THEIR PREROGATIVES
(1) The priest holds converse with his divine friends, whose form he sees and describes, whose words he hears and interprets, and whose injunctions, whether made known directly by personal revelation or through divination or through dreams, he announces. When under supernal influence he is not a voluntary agent but an inspired being, through whose mouth the deity announces his will and to whose eyes he appears in visible incarnation.
(2) By means of his friendship with these unseen beings he is enabled to discover the presence of the inveterate enemies of human kind, the búsau, and even to wound them. I investigated two3 cases of the latter kind and found that not a shadow of doubt as to the truth of the killing and as to the reality of this last-mentioned power was entertained by those who had been in a position to see and hear the facts.
3San Luis and San Miguel.
(3) As a result of the favor with which he is looked upon by the beneficent deities, he is enabled to discover the presence of various spirits in certain localities, and he knows the proper means of dealing with them. This statement applies to the spirits of "souls"4 of the departed whose wishes and wants he interprets; to the spirits of the hills and the valleys, the tagbánua, whose favor must be courted and whose displeasure must not be provoked, and to the whole order of supernatural beings that people the Manóbo world, with the exception of the blood spirits, the worship of whom falls to the war priests.
4Um-a-gád.
SINCERITY OF THE PRIESTS
On first becoming acquainted with the bailán system, I was very dubious, to say the least, of the sincerity and disinterestedness of these favorites of the gods. But long and careful observation and frequent dealings with them have thoroughly convinced me of their sincerity. They affect no austere practices, no chastity, nor any other observance peculiar to the order of priesthood in other parts of the world. They claim no high prerogatives of their own; they can not slay at a distance nor metamorphose themselves into animals of fierce aspect. They have no cabalistic rites nor magic formulas nor miraculous methods for producing wondrous effects. In a word, as far as my personal observation goes, they are not impostors nor conjurers, plying thrifty trade with their fellow tribesmen, but merely intermediaries, who avail themselves of their intimacy with powers unseen to solicit aid for themselves and for their fellows in the hour of trial or tribulation. "I will call on Si Inimigus" (her diuáta's pet name, his real name being Si Inámpo), said a priestess of the Kasilaían River to me once when I consulted her as to the sickness of a child, "and I will let you know his answer." On her return she informed me that the child had fallen under the influence of an evil spirit and that Si Inimigus required the sacrifice of a pig as a token of my good will towards him and also as a gratification of a desire that he felt for such nourishment. She departed as she came, never asking any compensation for her advice.
I might cite many cases of a similar nature that passed under my personal observation and in which I made every endeavor to discover mercenary motives. I frequently interrogated men of political and social standing as to the possibility of hypocrisy and deceit on the part of the priests. The invariable answer was that such could not be the case, as the deities themselves would be the first to resent and punish such deception. One shrewd Manóbo of the upper Agúsan assured me that the Manóbos themselves were wise enough to detect attempts at fraud in such matters.