So in October of 2024, there were nearly 5 ,000
people who went online to download this incredibly
dry 130 -year -old academic text. Right, which
is just a wild statistic when you actually think
about it. It's totally wild. I mean, we're talking
about a book covering spells, spirits, and the
folklore of the Malay Peninsula. Yeah. You know,
it wasn't some leaked fantasy novel manuscript.
It wasn't a newly discovered, like, grimoire
tied to a blockbuster movie franchise or anything.
No, not at all. It's a literal anthropological
study. Exactly. It's a 1 .4 megabyte plain text
file of historical magic, and it's just sitting
there on a bare bones open source platform. Yeah,
Project Gutenberg. Right. 4 ,516 people download
it in just 30 days. Which makes you wonder, you
know, why? It's a great question. Like, what
is driving thousands of... modern hyper -connected
people to seek out a public domain text from
the late 19th century. Well, I mean, I think
it points to a massive deficit in our modern
environment. A deficit. How so? We have this
unparalleled access to information today, right?
But we are just completely starving for cosmological
context. Oh, that's an interesting way to put
it. Cosmological context. Yeah, because when
you look at the text those people were downloading,
Walter Williamskeet's Malay Magic, you aren't
just looking at a catalog of quirky superstitions.
Right, it's not just a list of spooky stories.
Exactly. You are looking at a meticulously documented
blueprint of how human beings manufacture reality.
Wow. Skeet captured a society that was actively
negotiating its survival. And they did that through
creation myths and deeply structured supernatural
relationships. So that hunger we're seeing in
the download statistics. Yeah, that's modern
society looking for the source code of human
belief. That is exactly what we're going to be
using today for this deep dive. We're using that
exact source code. And we get to bypass the dusty
university archives completely. We do. We're
skipping the velvet ropes and looking directly
at this digitized text. It's called Malay Magic.
Being an introduction to the folklore and popular
religion of the Malay Peninsula. Which is such
a 19th century title, by the way. Oh, it really
is. But the mission here... for you listening,
is that we are going to look at how humanity
constructs its world from scratch. And through
those origin narratives. Right. And how we forge
these intense, highly pragmatic connections to
the supernatural world simply to survive the
terror of the natural one. Yeah, because the
natural world was and is terrifying. Exactly.
So Skeet's documentation of Malay culture is
our lens today. But the mechanics we are going
to look at applied to the very foundation of
human psychology. Absolutely, because, you know,
Steele was positioned at a very specific temporal
and geographical vantage point. He was a British
colonial administrator in the 1890s, right? Yes,
walking through villages, recording these incantations
and origin myths. He was observing a culture
that had systematized its relationship with the
unknown. And it was a system that was both ancient,
but also hyper -adaptable. Precisely. And by
dissecting his observations, we can kind of strip
away the exoticism that people usually apply
to the word magic. Right, because we treat magic
like it's a parlor trick. We do. But this reveals
the underlying psychological frameworks that
literally every culture uses to process chaos.
Including our own culture. Oh, absolutely. We
use it to handle uncertainty and just the sheer
terror of existing in an unpredictable universe.
Well, let's look at the metadata for this Project
Gutenberg file for a second, because the numbers
themselves kind of frame this entire discussion.
They really do tell a story of their own. Right.
So you have this text gathered in the 1890s,
but it was released digitally in 2015. And it
was updated just recently in October 2024. Yeah.
and it sits at a reading e -score of 63 .1. Which
is what about an eighth grade level? Exactly
an eighth or ninth grade reading level. And the
formatting is EP Yeeb, Kindle, plain text, UTF
-8. So it's accessible on literally any device.
Any device. And it was painstakingly digitized
by a guy named Jerome Hellingman and a volunteer
distributed proofreading team. Right. They took
images of the physical book and manually typed
it into a living digital format. Which is really
an act of preservation that mirrors the old monastic
traditions of the Middle Ages. OK, let's unpack
this. Because you're saying they're like digital
monks. Yes. But executed on this global, decentralized
scale, they are ensuring the cultural memory
encoded in Skeet's observations survives the
degradation of physical media. I have to stop
you there, though, because you call it preservation.
But doesn't reading an English eighth grade level
summary of a deeply complex police system kind
of strip it of its power? Well, that's a common
criticism, yeah. Like, if I can download the
sacred... terrifying secrets of a culture's relationship
with the supernatural as a tiny file. A 1 .4
megabyte file. Right, and I read it on my phone
while I'm like... waiting for the subway. Aren't
we just looking at a sanitized version of their
reality? You mean because we've removed the physical
context? Exactly. We've stripped away the jungle,
the monsoon, the spoken cadence of the shaman's
incantation. We've reduced it to a sterile string
of characters. Yeah. Doesn't that hyper accessibility
kill the magic? See, that is the central anxiety
of the digital humanities right there. Oh yeah.
The big question is always... Does digitization
demystify? Does translation inherently reduce
the power of the original thing? And what's the
verdict? Well. Yes, the experiential context
is obviously lost. You aren't sitting in a village
feeling the humidity, you know, or hearing the
specific tonal resonance of a voice in the dark.
But what's fascinating here is that stripping
away the physical barrier to entry actually isolates
the core psychological mechanism. Oh, so it makes
the mechanism more visible. Exactly. We aren't
distracted by the sensory exoticism of like a
rare leather bound book in some London archive.
We're forced to confront the raw ideas. That's
a really good point. The fact that an 8th grade
reading level can adequately convey the structural
logic of Malay magic proves something huge. Which
is? That the underlying architecture of belief
is fundamentally universally human. It doesn't
require complex academic jargon because it operates
on primal emotional logic. So the translation
to plain text actually acts as a centrifuge.
A centrifuge, yeah I like that. It spins out
the environmental context and just leaves us
with a dense, heavy, psychological core of why
the magic was invented in the first place. Precisely.
And that core is highly, highly pragmatic. Well
when you look at the text, skeet isn't describing
some isolated pristine bubble of indigenous thought.
Right, because the Malay Peninsula was definitely
not isolated. No, it was arguably one of the
most dynamic chaotic crossroads of human history.
Yeah, the text is actually incredibly explicit
about that. It describes Malay popular religion
as a rich tapestry. that is intertwined with
influences from Indian, Arab, and indigenous
sources. Which means we aren't dealing with a
closed system at all. Not even close. We're dealing
with a geographic bottleneck on these ancient
maritime trade roads. Yeah, you have merchant
ships from the Middle East, India, East Asia.
And they're all just waiting there for the monsoon
winds to shift. Right, they were stuck there
for months sometimes. And they aren't just trading
spices, are they? They are offloading gods. They're
offloading entirely distinct frameworks of reality.
Which creates a massive logistical problem for
a culture's spiritual infrastructure. Here's
where it gets really interesting. Yeah. Because
how does that actually work on the ground? It's
messy, very messy. I mean, you have these deeply
rooted indigenous animistic beliefs, right? Spirits
of the soil, the rivers, the tigers in the jungle.
Yes, a very localized earth based system. And
then suddenly. Indian traders bring in these
massive complex pantheons of Hindu deities. Right.
And then Arab merchants arrive carrying deeply
structured uncompromising monotheism. Yeah, Islam
arrives. So what happens? Do they just... Does
one god overwrite the other in some kind of holy
war, or does the culture somehow force these
hostile architectures to coexist? They absolutely
force them to coexist. They do it through the
mechanics of cultural synthesis. But synthesis
sounds so polite. Right. It isn't just a polite
blending of ideas. It is a desperate, highly
creative act of structural engineering. Oh, I
like that. Structural engineering. Think of it
like retrofitting a modern, rigid glass skyscraper
with ancient Roman plumbing. They're simultaneously
trying to wire the whole thing for high -speed
internet. That sounds like a disaster. It shouldn't
work. The blueprints are completely hostile to
one another. Like, strict monotheism theoretically
cannot tolerate animistic Earth spirits. Right.
The rules of monotheism explicitly forbid that.
Exactly. But the local population, they aren't
concerned with theological purity. They are concerned
with survival. They just need the lights to turn
on and the water to flow. So they build bizarre...
architectural workarounds. That's exactly what
they do. The indigenous forest spirit isn't eradicated.
It just gets quietly demoted to a local saint.
Oh, wow. Or it's given a new Arabic name. An
ancient harvest ritual meant to appease a local
earth goddess is suddenly prefaced with an Islamic
prayer. So if you examine the theological blueprints,
it looks like a chaotic mess. A total mess, yeah.
But to the people living inside that structure,
it is a highly stable, hyper -adaptable fortress.
Yes. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
it's the ultimate proof that pure folklore is
just a myth. It really is. The strength of the
Malay magical system wasn't its isolation. Not
at all. It was its aggressive, almost predatory
ability to absorb the most useful technologies
of visiting cultures. It's like a linguistic
creel, but for magic. Exactly. If a passing Indian
merchant had a chant that seemed to cure a fever
faster than the local root, the local shaman
didn't reject it out of indigenous pride. No,
they stole it. They stole the chant, recontextualized
it, and added it to the arsenal. Because belief
at this level is a survival technology. And this
brings us to the foundation of how that technology
is built in the first place. Which is what we
really want to dig into today. Right. You cannot
understand a culture's survival mechanisms until
you understand their creation myths. And the
Project Gutenberg summary specifically notes
this. It says Skeet introduces creation myths
right at the outset of his work. He positions
them as the absolute key to understanding Malay
identity. So if we run with the idea that belief
is a technology, then the creation myth is basically
the operating system. Yes. It dictates how all
the subsequent software runs. So it establishes
the baseline rules of the hardware, the social
hierarchy, the gender dynamics. and the culture's
fundamental relationship with the environment.
Without that operating system, nothing makes
sense. So what does this all mean for someone
looking from the outside? It's kind of like the
foundational rules of a complex board game, right?
Yeah, or a universe -building franchise. Exactly.
If you don't know the origin story, observing
a cultural ritual is like watching someone wildly
click a mouse without being able to see their
monitor. That's a great analogy. It just looks
arbitrary and insane to an outsider. But to the
user... Every click has a specific vital purpose
based on the rules of the system. That is the
function of a creation myth. It provides the
rules. More than that, it provides ontological
security. That fundamental sense of order and
meaning that prevents human beings from just
descending into existential panic. Right, because
a creation myth isn't trying to answer the scientific
question of how the universe was formed in a
geological sense. No, not at all. It is answering
the sociological question of why the universe
is organized the way it is right now. But wait,
let's tie this back to the retrofitting metaphor
we talked about earlier. OK. If the Malay Peninsula
is constantly absorbing Indian and Arab influences,
what happens to their operating system? It has
to adapt. But an operating system is notoriously
rigid. If you try to run incompatible software
on it, the whole system crashes. True. So if
your foundational myth says the world was born
from, I don't know, a cosmic egg laid by a primordial
bird. Right. Then a foreign culture arise and
insist the world was spoken into existence in
six days by a singular creator Yeah, that's a
massive conflict. The cognitive dissonance should
tear the society apart How does a culture rewrite
its own source code without collapsing? Well,
that is the absolute genius of mythological adaptation
and it's a deeply painful Generational process
it doesn't happen overnight No. Origin stories
are not fixed historical points in folklore.
They are fluid, living documents that are continuously
updated through narrative friction. Narrative
friction? Yeah. When a new, powerful religion
arrives, the existing creation myth has to stretch
to accommodate it. Okay, give me the mechanics
of that stretch. How do you actually merge the
cosmic egg with... the six day creation. You
do it through narrative subordination and recontextualization.
Meaning the local storytellers and shamans begin
to subtly alter the oral traditions. So they
just change the story. Gradually. Yes. Perhaps
the singular formless creator is now the one
who placed the cosmic egg in the first place.
Wow. OK. Or the primordial bird is recast as
an angel or a servant of the new monotheistic
God. You see this heavily in the texts Skeet
collected. So you literally find indigenous animistic
creation elements sitting awkwardly side by side
with imported Hindu cosmology and Islamic theology.
Yes. It creates a layered, sometimes deeply contradictory
narrative. But they don't care about the contradiction.
Exactly. Human psychology is incredibly adept
at ignoring contradictions if the resulting story
provides a cohesive social identity. So the past
is completely subjugated by the needs of the
present. Entirely. They are looking backward
and projecting their current chaotic, multicultural
reality onto the very beginning of time. Yes,
just to prove to themselves that their current
existence is natural and ordained. That's incredible.
The beginning of the world is always a reflection
of the world as it currently is. Always. If your
society now relies on Indian and Arab merchants
for economic survival, your creation myth will
eventually be rewritten to include a universe
large enough to justify their presence. It's
a psychological defense mechanism against the
chaos of change. Exactly. But once that massive
convoluted operating system is booted up, we
have to look at the user interface. Right. How
do these people actually interact with the world
they've built? This is where the macro cosmology
hits the dirt. And the text emphasizes this.
It talks about exploration of the understanding
of nature. the relationships between humans and
the supernatural world, and the role of magic
in everyday life. Yeah, everyday magic. This
requires us to fundamentally redefine the word
magic, though. How so? Because in our modern
post -enlightenment context, we categorize magic
as fiction. It's a performance, an illusion,
or, you know, a fantasy novel. Right, we draw
an absolute impenetrable line between hard science
and magic. Exactly. Science is measurable cause
and effect. And magic is just wishful thinking.
But for the culture skeet was documenting in
the 19th century, that line did not exist. Magic
was applied science. Applied science. Yes. It
was the logical, systematic framework they used
to assert control over a natural world that was
terrifyingly opaque and lethal. I want to push
back on the applied science label though. Okay,
go ahead. Because science requires falsifiability.
It requires a hypothesis to be tested, and if
it fails, it's discarded. Right. If a shaman
performs a ritual to summon the monsoon rain
so the crops don't fail and the rain doesn't
come, the crops die. The spell failed. Yes. The
outcome wasn't achieved. So why doesn't the system
collapse? Why don't they discard the magic if
it repeatedly fails the reality test? This raises
an important question. But the answer is that
the magical framework contains its own internal
logic for failure. What do you mean? It's much
like modern debugging in software or diagnosing
a complex mechanical engine. OK. If the rain
doesn't come, the practitioner doesn't assume
the entire concept of magic is fake, just as
a mechanic doesn't assume the laws of thermodynamics
are fake when a car won't start. Oh, that's a
brilliant comparison. The shaman assumes a specific
variable was flawed. So like, The phrasing of
the incantation was wrong. Exactly. A syllable
was mispronounced. An ingredient was harvested
at the wrong phase of the moon. Or they just
didn't hold their mouth right. Yeah. Or crucially,
a rival practitioner in the next village cast
a stronger counter -curse. Ah. So there's always
an out. Always. The system is a closed logical
loop. It is entirely self -sustaining because
every failure can be explained within the rules
of the system itself. So it's not ignorance at
all. No. It is a highly sophisticated cognitive
structure designed to protect the community from
the despair of true powerlessness. It's the ritualization
of hope. That is a beautiful way to put it. I
mean, if you are a farmer relying on weather
patterns you literally cannot track, the sheer
existential dread of that helplessness would
paralyze you. You wouldn't be able to function.
Right. So magic provides agency. If I perform
this complex, demanding ritual exactly right,
I have a hand on the steering wheel of the universe.
Even if it's an illusion of control. Right. That
illusion is the exact psychological mechanism
required to get out of bed in the morning and
plant the seeds. And here's the thing you really
have to consider. We employ the exact same mechanisms
today. You think so? Oh, absolutely. The tools
have changed, but the human intent is identical.
What stands out to you when you think about our
modern daily routines? Well, think about how
we interface with the opaque, terrifying forces
that govern our modern lives. Like the economy?
Or algorithms. Look at how people interact with
the algorithms that control social media visibility,
gig economy jobs, or digital markets. The algorithm
is essentially an invisible, omnipotent deity
that dictates fortune and ruin. And no one truly
understands its full internal logic, not even
its creators at this point. Exactly. So what
do we do? We invent everyday magic. We do. We
tell each other that if you post at exactly 9
.04 AM, use exactly five specific hashtags and
engage with three other accounts within 10 minutes,
the algorithm will bless your content. It is
functionally indistinguishable from 19th century
agricultural magic. It really is. We are negotiating
with the unseen forces of our environment using
ritual behaviors, hoping to exert a tiny sliver
of control over a system that is massively more
powerful than we are. Which brings us to the
most staggering detail buried in the metadata
of this Project Gutenberg page. Yes, the classification.
It's a tiny categorization note that completely
reframes what Skeet was actually doing and what
we are doing by reading him. You're referring
to the Library of Congress classification. Yes.
The Library of Congress system is the ultimate
objective arbiter of how human knowledge is categorized
and physically shelved. Right, it's the standard.
Skeet wrote a book in the late 1800s documenting
literal spells, incantations, animistic spirits
and folklore. Yeah. The subject keywords explicitly
say Magic Malay Peninsula. Yet the Library of
Congress classification for this book is BF.
And BF is the classification for philosophy,
psychology, and religion. But the specific subcategories
applied to this text are psychology, philosophy,
and psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis. Yes. They
took a book of raw historical magic, a catalog
of how indigenous people summoned rain and cured
fevers, and the modern archival system filed
it under psychoanalysis. Because the modern archival
system recognizes the underlying truth of the
text. Which is what? Skeet thought he was cataloging
the external beliefs of a specific Southeast
Asian culture. But in reality, texts like Malay
Magic are mirrors. Mirrors for us. Yes. When
we study the ancient magic, the impossible creation
myths, and the desperate supernatural rituals
of other cultures, we aren't studying their universe
at all. What are we studying then? We are simply
psychoanalyzing the human mind's eternal desperate
need to control the unknown. Wow. We are looking
at the architecture of our own anxiety. That
is why 4 ,500 people downloaded it last month.
Exactly. They weren't downloading magic. They
were downloading a diagnostic manual for the
human condition. And it remains just as vital
and applicable today as it was in the jungles
of the Malay Peninsula over a century ago. It
really does. It's an incredible text. Well, that
leaves us with a lot to think about. Thank you
for joining us on this deep dive. Thanks for
having me. We'll see you next time.