If one knows an efficacious form of words connoting a state of physical facts and repeats it with the proper accessory conditions, then that state of facts is actually caused to exist; and if one knows a man's name and calls on him with a form of words efficacious to compel attendance, he has to come and his spirit can similarly be summoned from the dead.

When a Malay wishes to kill an enemy he makes an image of the man, transfixes or otherwise injures it, and buries it on the path over which the enemy will tread.

As he buries it with the impression that he will thereby cause the enemy to die and likewise be buried, he says: It is not I who am burying him, It is Gabriel who is burying him, and thinks that the repetition of these words produces the state of facts which they denote so that the guilt of the murder is removed from his own shoulders to those of the archangel Gabriel.

Similarly when he has killed a deer and wishes to be free from the guilt of his action, or as he calls it to cast out the mischief from the deer, he says: It is not I who cast out these mischiefs, It is Michael who casts them out.
It is not I who cast out these mischiefs, It is Israfel who casts them out, and so on, freeing himself in the same manner from responsibility for the death of the deer.

[116] Names also are regarded as concrete.