Sorcery in Cambodia: A Little Perspective
Published by seserak.

At daytime she is a normal person. At night she is a strange, scary creature: half-ghost and half-human.

Shortly after midnight, when all the village people are sound asleep, she would pull her head and all her internal organs out of her body and slip out through the window of her house, leaving behind her empty figure that is separated from the neck down. She would fly from house to house, sometimes from rice paddy to rice paddy, looking for some dirty and unpleasant stuff to feed herself. A villager-if he’s not yet asleep- could spot her easily since there is a bright green light emanating occasionally from her lungs as she goes from place to place.

Perhaps you haven’t heard of this kind of grotesque creature before. Ask any Cambodian what it is called.

Everyone knows it is called Arb, although I believe not many would claim to have seen Arb in real life, except in TV series or in movies. I’ve heard stories of people seeing Arb in my hometown a few times while I was a kid. But I have never been lucky enough to meet and talk to those people.

Usually, in Khmer, the word Arb is followed by the word Thmob. We say Arb-Thmob, meaning witchcraft or sorcery. A Guru Arb-Thmob (a witch) is believed to possess evil power that can cause harm, disease, bad luck or even sudden death to anyone he or she dislikes.

Now ask the same person again if he or she believes in Arb-Thmob or sorcery. If the person is from the City or town, the answer is likely to be a negative than a positive one. But if the person is from the countryside, where the majority of the population lives, I believe you are likely to get a ‘Yes’ response than a ‘No’, or if not, the unsure yes-and-no.

TheRFA (Radio Free Asia in Khmer-2007/11/27) has recently interviewed people in my hometown -Kampong Speu- and found out that among ten people who were asked whether they believe in sorcery, six people said they seriously do; three people said they are unsure, while one person reluctantly said he doesn’t. Interestingly, one of the people who gave the positive responses was the head of Kampong Speu provincial court, who claimed that he himself was a victim of sorcery.

For some, belief in sorcery has little to do with their lives. For others, this can be harmful to both the believers themselves and to the people they accuse of practicing sorcery.

Take the case of one of my neighbor who died several years ago. She was quite a religious woman. She had suffered for a long time from diabetes. At first she did consult the doctor, using all the modern medicine to fight the illness. But two or three weeks before her death, her family somehow resorted to consult the Guru Khmer (exorcist) who said she was actually enchanted. The exorcist said the evil spirit was extremely powerful, and that there was only one effective method he could use to make it leave her body.

And the method (one of the stupidest curing method I’ve ever heard) was rapping her body with salt and chilly, and placed her on a bed under which some pieces of coal were burning. It was like they were roasting her alive. This only exacerbated her illness. She died a few weeks later. Her family, however, didn’t take any legal suit against the Guru Khmer as they believed the evil spirit was too powerful to kill.

As to how many people were killed under such treatment, I do not know. I just hope she was the first and the last victim. Still, there have been numerous cases of people wasting their time and money on witch doctors who claimed to be able to effectively cure disease without having to use any medicine.

Very often, stories of such unusual people appear on various local newspaper and magazines. The recent one has been reported in the Kohsantepheap Daily. It was about a man who claimed to have been possessed by the spirit of a ghost’s doctor. He said the ghost's spirit enabled him to perform surgery on patients from outside their bodies by merely reciting magic words. As the Kohsantepheap Daily reported, hundreds of people flocked to his house, consequently creating immediate environmental problem in the local community such as pollution and congestion. Interestingly enough, he even offered his treatment service-surgery- via mobile phone to those who could not come to his house. Such an unbelievably advancing therapy!

In short, I’ve talked about the harm it does to people who believe their diseases are caused by evil spirit and sorcery. The real victims, however, are those who are accused of practicing this sort of witchcraft.

According to the same RFA's report, during the last two months, four people in my province have been killed after being accused by villagers of practicing witchcraft. The same cases happen every year through out the province. One such case happened around ten years ago, in a village next to mine.

In that, a middle-aged man was murdered after having long been suspected by villagers of evil practice(sorcery) causing disease, sudden death and bad luck to people in the village, including his neighbors. After his death, his wife and kids were discriminated and shunned by the whole community. She subsequently had to move out and never returned. The case has never been solved. Ironically, after the accused sorcerer died, people in the village continue to get sick, and die-either of natural or accidental cause.

In response to the increasing number of killings related to sorcery, the government has recently called on local government officials to educate people about the danger of this belief, and to stop them from believing in such irrationality.

Although this may sound easy, I believe the actual task can be rather difficult.

For one thing, belief in witchcraft or sorcery among some Cambodian has a long history-even longer than belief in Buddhism. As people started to adopt Buddhism as their religion, the two have co-existed ever since. In this way, belief in sorcery is deeply rooted in their minds. Simply telling them that sorcery is a false belief is like telling them to stop believing in their religion- buddhism.

Another thing is that the majority of those believing in sorcery -if not all- are the have-nots who receive little education. The belief will disappear when the country is economically and technologically advanced, which means more and more people will be educated. On the other hand, so long as the country remained poor and underdeveloped, with a high rate of illiteracy like today, belief in sorcery will continue to exist.

Having said that, I still applaud the move by the government to deal with problems stemming from this false belief. At least, it has started to show its concern over this long ignored issue.

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*Author’s notes:

- There are a few recently made Khmer movies that deal with Arb, one of which is joining the 2005 Cambodian Film Festival. If you are curious to find out what Arb actually looks like, check out the movies at Angkorwat.com

- Belief in Arb-Thmob(witchcraft) in Cambodia may differ by regions. If you have any knowledge about Sorcery that is different from mine, please share it with me, either in my Comment section, or send to my mail: [email protected].

Samouth wrote:This is a great article. I always wanted to write something like this. I was thinking to make a blog, but didn't manage to do it.

Do you believe in ghosts?” is a question sometimes asked after conversations about rice and money have been exhausted. “Believe!” is the emphatic answer. When prodded on the subject further, the admission is usually “Believe, but never see……”
If pushed, I may treat them to my own tale about how I saw a man walk across my yard one moonless night and disappear behind a tree- never to be seen again. Admittedly I had been drinking cheap Sir Edwards whisky, and it was only from the corner of one eye that I saw it. Yet, something happened and it’s a lot simpler to cry ghost than accept that a combination of half a bottle of blended Scotch, a trick of the light and a brain pushed hard by ‘happy trippy hippie’ came up with the apparition.
Cambodians can basically be divided into two groups – the urbanites (who, depending on the length spent away from the countryside are, in general, considered better educated and more used to outside stimuli) and the country bumpkins (seen by the long term city residents as stupid, uneducated who get to stare at cows and rice fields all day long).
Of course this line is becoming blurred as town and country merge, but remains essentially true. Superstitions are rife in both town and country, but, away from the neon and noise, where the nights are long and dark, the fear of one particular nocturnal monster strikes fear into the hearts of children and grownups alike.
The Aap (អាប) has to be one of the greatest ways to scare the young ‘uns shitless before bedtime. As with most oral folklore the details alter from person to person, but essentially the Cambodian countryside is terrorised by a dung eating, blood sucking, floating head of a woman, with entrails flowing around it. Oh, and it glows an ethereal green.
Ap1
As Khmers are often fond of pointing out, anything good in neighbouring Thailand was originally from Cambodia before the dastardly Siamese pinched it and the Aap is no exception, although nest door it’s known as the Krasue. The origins of the Krasue are different from the Aap, as in Thai mythology a Khmer princess, betrothed to a Siamese big shot, was caught indulging in a bit of boom-boom with a common soldier. Understandably peeved, the lord decided that burning to death the girl he was sweet on was the only course of action. We’ve all been there.
The princess somehow managed to get a Khmer sorceress to whip up a bit of black magic to save her from the flames, but alas, in those days of yore locals timekeeping was similar to now, and the spell arrived a bit late, only working on the head and some of the bowels. Now immortal, the Khmer Krasue was born and free to fly about drinking blood around Thailand and Laos.
Cambodians have a different story, where the Aap is not the one entity, but contagious through either dabbling in witchcraft (when black magic goes wrong), passed down from mother to daughter, or from drinking water an Aap has spat in. Men can rest easy on this one, as only the fairer sex can become infected – blood and woman, there seems something Freudian in that.
Therefore, any lady, young or old might be an Aap, and, come evening, cut loose from the body and get up to no good. In a similar way that harmless crones were persecuted as witches back in Europe and the USA, Khmers will still denounce woman as being Aap.
The Aap is said to be highly attracted to blood but when it cannot satisfy itself, it will eat shit, frogs and sometimes chickens found in the rice fields. Some also say that Aaps have a taste for young babies. When yet one more bundle of joy is dropped into a village shack, it is often custom to bury the placenta deep beneath a thorn tree and place thorn branches around the windows and doors of the house to ward off those ladies in the village who might turn into Aap at night time.
Mrs Pedro told me a story of a local woman thought to be Aap. As a kid, when Papa was at work, her own mother popped out another one of the 7 kids in the one room hut (by itself, a testament to the hardness of village ladies). The first visitor to this happy scene was an old girl, rumoured to be involved in a bit of sorcery (love potions, healing herbs and the like). She had already been labelled an Aap by others, and, as she had walked a whopping 1.5km just in time to witness the natural bloodbath….. it was if she could smell it….. The prosecution rests, Your Honour. Throughout her childhood, Mrs P and most of the village were convinced this lady would take nightly jaunts away from her torso. “Believe but never see.”
Let’s get critical. As much as I “Know what I saw” with my own supernatural spooking, I can readily admit that the brain makes mistakes. Cambodia, like much of SE Asia, has a deep rooted tradition of animism and spiritual belief beneath a thin façade of Buddhism. With the not so distant history of mass slaughter, it would be reasonable to suppose that, should ghosts exist, then Cambodia would be a paranormal nirvana.
In a conservative culture, much is gained by fear of the dark – your daughter can’t get knocked up and your son won’t become a hoodlum if they are tucked up in bed by around 8pm. A couple of decades of war and subsequent banditry also made Cambodia a pretty dangerous place – out in the provinces rapes, murders, savage beatings and traffic accidents are still commonplace. A bogeyman detracts from the real problems of society and functions as a face saving nod to the fact that it’s fucked up outside, whilst not naming or dealing with the real causes.
As for the Aap, I have a theory or three. First is cultural – a ghost story told to kids, which has become the subject of several ghost movies filmed in Thailand and Cambodia and has been viewed by Cambodian youth almost as a documentary. To a susceptible bunch of people, it’s already ingrained as fact.
Next is the science- the Aap is said to glow fluro green, perhaps the same hue as burning methane – known as marsh gas, which is also attributed to the will-o-the-wisp phenomena in Europe. Then comes the witnesses and geography.
Your average Cambodian/Thai/Laotian rice farmer is pretty short, and rice can grow to about shoulder height of a pretty short rice farmer. These guys like nothing more than to drink quite powerful hooch and have not so happy wives waiting for them back at home. Could it be that a peasant, with an overactive imagination, trippin’on moonshine, could see a natural blaze of marsh gas, and perhaps glimpse another equally pissed up farmer stumbling about, with only his head visible above the grass?
“No love, I was just coming home, when I was chased by the Aap” is probably a plausible excuse for returned shite-faced and covered in filth.
Whatever the source and propagation, the myth of the Krasue in Thai, Krasu in Laos, Hantu Penanggal of Malaysia and Phillipines, Leyak in Indonesia, Mai Lai to the Vietnamese and, of course the Cambodian Aap is widespread across the region and taken seriously. As a fairly educated Khmer said to me, as I was researching the topic “How can something known to so many people in different countries not be real?”
Just remember, the Aap can be killed by fire, joining the wrong headless torso, or not getting back to its own body by dawn. Knowledge is power, my friends, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Anchor Moy wrote:A lot of westerners believe in stuff like this as well. Most wouldn't say that they believe in ghosts, but they believe in the supernatural and it's powers - all the new-age stuff: a friend gave me a stone pendant "to keep away illness", another friend is convinced that she can do "natural healing" over the telephone, and my own uncle used to sell "magnets" to cure arthritis/rheumatism. (I don't think he really believed that it worked but he was a dodgy bugger. )

I think, Samouth, that you would really be surprised how superstitious westerners can be.

Samouth wrote:

Anchor Moy wrote:A lot of westerners believe in stuff like this as well. Most wouldn't say that they believe in ghosts, but they believe in the supernatural and it's powers - all the new-age stuff: a friend gave me a stone pendant "to keep away illness", another friend is convinced that she can do "natural healing" over the telephone, and my own uncle used to sell "magnets" to cure arthritis/rheumatism. (I don't think he really believed that it worked but he was a dodgy bugger. )

I think, Samouth, that you would really be surprised how superstitious westerners can be.

It would be great, if you write down here, so i can read haha