Part 14 (1/2)
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-wors.h.i.+ppers, who, instead of seeking to ingratiate themselves with benevolent deities, whose favor is already a.s.sured, 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 G.o.ds, 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 a.s.sociate, 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 G.o.d, spirit, or future life; they do not wors.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sport 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 G.o.d, 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 s.h.i.+nes 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 s.p.a.ce 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 anaemic 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 sh.o.r.e and became a beautiful woman. The G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.d, 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 h.e.l.l; others that there is no h.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l enough on earth in fear, illness, disappointment, misunderstanding and Spaniards, to atone for all the mischief he is liable to make.
Animal Myths
In the fables of the Filipinos the animals often speak together in a common language. The dove, however, is the only one that comprehends human speech, and it is a creature of uncommon shrewdness and intelligence, like the hare in the Indian myths and Br'er Rabbit in the stories of our Southern negroes. Once the dove was a child. In shame and anger that its mother should refuse to give it some rice she was pounding for panapig (a sort of cake), it ran out of the cabin, took two leaves of a nipa, shaped wings from them, which it fastened to its shoulders, and fluttered into the boughs of a neighboring tree, changing, in its flight, from a child to a dove. It still calls for panapig.
Darwin is read backward by the natives, for they say that the monkey was a man, long, long ago, and might have been one still but for his manana habit, so general in the Spanish colonies. He had a partner whom he greatly vexed by his idleness, and once, when this partner was planting rice, he glanced up and saw the monkey squatted on the earth, with his face between his hands, watching the labors of the industrious member of the firm,--for nothing makes loafing sweeter than to see somebody else work. Enraged, the busy one caught up a cudgel and flung it at the monkey, who was thereupon seized with a sudden but futile activity, and started to run away. The club struck him in the rear so mightily that it entered his spinal column and stayed there, becoming his tail.
In the Moro tradition of the flood--a tradition almost world-wide--Noah and his family got into a box when the forty days of rain began, and one pair of each kind of bird and beast followed them. All of the human race except Noah, his wife and children, were either drowned or changed. Those men who ran to the mountains when they saw the flood rising became monkeys; those who flung themselves into the sea became fish; the Chinese turned into hornbills; a woman who was eating seaweed and kept on eating after the waves broke over her became a dugong.
In Mindanao, Basilan, and Sulu the pig is held in suspicion and its flesh is not eaten. The reason for this aversion is that the first pigs were grandchildren of the great Mahomet himself, and their conversion to these lowly quadrupeds fell out in this way: When Jesus (Isa) called on Mahomet, the latter, jealous of his reputed power, bade him guess what was in the next room. Christ said that he did not wish to do so. Mahomet then commanded him to prove his ability to see through walls, and added that if he made a mistake he would kill him. Thereupon Christ answered, ”There are two animals in that chamber that are like no other in the world.”
”Wrong!” cried the Prophet, plucking out his sword. ”They are my grandchildren. You have spoken false, and you must lose your head.”
”Look and see,” insisted Christ, and Mahomet flung open the chamber door, whereupon two hogs rushed out. It should be added that while the divinity of Christ is denied in some of the Oriental religions, he figures in many of them as a great and good man, gifted with supernatural power. Moros charge as one reason for killing Christians that followers of Christ disgrace and belie mankind in teaching that men could kill their own G.o.d.
On Mindoro the timarau, a small buffalo that lives in the jungle, has given rise to rumors of a fierce and destructive creature that carries a single horn on his head. It is a wild and hard fighter, but it has two horns, and is not likely to injure any save those who are seeking to injure it. A creature with an armed head has lingered down from the day of Marco Polo, because in the stock of yarns a.s.sembled by that redoubtable tourist the unicorn figured. This was the rhinoceros, which is found so near the Philippines as Sumatra. The gnu of Africa is another possible ancestor of this creature, a belief in which goes back to the time of Aristotle; but the horse-like animal with a narwhal's horn that frisks on the British arms never existed.
And, speaking of horses, it is strange that centaurs should figure in the mythology of a country like Luzon; but a mile from the church at Mariveles is a hot spring beside which lived a creature that was half-horse and half-man. As in ancient Greece, there is little doubt that a belief in this being came from the wonder excited by the first hors.e.m.e.n.