Babaylan is the Visayan term, used across the scholarship as a general label, for the priestess or shaman of the precolonial Philippines, believed capable of mediating between the human community and the spirits of nature and of the dead. The office ranked second in community standing only to the datu, the chief, and its holders led healing rites, presided over planting and harvest ceremonies, and interpreted omens and dreams for the communities they served across the Visayas, Luzon and Mindanao before sustained Spanish contact.
The role was held predominantly by women, but it was not exclusively theirs: ritually feminized men, called asog in the Visayas and bayok in parts of Luzon, adopted women's dress, speech and social role in order to serve as babaylan, a pattern of gender crossing tied specifically to ritual office rather than to identity more broadly. Early Spanish missionary writing struggled to categorize these men, and the confusion itself became part of the colonial record scholars now use to reconstruct how gender and religious authority were organized before conquest.
Babaylan practice was never uniform across the archipelago's many language groups, and the term itself is a modern scholarly convenience covering a range of local titles and specializations, some focused on healing, others on divination, mediumship, or leading communal ritual, a diversity this atlas preserves by treating Babaylan as a general office rather than a single fixed role.