The mantra, a proto-malay tribe, claim to be descended from mertang, the first magician, who was the child of two persons called drop of water and clod of earth. In the moluccas the earth is a female deity, who in the west monsoon is impregnated by lord sun-heaven. The torajas in celebes believed in two supreme powers, the man and the maiden, that is, the sun and the earth. The dayaks of borneo hold that the sun and the earth created the world. The terms, "father sky and mother earth," occur in the malay ritual of the rice-year, at the opening of mines and of theatrical shows and in the invocations of the kelantan shaman. A kelantan account relates that sun and earth once had human form, sun the form of a man and earth the form of a woman, whose milk may be traced in the tin-ore of malaya and whose blood is now gold. Actors in the north of the malay peninsula say that "the earth spirit, whom actors fear, is the daughter of seretang [1] bogoh, who sits in the sun and guides the winds, and of sang siuh, the mother of the earth, who sits at the navel of the world." many religions at once unite and dissociate the fruitful earth and the gloomy underworld. But as malay drama came from india, this northern tradition may be a corruption of hindu mythology. By some malay actors raja siu, lord of the surface of the earth, is invoked along with siva, and the name is perhaps a corruption of siva. Anyhow, in time siva and sri usurped the place of father sky (or father water, as he is sometimes called) and of mother earth in the malay pantheon, and to-day even the existence of these two primitive gods has been forgotten.
The study of early cults shows that the place of a sky-god tends later to be taken by gods of the sun, the moon and the stars. So in some ancient layer of malay beliefs before the introduction of saivism, the white spirit of the sun, the black spirit of the moon, and the yellow spirit of sunset may have been important, seeing that they have indonesian names...