In the Benaue district, the kin of one’s father or mother, in addition to being called father or mother, are also called ulitao (uncle or aunt), and the husbands or wives of the ulitao are called ulitaon (uncles-in-law, aunts-in-law). The son or daughter of a kinsman or a kinswoman of the same generation in addition to being called son or daughter of one’s self is called amanaon.
Appendix 2: Connection of Religion with Procedure
An Ifugao myth.—Partly because of its connection with the Ifugao marriage ceremony, partly because it illustrates so well the use to which the Ifugao puts his myths—rarely telling them for amusement, but reciting them in religious ceremonies as a means to magic—and partly because it is so characteristically Ifugao, I have decided to append the following myth, despite the fact that it might more properly appear in a work on religion.
Most of the Ifugao’s myths have either been invented or if not invented, changed, for the purpose of affording an analogy to the solution of the difficulties or misfortunes that confront men today. The Ifugaos have a myth telling of a great flood, whose only survivors were a brother and sister—Balitok and Bugan. In chagrin and shame because her brother has gotten her with child, Bugan flees into the East Region to seek destruction from the terrors there. They refuse to destroy her, but teach her how to take the curse off marriages between kindred by the sacrifice of two pigs, a male and female of the same litter. Notice how a flood myth—an element in the mythology of nearly every people under the sun—has been modified and made to serve a magic purpose.
The myth given below is a further and utterly inconsistent modification of this flood myth. In the myth above, Balitok and Bugan are represented as having a child and not wanting it—in the myth below, they have no child but want one.
The ceremony of using a myth to serve a religious end consists of two parts. The first is the recitation of the myth by the priest. This is called bukad. In affords an analogy to the condition of sickness, war, famine, harvest, union in marriage, or what not, in which the performers of the ceremony find themselves, and the happy solution of the problem. It is terminated by what I term the fiat. This is an expression of the priest’s will that the happy solution related in the myth shall be existent in the present situation. It is not, I think, the fact of the priest’s will that is thought to bring about the solution so much as the compelling and magic power of his spoken word to that end.
Up to this stage, the ceremony is sympathetic magic. In the second stage it becomes witchcraft, and is called tulud, “pushing.” In it the priest “pushes” the deities of the myth over the route from their habitations in the Skyworld, the Underworld, the East Region, the West Region, or wheresoever they may abide, step by step to the village of the Ifugaos performing the ceremony. He may recite their passage through as many as thirty or forty localities, and as the priest drones: “They climb the steep at Nunbalabog; they descend at Baat, they wade at Monkilkalney,” etc., the compelling power of his spoken word “pushes” the deities along. Finally the deities arrive and declare through the priest that they will confer the benefits requested.
This myth is employed in all of the final ceremonies of marriage, and in all ceremonies of married persons that have the obtaining of children as their object. The translation is absolutely literal and without embellishment.
How Balitok and Bugan obtained children.—And it is said that Bugan and Balitok of Kiangan were childless. “What is the use [of living]?” said Bugan. “Stay here, Balitok. I am going to go to the East Country. I will see Ngilin, Umbumabakal, Dauwak, Pinyuhan, Bolang, and the Gods of Animal Fertility of the East.” She got betels together and packed them. Bugan and Balitok ate. After finishing, they chewed betels.