Note 134 — Chapter VI · Magic Rites as affecting the Life of Man

Badi is the name given to the evil principle which, according to the view of Malay medicine-men, attends (like an evil angel) everything that has life. [It must not be forgotten when we find it used of inert objects, such as trees, and even of stones or minerals, that these too are animate objects from the Malay point of view.] Von de Wall describes it as “the enchanting or destroying influence which issues from anything, e.g. from a tiger which one sees,134 from a poison-tree which one passes under, from the saliva of a mad dog, from an action which one has performed; the contagious principle of morbid matter.”