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Nevertheless many women keep in the cupboards in which they sleep a wooden image of the hawk with a few feathers stuck upon it. If the woman falls sick she will take one of these feathers and, waving it to and fro, will say, "Tell the bad spirit that is making me sick that I have a feather of Bali Flaki." When she recovers her health Bali Flaki has the credit of it.
Generally a wooden image of a hawk, BALI FLAKI, stands beside it on the top of a tall pole. The Kenyahs carve such images more elaborately than the Kayans, who are often content merely to indicate the eyes, mouth, and four limbs, by slashing away with the sword chips of wood from the surface of the log, leaving gashes at the points roughly corresponding in position to these organs.
All Kenyahs hold Bali Flaki in the same peculiar regard, and no individuals or sections of them claim to be especially favoured by him or claim to be related to him by blood or descent. Other Omen-birds Kenyahs obtain omens of less importance from several other birds.
But Singalong Burong is decidedly more anthropomorphic than Bali Flaki; he is probably generally conceived as a single being of human form living in a house such as the Ibans themselves inhabit; whereas Bali Flaki, even if sometimes conceived in the singular as the great Bali Flaki, is very bird-like.
FLAKI, the name of the bird of most importance in augury, bears a suggestive resemblance to the German FALKE and the Latin FALCO. The Kayan word for omen is AMAN, the resemblance of which to the Latin word is striking. Are these resemblances merely accidental?
It seems to us probable that in this case the Kenyahs have carried further the tendency we noted in the Kayans to allow the omen birds to figure so prominently in their rites and prayers as to obscure the gods whose messengers they are; and that BALI FLAKI has in this way driven into the background, and more or less completely taken the place of, a god of war whose name even has been forgotten by many of the Kenyahs, if not by all of them.
The hawk is always spoken of and addressed as BALI FLAKI, and is formally consulted before any party of Kenyahs sets out from home for distant parts. To illustrate the formalities with which they read the omens we will transcribe here a passage from a journal kept by one of us.
With the Kenyahs similar processes, we suggest, have led to the exaltation of BALI PENYALONG, the original god of war, into the position of the Supreme Being, and of BALI FLAKI, his special messenger, into the position, or almost into the position, of the god of war.
Bali Flaki is also consulted before sowing and harvesting the rice crop, but besides being appealed to publicly on behalf of the whole community, his aid may be sought privately by any man who wishes to injure another.
Although the Kenyahs thus look to Bali Flaki to guide them and help them in many ways, and express gratitude towards him, we do not think that they conceive of him as a single great spirit, as some of the other tribes tend to do; they rather look upon the hawks as messengers and intermediators between themselves and Bali Penyalong, to which a certain undefined amount of power is delegated.
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