Crossword-Solution: BATAK 5 letters, 4 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 11

During a tempest the inhabitants of a Batak village in Sumatra have been seen to rush from their houses armed with sword and lance.

Release the soul of the sick man and plague the image, for it is indeed prettier and better than he." Batak magicians can conjure the demon of disease out of the patient's body into an image made out of a banana-tree with a human face and wrapt up in magic herbs; the image is then hurriedly removed and thrown away or buried beyond the boundaries of the village.

The writer who mentions this belief says nothing about the Batak totems; but on the analogy of the Australian, Central American, and African evidence we may conjecture that the external soul, whose death entails the death of the man, is housed in the totemic animal or plant.

Against this view it can hardly be thought to militate that the Batak does not in set terms affirm his external soul to be in his totem, but alleges other grounds for respecting the sacred animal or plant of his clan.

When the massacre of Batak was mentioned in the House of Commons, he dwelt on the honourable qualities of the Circassians; when instances of torture were alleged, he remarked that an oriental people generally terminated its connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner.