Mariang Makiling

The mist comes off Mount Makiling in the late afternoon and moves downhill through the trees as though it has an errand. Farmers on the Laguna side have watched it do that for centuries. Somewhere inside the pale drift, they say, walks a woman in a white dress who has not aged since anyone’s grandmother was a girl, and who owns every fruit on the mountain whether you were told so or not.

She is Mariang Makiling, a diwata, one of the guardian spirits the Tagalogs carried through three centuries of Spanish rule by the straightforward method of not raising the subject in church. The mountain is hers and she is the mountain’s. Seen from the right angle across the lake, the volcano’s ridgeline reads as a reclining woman, the peaks taken for a face and two breasts, the long southern slope for her hair spilling away from her body. Nobody has ever settled which came first, the mountain’s name or the lady’s. The Tagalog word makiling means leaning or uneven, which suits a summit that breaks into ragged hills going south; another reading points at kawayang kiling, the bamboo that grows thickly on the slopes. Her own name is a piece of colonial sediment. The older form was Dayang Makiling, dayang being the Austronesian title for a noble lady, and the Spanish swapped in Maria to make her sound like somebody the parish priest could live with.

She is easiest to find in the aftermath of weather. Six generations of Tagalogs have described her walking the ruined forest the morning after a typhoon, setting broken trunks upright, lifting fallen nests back into the branches, clearing the choked mouths of anthills, mending a butterfly’s wing between two fingers. Orchids open where she has been. The deer come out to be looked at. On clear nights people below the treeline claim to hear a harp and a woman singing something slow in a language they cannot place, and they go to bed and say nothing about it.

Her generosity was once a matter of practical arrangement rather than legend. A family with a wedding coming and nothing to put on the table would go up and ask, and she would lend jewels, good clothes, plates and cutlery, on the single condition that they bring her a white hen that had never laid, a dumalaga. Poor gatherers found gold in their pockets after a day’s firewood. One young hunter chased a wounded boar through the thorn scrub and lost it at the door of a hut he had never seen before. A woman came out and told him the boar was hers, observed without much sympathy that he was bleeding from both arms and both legs, and fed him anyway. He ate everything she put down and could not manage a single word. On the way out she handed him a few knobs of ginger for his mother’s cooking. He put them in his hat and walked home, and when he took the hat off, the ginger was gold.

That is the story the whole archipelago knows, and it usually ends worse. In most tellings the ginger goes to a mother whose child is not sick but starving, or to a husband who finds the load too heavy and throws half of it into the grass before he learns what he is carrying. Then the neighbours hear about it. They break into her garden at night to see whether the rest of her plants are gold too, and that is the end of the arrangement. She goes up the mountain, her white clothes losing themselves in the white cloud among the upper trees, and the borrowing stops.

The version most readers meet was set down in Madrid on the last day of 1890, in the fortnightly La Solidaridad, by a doctor from Calamba at the foot of the mountain writing under the name Laong Laan. José Rizal did not invent her, and he says so; he is reporting what the people of his own town told each other. But his telling is loaded with the politics of the decade. His Maria falls in love with a quiet young farmer whose fields and flock do better than his neighbours’, which the village puts down to a mutya, a charm. Then the army comes recruiting unmarried men, and the farmer arranges a marriage to a mortal girl to keep himself out of the war. He climbs up one last time. She tells him he needs an earthly love and has not enough faith in her besides, and that she could have protected him and his family. Then she is gone, and the hut is never found again. Elsewhere in the same essay the reason for her withdrawal is the Dominican friars trying to take half her mountain.

The mountain kept its manners after she stopped appearing. You may eat any fruit you like on Makiling and you may carry none of it home. Break that and you will circle the same clearing until dark, stung and thorn-torn, and the only remedy is to throw the fruit away and turn your clothes inside out so she can see your hands are empty. Men still go missing in the forest, and the old explanation is that she has taken a husband. Students at the university on the lower slopes trade sightings of a woman in white on the road up to the forestry campus, sometimes seeming to want a lift down, always ignored. A loud event near the mountain that is followed by sudden rain gets the same verdict from the locals: she does not approve.

Not everyone tells it kindly. Kapampangan tradition remembers a Dayang Makiling who came at the head of an invading fleet of river people, and a chief named Apung Suku who dammed the Pampanga River, reversed its flow, trapped the boats and took her surrender, which is how he became Sinukuan, the one to whom submission is made. Two mountains, two peoples, one lady, and the story changes sides depending on which slope you are standing on.

Her powers are the mountain’s powers and they stop at its edges. She commands abundance inside her own territory and nothing outside it. She cannot be compelled, tricked, or bargained with beyond the terms she sets herself, and she has no counter at all for the one thing that keeps beating her, which is an ordinary human choosing something ordinary. A farmer picks a wife who can be seen by his neighbours. Villagers who have been given gold decide to go and take the rest. There is no monster in this story and no weapon that works on her. She simply stops coming down, and the record of the last hundred and thirty years suggests she meant it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Mariang Makiling?

Mariang Makiling, also written Maria Makiling, is a diwata or guardian spirit of Mount Makiling in Laguna province, Philippines, and the best known figure of her kind in Philippine mythology. She is described as an unaging young woman with sun-browned skin and black hair almost to her feet, dressed in luminous white. She protects the mountain’s forests and animals and controls the abundance of its fruit, game and fish.

What is the legend of the ginger turning to gold?

In the most widespread version, Mariang Makiling gives an ordinary villager a handful of ginger, which has turned to gold by the time he reaches home. The recipient is usually a poor hunter, or a parent whose child is starving rather than ill. In many tellings the villager throws part of the ginger away because it is heavy, and greedy neighbours then raid her garden looking for more gold, which is why she withdraws up the mountain.

Did José Rizal invent Maria Makiling?

No. Rizal published his account of her in the Madrid paper La Solidaridad on 31 December 1890 under the pen name Laong Laan, and he presents it as a legend already told for generations in his home town of Calamba at the foot of the mountain. His version is the most influential one, and it carries the politics of its moment, including Spanish military conscription and the Dominican friars’ attempt to take half the mountain.

Why can you not take fruit home from Mount Makiling?

Local custom holds that Mariang Makiling allows visitors to eat any fruit they like on the mountain but never to carry any away, because everything on it belongs to her. Anyone who breaks the rule gets lost, walking in circles and beset by insect stings and thorn pricks. The remedy is to throw the fruit away and turn your clothing inside out, showing her that you are no longer carrying anything of hers.

What does the name Mariang Makiling mean?

It contracts the Tagalog phrase Maria ng Makiling, meaning “Maria of Makiling”, and the “Maria” is a Spanish-era addition to an older title, Dayang Makiling, in which dayang means noble lady or princess. The word makiling itself is Tagalog for leaning or uneven, describing the mountain’s irregular profile. Some accounts instead derive it from kawayang kiling, a bamboo that grows on the slopes.

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