Philippine Indigenous Religion (Anitism)

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.

Nearly everything written about Philippine indigenous religion before the nineteenth century was written by men whose purpose was to end it. Fray Juan de Plasencia's Relacion de las Costumbres de los Tagalos, compiled in 1589, is the earliest systematic account of Tagalog belief and practice, and it was produced as a working document for missionaries: a catalogue of what to recognise and what to root out. Its detail is genuine and often the only detail there is. Its shape is not neutral. Practices are sorted into categories drawn from European demonology, the specialists are described as agents of the devil, and the whole is organised around the question of what must be forbidden. Reading such a source well means using it for what it observed while discounting what it assumed.

Later scholarship has done exactly that. Carolyn Brewer's work on shamanism, Catholicism and gender in the colonial Philippines reads the missionary record against itself to recover the standing of the babaylan and to show how deliberately that standing was dismantled, a female ritual specialist being both a rival authority and an offence to the order the friars brought with them. Damiana Eugenio's collections of Philippine myth gather narrative material from later oral sources and supply what the friars did not think worth recording. The atlas treats the tradition as living rather than extinct.