Old Beliefs of the Filipinos
Respecting their myths the Filipinos differ in little from other human families whose civilization is incomplete. They had in former times the same tendency to create gods and spirits for particular hills, woods, seas, and lakes, to endow the brutes with human qualities, to symbolize in the deeds of men and animals the phenomena of the heavens. Even now the Monteses tell of a tree that folds its limbs around the trunk of another and hugs it to death, the tree thus killed rotting and leaving a tube of tightly laced branches in which are creatures that bleed through the bark at a sword-thrust or an ax-cut. These creatures are mischievously alleged to be Spaniards. The Tagalogs believe in Tic-Balan, an evil spirit who inhabits fig-trees, but is kept off by wearing a certain herb, and in a female spirit of the woods, Azuan, who is kept away from the house in times of domestic anxiety by the husband, who mounts to the roof and keeps up a disturbance for some hours.
In their feasts and ceremonies the natives have hymns and prayers to the rain-spirit, the sea, the star-god, the good birds, and the winds. Little has been done toward the preservation of their myths, for the Spaniards, during their centuries of control, suppressed learning, except as it pertained to religious studies, and tolerated but scant liberty of opinion. The friars, against whom the people nursed so strong a hate, stood for all that was harsh, narrow, tyrannical, and unprogressive. In order to gain money and maintain their political ascendency they engaged in commerce, became owners of real estate and buildings, including saloons and dance-houses, debased their churchly functions, discouraged attempts at progress, practically forbade the printing of secular books and papers, making illiteracy, with its attendant vice, poverty, and superstition, universal; and when Dr. Jose Rizal urged his reforms in the church and civil service, he was shot, though not as a blasphemer, but because his secret order, the Katipunan, with its Masonic ritual and blood initiation, was thought to be dangerous to the public peace.
The change from this mediæval condition to that of the nineteenth century, with its impatience of title, caste, form, and ceremony, its trust in equal right, its insistence on freedom of belief, came suddenly. In shaking off their ancient political and religious bonds the Filipinos may lose some of the quaint and poetic records of their ancient faiths; for the first progress of a nation after a long sleep is a material one, and art, literature, all the more delicate expressions of national taste, history, and tendency, have to bide their day until the fortunes of the nation are assured. In this period of reconstruction let us hope that those fables and dreams will not be forgotten which tell, more truly than dates and names and records, the ancient state of the people, and afford us a means of estimating the impetus and direction of their advance.
The influence of Christian teaching is plain in some of the songs, plays, and stories of the natives, especially in the plays, for in them the hero is often a Christian prince who defeats a strong and wicked Mohammedan ruler, and releases an injured maiden. Change the names and the play becomes a modern English melodrama. In several of the islands, however, the impress of Spanish occupancy is slight, and customs are still in force that have existed for hundreds of years. On Mindanao are still to be found the politic devil-worshippers, who, instead of seeking to ingratiate themselves with benevolent deities, whose favor is already assured, try to gain the goodwill of the fiends. Their rites are practised in caves in which will be found ugly figures of wood and an altar on which animals are sacrificed. The flesh of these animals is eaten by the devils, according to the priests, and by the priests, according to the white men. The evil spirits who appear in the half-darkness of these caves, leaping and screaming, goading the company to frenzy, are priests in disguise and in demoniac possession.
Tagbanuas tear a house down when a death occurs in it, bury the corpse in the woods, and mark the grave by dishes and pots used by the deceased in life. These implements are broken. Among our American Indians the outfits supplied to a dead man are in sound condition, as it is supposed he will need them on his journey to the happy hunting-grounds, while the Chinese put rice and chicken in sound vessels on the graves of their brethren, believing they will need refreshment when they start on the long journey to the land of the shades. Tramps know where the Chinese are accustomed to bury their dead in American cities. When food is placed before an Otaheite corpse it is not for the dead, but for the gods, and is intended to secure their good offices for the departed. While a Tagbanua corpse is above ground it is liable to be eaten by a vampire called the balbal that lives on Mindanao, has the form of a man with wings and great claws, tears open the thatch of houses and consumes bodies by means of a long tongue, which it thrusts through the opening in the roof. These Tagbanuas do not believe in a heaven in the skies, because, they say, you could not get up there. When a man dies he enters a cave that leads into the depths of the earth, and after travelling for a long time he arrives in the chamber where Taliakood sits,—a giant who employs his leisure in stirring a fire that licks two tree trunks without destroying them. The giant asks the new-comer if he has been good or bad in the world overhead, but the dead man makes no reply. He has a witness who has lived with him and knows his actions, and it is the function and duty of this witness to state the case. This little creature is a louse. On being asked what would happen if a native were to die without one of these attendants, the people protest that no such thing ever happens. So the louse, having neither to gain nor lose, reports the conduct of his commissary and associate, and if the man has been bad, Taliakood throws him into the fire, where he is burned to ashes, and so an end of him. If he has been good, the giant speeds him on his way to a happy hunting-ground, where he can kill animals by thousands, and where the earth also yields fruits and vegetables in plenty. Here he finds a house, without having the trouble to build one, and a wife is also provided for him,—the deceased wife of some neighbor usually, although he can have his own wife if she is considerate enough to die when he does. Down here everybody is well off, though the rich, having had much pleasure in the world, have less of it than the poor. After a term of years the Tagbanua dies again and goes at once to a heaven in a deeper cave without danger from fire. Seven times he dies, each time going deeper and becoming happier, and probably gains Nirvana in the end. Occasionally a good spirit returns as a dove, and a bad one comes as a goat; indeed, a few of the bad ones are doomed to wander over the earth forever.
A common belief is that the soul is absent from the body in sleep, and if death occurs then the soul is lost. “May you die sleeping” is one of the most dreadful of curses.
Among the Mangyan mountaineers it is customary to desert a person who is about to die. They return after his death, carry the corpse to the forest, build a fence about it, and roof it with a thatch. These people seem to have no word for god, spirit, or future life; they do not worship either visible or unseen things, and are the most moral of the Filipinos. The lowlanders also desert their dying, and after death close all paths to the house, leave the skeleton of the defunct to be picked clean by ants, and change their names for luck.
When an islander in the Calamianes province dies his friends ask the corpse where it would like to be buried, naming several places, and lifting the body after each question. When the body seems to rise lightly the dead man has said, “Yes.” It may then be buried, or placed in a tree in the desired locality, with such of its belongings as the family can spare, and the mourners watch around a fire that night until all the logs are consumed. The dead man walks about in the ashes, leaving his footprints, and sometimes shows himself to his relatives. Singing and feasting follow for several nights, and the house of the dead is then abandoned.
The holes in the marble cliffs of San Francisco Strait formerly contained the coffined dead of the tattooed Pintados, who sacrificed slaves at the funeral that they might attend their relatives in the next world. Fear of the spirits of these rocks was but partially overcome when a Spanish priest smashed the coffins and tumbled the bodies into the sea, for the strait is still haunted and the burial rocks are good places to keep away from after dark.
Among the Moslem Moros it is a sure passport to heaven to kill a Christian, and when one remembers how the people have been robbed, tortured, and oppressed by nominal Christians, this item of faith is not surprising. The more Christians he kills the greater will be his reward. He bathes in a sacred spring, shaves his eye-brows, dresses in white, takes an oath before a pandita or native priest to die killing infidels; then, with the ugly creese, or wave-edged knife, he runs madly through the street, killing, right and left, until some considerate person shoots him. In the rage for blood he has been known to push himself farther against a sword or bayonet that had already entered his vitals in order to stab the man who had stopped him. When they hear of his death the relatives of the fanatic have a celebration, and declare that in the fall of the night they see him ride by on a white horse, bound for the home of the good, where no Christians ever go to vex the angels. These people are often fatalists. They will drink water known to be poisoned with typhoid germs, and when epidemics come they declare them to be the will of God, and refuse to take the slightest measure against infection. They believe that when a strange black dog runs by cholera follows on his heels.
Yet, like our Indians, the better Tagbanuas and Calamianes try to heal the sick through the aid of drugs and charms and incantations, and they have their medicine man or papalyan. There is in the forest a strange little fellow, known as the man of the wood, who has the power of giving to these doctors the art of healing. He rushes out upon one who walks alone, seeking power, and brandishes a spear, finally aiming it at the breast of the candidate, and advancing his foot as if to throw it. If the candidate runs he is unworthy, but if he stands his ground the little man of the wood drops his spear and gives a pearl to him. This pearl is never shown to anybody. It is looked at secretly at a patient’s bedside, and if clear the physician will prescribe, but if it is dark, or has taken on a stony aspect, he resigns the case. The “drugs” are similar to those used by the Chinese, consisting in part of powdered teeth and bones and other animal preparations. Charms are in common use as a protection not only from disease but from murder and misfortune, and in the fighting between the Americans and the natives about Manila many poor, half-naked creatures, armed with bows and arrows, had ventured fearlessly into the zone of fire, believing themselves to be safe because they wore an anting-anting at the neck. This object, like an Indian’s “good medicine,” is anything,—a little book, a bright pebble, a church relic, a medal, an old bullet, a coin, a piece of cloth, a pack of cards. It is the faith that goes with it, not the object itself, that counts. Even Aguinaldo has been invested by his followers with superhuman power. Just before he resorted to arms against the Americans the natives knew that the time for rebellion had come, for a woman in Biacnabato gave birth to a child dressed in a general’s uniform, and above Tondo a woman’s figure crowned with snakes was painted in fire upon the night-sky.
In details of their faiths the tribes differ, but there is a prevalent belief in a principle of good that the Moros call Tuhan. The sun, moon, and stars are the light that shines from him,—he is everywhere, all-seeing, all-powerful; he has given fleeting souls to brutes and eternal souls to men. The soul enters a child’s body at birth, through the soft space in the top of the head, and leaves through the skull at death. Their first men were giants, and Eve was fifty feet high, but as men’s minds grew their bodies became of less account, and they will shrink and shrink until, at the world’s end, they will be only three feet high, but will consist mostly of brains. Comparing a brawny savage with an anæmic scholar, one fancies there is reason in this forecast. The Tagbanuas have no Adam and Eve. Those of them who live beside the ocean say they are the children of Bulalacao, a falling star that descended to the shore and became a beautiful woman. The gods of these people are like men, but are stronger, living in caves, eating an ambrosia-like boiled rice that has the power of moving. Their gods sometimes steal their children.
Old Testament traditions are commonly accepted by the Moros, who believe in No (Noah), Adam, Mosa (Moses), Ibrahim (Abraham), Sulaiman (Solomon), Daud (David), and Yakub (Jacob); but creation myths are locally modified, and some tales of recent emergence of islands out of the sea are probably true. In all volcanic districts mountains may be shaken down and hills cast up in a day. Siquijor formerly bore the name of the Isle of Fire, for the natives say that in the days of their grandfathers a cloud brooded on the sea for a week, uttering thunders and hisses and flashing forth bolts of fire. When the cloud lifted, Siquijor stood there. The geology of the island supports the tradition.
The future is differently conceived by different sects and families, some panditas teaching that the soul, having come from God, will return to him at death; others that it will sleep in the earth or the air until the world has ended, when all will be swept on a wind to a mount of judgment, where saints and angels will weigh them, and souls heavy with sin will fall into hell; others that there is no hell of fire, because there is not coal enough to keep it going, but that every man is punished until his soul is purified, when it rises to heaven, glowing with light and color; others that men are punished according to their sins; liars and gossips with sore mouths and tired jaws; gluttons with lame stomachs; jealous, cruel, tricky people with aching hearts; abusive and thievish ones with pains in their hands; others that one finds hell enough on earth in fear, illness, disappointment, misunderstanding and Spaniards, to atone for all the mischief he is liable to make.