POWER OF ANCIENT CURSES The poetic jampi serapah is very much a part of our oral heritage Words are powerful things. This is something we've known for a long time. Words have a way of creating, healing and destroying concepts, ideas and relationships. It's almost magical. Some of the grandest words, in poetry or prose, form incantations, which conjure visions of ghouls, ghosts and everything in between. With the dust of Halloween just settling, it's a great time to explore this topic. In Asian, societies, incantations come in the form of mantras. Throughout ancient times, most civilisations had mantras for dealing with illness, injustice, imbalance, catastrophes and the unknown. The Hindu, Chinese, Egytians and many others practised good mantras as well as bad curses. SPOKEN HERITAGE In the not too distant past, the Malays and many other ethnic groups such as the Kadazan and the Iban for example, relied on jampi serapah for healing purposes in a...