “Javanism” chapter, she starts to show her true pseudoarchaeological colours. She argues, via theosophist CW Leadbeater's The Occult History of Java, that local wisdom is the inheritance of the sunken continent of Atlantis / Lemuria / Langka-Dhvipa, which originally extended as far north as Japan, as far south as Australia, as far west as Madagascar and as far east as Easter Island/California, with Indonesia slap-bang in the middle, cradle of the human race, where adepts still understand how to utilise the third eye for bio-atomic power—references to the Krakatoa explosion, the Rosicrucians, mysticism scholar W. Hardjanto Pradjapangarsa.

If you’re curious about Leadbetter’s work, turns out it’s downloadable for free at the Theosophy World Resource Centre. [6] He unflinchingly states that Java used to be an Atlantean colony; that the Javanese are of predominantly Atlantean blood; that they practised "the dark and evil religion" of Atlantis, based on fear and human sacrifice, till the Hindu king Aji Saka came down and civilised them (he calls the Indians Aryans, which I guess isn't that scary if he's writing pre-World War Two?), binding the Atlantean priest-king by burying magnetised tumbal (amulets) in sacred places like the mountains of Jepara and the hills of the Progo River. Oh, and also that Java and Sumatra only got split apart by an eruption of Krakatoa in 915 CE!

Loads of my friends will roll their eyes at the appropriative-ness of all this. But I’m kinda delighted to realise that Indonesia's played this part in New Age Movement theories, even from the early 20th century, way before Graham Hancock visited Gunung Padang for Ancient Apocalypse. We know these are fertile lands for fantasy, but what I want to know now is: how much did they fuel Western notions of magic in the fashion of Tibet and Alexandria? Orientalism cuts both ways, y’know. The exoticised gain a handy bit of power and influence through mystique.

Endnotes

[1] Ice Lacsamana and Anama Dimapilis-O'Reilly. “EPISODE 22: GOT 2 BELIEVE (IN MAGIC) Part 1 | Anting-Anting, Agimat, and Talismanic Beliefs in the Philippines.” The Gods Must Be Crazy. Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/show/3NlpOnbcQNgQzHWxpTgkTU

[2] Check out my review of Black Water Sister at Ng Yi-Sheng. “#YISHREADS October 2022.” Suspect. 28 October 2022. https://singaporeunbound.org/suspect-journal/2022/10/28/yishreads-october-2022

[3] Bumiputera and pendatang are racialised terms used in Malaysia to refer respectively to indigenous peoples (including Malays, Orang Asli, Dayaks, Kadazans and Dusuns) and descendants of immigrants (including Chinese and most Indians). The politics surrounding these terms are extremely controversial due to affirmative action policies for indigenous racial majority Malays and direct racism towards to pendatang.

[4] Check out the essays and pics in the exhibition booklet! The Sufi and the Bearded Man. NUS Museum. 2011. https://www.nus.edu.sg/museum/pdf/2010/Sufi_And_The_Bearded_Man.pdf

[5] I blame the artist Zarina Muhammad for this! Check out her perspectives on Malay magic in Dia Halim K. “Zarina Muhammad: A Girl in Ghosts and Trees.” Esplanade Offstage. 30 April 2024. https://www.esplanade.com/offstage/arts/zarina-muhammad-a-girl-in-ghosts-and-trees

[6] CW Leadbetter. The Occult History of Java. The Theosophical Publishing House, 1951. https://www.theosophy.world/sites/default/files/ebooks/Singapore/The%20Occult%20History%20of%20Java_CWL.pdf

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Ng Yi-Sheng (he/him) is a Singaporean writer, researcher and LGBT+ activist. His books include the short-story collection Lion City and the poetry collection last boy (both winners of the Singapore Literature Prize), the non-fiction work SQ21: Singapore Queers in the 21st Century, the spoken word collection Loud Poems for a Very Obliging Audience, and the performance lecture compilation Black Waters, Pink Sands. He recently edited A Mosque in the Jungle: Classic Ghost Stories by Othman Wok and EXHALE: an Anthology of Queer Singapore Voices. Check out his website at ngyisheng.com.

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