This presentation explores how translations influenced understandings of sex, piety, and regeneration, in this life and the next, among the Muslim elite in Islamic Southeast Asia, particularly in the spice-producing island of Ambon in eastern Indonesia. By examining and comparing two different types of Arabic to Malay translations in an eighteenth-century manuscript, catalogued as a book of “mantras,” I will examine how the island's male writers vernacularized the virtues of sexual acts, understood marital relations, and attempted to resolve tensions of bodily purity and impurity through tropes about creation and the afterlife. I will be linking these translations to medical recipes contained in the same manuscript. These recipes consisted of instructions for wielding the potency of plants as well as words, for healing common bodily ailments as well as ghostly afflictions of the mind and soul. Fragments of similar recipes circulated across the archipelago through inter-island networks, as elite Muslims integrated them from and into many existing genres. By reading the translations alongside these recipes, I will demonstrate how such intertextual readings can illuminate a history of everyday material practice in relation to the body and the natural world. While these religious and medicinal contents―including teachings and figurations of ‘Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib and Fāṭima al-Zahrā'―are found in many other parts of the archipelago, I suggest that they had particular valence for the island's minority Muslim population under Dutch East India Company rule in the eighteenth century.