The Meuramput is the Achehnese magic rite of “blowing away” an evil thing that has been “blown upon” a victim, performed by an old woman in the house of the patient. As C. Snouck Hurgronje records in his chapter on disease and its treatment, the related words meuramuy and meurampot are applied to cases of sudden illness without discoverable cause, such as dysentery; both words may be approximately rendered “blown upon,” and that which has blown on the patient may equally well be a jën dwelling in the leaf or branch of a tree which the victim has accidentally brushed against, as a rambaluy of the kind described in the same chapter. The meuramput is the means by which this “blown-upon” evil is “blown away” again by magic art.
The rite is performed in the house of the patient, and almost every old woman can act as an expert in this peurampot, as the performance is called. For the meuramput seven things are required: a chi’uë, or water-dipper made of a cocoanut-shell; a spoon (aweue) of the same material; a reungkan, or rough mat of cocoanut or other palm leaves on which pots just removed from the fire are set; a red betel-nut leaf; a kala-leaf (Malay kantan); a worn-out pair of trousers; and a rice winnowing-basket (jeu’ë). These seven objects are each waved seven times, in the order named, over the head of the sufferer who has been breathed on by the jën. The solemn counting is long drawn out to the exclamation tujooooh! — “seveeeeen!” — after which the articles employed in the rite are disposed of in the manner prescribed by the tradition.
The number seven, which pervades the meuramput, is one of the most characteristic features of Achehnese (and more generally of Malayan) magic. Seven objects, each waved seven times, with the count drawn out to a long tujooooh! — the same sevenfold structure recurs in many other Achehnese rites, most notably in the vows made for the recovery of a sick child (the visit to “seven mosques,” the gift of “seven head of buffalo,” the visit to “44 saints”), and in the kanduri of the seventh day after death. The number is, of course, of universal magical significance; but in Acheh it has been woven with peculiar thoroughness into the texture of popular religious and magical practice.
The meuramput occupies a place in the Achehnese system of healing between the purely magical and the more explicitly religious remedies. On the one hand, the rite is performed by an old woman — that is, by a practitioner of popular magic rather than by a teungku or other religious functionary — and its materials (cocoanut-shell dipper, worn-out trousers, winnowing-basket) are the ordinary stuff of household magic. On the other hand, the rite is directed against the jëns — the same class of spirits whose battles, in the Achehnese theory, give rise to cholera and which the kanduri tulaka bala is held to avert. The meuramput thus stands in the same religious-magical universe as the kanduri tulaka bala and the kanduri of Ja’ Karieng, but at the opposite end of the social scale: where the kanduri is communal and public, the meuramput is domestic and private; where the kanduri is performed by a teungku, the meuramput is performed by an old woman; and where the kanduri invokes the blessing of Allah against an epidemic, the meuramput employs the inherited techniques of popular magic against a single case of meuramuy or meurampot.
See Also
Source
The Achehnese, Vol. I, by Dr. C. Snouck Hurgronje, translated by A.W.S. O’Sullivan, indexed by R.J. Wilkinson. Leyden: E.J. Brill, 1906.