Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
THE ASWANG WHO CAME TO DINNER
Heard the one about the pretty young housewife in a remote Visayan village who was
possessed by the spirit of a jealous witch? Or the poor woman from a Manila shantytown
who had taken to flying through the barangay, terrorizing her neighbours? These are
stories from the pages of Manila's daily tabloid newspapers, reported as if they actually
happened. Foreign visitors greet news of the latest barangay haunting with healthy
cynicism, but when you are lying in your creaking nipa hut in the pitch dark of a moonless
evening, it's not hard to see why so many Filipinos grow up embracing strange stories
about creatures that inhabit the night. Even urbane professionals, when returning to the
barangay of their childhood on holiday, can be heard muttering the incantation
tabi tabi
lang-po
as they walk through paddy field or forest. Meaning “please let us pass safely”, it's a
request to the spirits and dwarves that might be lying in wait.
Most Filipino
spirits
are not the abstract souls of Western folklore who live in a netherworld;
they are corporeal entities who live in trees or hang around the jeepney station, waiting to
inflict unspeakable horrors on those who offend them. The most feared and widely talked
about creature of Philippine folklore is the
aswang
; hundreds of cheesy films have been made
about the havoc they wreak and hundreds of
aswang
sightings have been carried by the
tabloid press. By day the
aswang
is a beautiful woman. The only way to identify her is by
looking into her eyes at night, when they turn red. The
aswang
kills her victims as they sleep;
threading her long tongue through the gaps in the floor or walls and inserting it into one of
the body's orifices to suck out the internal organs.
Other creatures on the bogeyman list include the arboreal
tikbalang
, which has the head
of a nag and the body of a man, and specializes in the abduction of virgins. Then there's the
duwende
, an elderly, grizzled dwarf who lurks in the forest and can predict the future, and
the
engkanto
, who hides in trees and throws dust in the faces of passers-by, giving them
permanently twisted lips.
Protestantism and the new religious movements
Some of the fastest growing religious movements in the Philippines are actually
Protestant. One of the candidates in the 2004 and 2010 presidential elections
(he came last both times), Eddie Villanueva established the charismatic
Jesus is
Lord Church
in 1978, which he claims has some six million members, with branches
in Asia, Europe and North America.
You'll see the distinctive fairy-tale spires of
Iglesia ni Cristo
churches throughout the
Philippines, an independent, purely Filipino movement founded by Felix Manalo in
1914 (the movement is currently run by his grandson, Eduardo V. Manalo). Iglesia ni
Cristo is explicitly anti-Catholic in its beliefs (the doctrine of the Trinity is rejected,
for example) and is very influential during elections. Membership is estimated to be
over three million but is probably much higher.
One of the churches most successful at expanding overseas is the
Pentecostal
Missionary Church of Christ
, founded in 1973 and based in Marikina City.
The United
Methodist Church
in the Philippines is an umbrella group for around one million
Methodists in the country, while there are about twenty different
Baptist
groups in the
islands, at least half a million
Mormons
and half a million
Seventh-Day Adventists
.
Another well-known loose a
liation of groups, the
Rizalistas
, have only a tenuous
connection with standard Christian doctrine. All regard José Rizal (see p.439) as the
second son of God and a reincarnation of Christ, and some hold Mount Banahaw (see
p.198) in Quezon province to be sacred, regularly attending pilgrimages to the mountain.
Islam
Islam spread north to the Philippines from Indonesia and Malaysia in the fourteenth
century, and by the time the Spanish arrived it was firmly established on Mindanao and
Sulu, with outposts on Cebu and Luzon.
