Anitism is best read from its practice outward rather than from a doctrine down. The unit that matters is the household and the settlement, and the beings that matter are near at hand. Anito covers both the ancestral dead, who continue to take an interest in their descendants, and the spirits attached to places and things, who have interests of their own and can be offended by trespass. Illness, a failed harvest and a bad crossing are read as consequences of a relation gone wrong, and the response is an offering, made with food, drink, cloth or a pig, at a place the spirit is known to occupy. Carved figures representing anito were kept in houses and fed.
Above this level the sources for the Tagalog lowlands describe Bathala Maykapal, a creator who made the world and then withdrew from it, receiving little direct cult; other language groups in the archipelago name their own high beings, and the pattern of a remote creator with active local spirits recurs across them. Reaching the spirits was specialist work.
The babaylan in the Visayas and the katalonan among the Tagalogs was a ritual specialist and a healer, entering trance to speak with or as the spirit, and holding a standing in the community that depended on no male office. That the role was usually filled by women is among the most consistent features of the record, and among the first things colonial authority attacked.