Note 2 — Chapter IV · The Malay Pantheon

“There yet remain the powerful influences of the still earlier indigenous faith to be noted and accounted for. Just as the Buddhists of Ceylon turn in times of sickness and danger, not to the consolations offered by the creed of Buddha, but to the propitiation of the demons feared and reverenced by their early progenitors, and just as the Burmese and Talaings, though Buddhists, retain in full force the whole of the Nat superstition, so among the Malays, in spite of centuries which have passed since the establishment of an alien worship, the Muhammadan peasant may be found invoking the protection of Hindu gods against the spirits of evil with which his primitive faith has peopled all natural objects.”2