Alan

There is a sound in the big tree beside the trail, and it is not the sound a bird makes. Look up and the branches are occupied. Bodies hang head-down from the limbs with their wings folded against them, each one as large as anybody walking below. The toes sit at the backs of the feet. The fingers are fastened at the wrist and point the wrong way, back along the forearm, so that even asleep the hands look wrong in a way that takes a moment to place.

These are the alan, the deformed spirits of the forest in the belief of the Itneg of Abra, in the mountains of northwestern Luzon, the people the American ethnographer Fay-Cooper Cole knew as the Tinguian. He recorded the description almost as a definition, in the flat voice of a man writing down what he had been told: they are as large as people but have wings and can fly, their toes are at the back of their feet, and their fingers point backward from their wrists. In one of the old chants they are called the alan girls whose toes on their feet turn out. In another they are addressed as the alan of the springs, and a man goes down into the water to find them there.

Nobody says where they came from. They are simply in the forest, in the places where people seldom go, and the tales treat them the way a village treats a neighbouring settlement of odd habits and unaccountable wealth.

The wealth is the first surprise. For creatures that sleep upside down in trees, the alan keep astonishing houses. Cole’s informants placed those houses beside springs, and made the pebbles of the spring bed out of gold and beads. The flat stones a woman sets her water jar on while she dips are great plates and dishes. More dishes make the stepping stones up to the door. Inside there are worked gold and the old Chinese jars that an Itneg family would pay a bride price with, and which they notched on the rim once for every generation that had held them.

The second surprise is what the houses are for. The alan are foster mothers. When a woman miscarries, or bleeds, or when the afterbirth is put away, an alan may take what was discarded and, without the true parents ever knowing, change it into a child and raise it as her own. The belief was not confined to the storytellers. Cole found it alive in the practices around childbirth, where the tie between an infant and its afterbirth was held to be close and dangerous, and where the conviction persisted that a group of spirits called alan sometimes took the placenta and made from it a real child, stronger than ordinary mortals. Those children grow up in the golden houses. When their true parentage is finally worked out they go home to their blood parents and take the treasure with them, and the arrival of all that gold in an ordinary village is a thing the tales linger over. One such foster child, Sayen, was believed to have lived not very long ago at all, and his story runs on the same rails as the ancient ones.

They are dangerous chiefly by accident, and by appetite. Two men once speared a wild pig in the mountains and had no fire to singe the bristles off it. One climbed a tree, saw smoke at a distance, and walked to it, and found an alan asleep in her house with her baby. He crept in on his toes and she woke anyway. Epogow, she said, which is the word spirits use for human beings, what do you want. He asked for fire. She gave him the fire, took up her basket, walked back with him and butchered the pig herself with her long nails, then handed him the liver and told him to carry it home and feed her child. He ate the liver on the way. Standing in her house with nothing to give the baby, he looked around, saw the cauldron of hot water on the hearth, and put the baby in it.

What follows is the closest thing the alan have to a death scene. She came back, found the child, and went after the men, who had climbed a high tree beside the water. She saw their reflection first and reached for it, the long backward hand going down into the pool. Then she looked up. How did you get up there, she shouted, and they told her they had climbed feet first. So she caught a vine and started up the trunk feet first, and they cut the vine, and she fell and was killed. The men went to her house and came away with a jar of beads and a jar of gold.

Their gifts are as unnerving as their anger. Another Tinguian, frightened by the noise in the tree, tried to run, got a few steps, and fell on his face in the trail. The alan began to wail, because they thought he was dead, and they came down out of the branches with gold and beads and laid the treasure on his body. When he found his nerve and jumped up shouting at them to go away, they did not move. They only asked to keep one bead, the nagaba, and said he could have all the rest. Such beads were real and are still worn on Itneg women’s arms, strand above strand, each one reckoned worth more than a carabao. He refused. Then we are going to burn your house, they said, for you are a bad man. His house burned.

That is the whole of their power, more or less: flight, a strength in the hands that opens a pig without a blade, the making of children out of blood, and a promise that carries. What they conspicuously lack is dignity. They can be outwitted by a lie about climbing. They can be robbed while they are grieving. Cole noted that the ending of the hunters’ tale was typical of the way the Tinguian handled the weaker spirits in his own day, when the mediums would make fun of them at ceremonies and cheat them of their share of the sacrifice. A being that can fly and rebuild a miscarriage into a hero can also be sent away from a feast with the wrong portion.

Later collectors blurred them. Maximo Ramos, whose compendium of Philippine lower mythology remains the standard field guide, filed the alan under the imported European heading of ogre and folded in material about the aran, the cannibal beings of the Isnag people of Apayao to the north, so that some tales told of one creature now circulate under the other’s name. The alan of Abra do not eat anybody in the record Cole collected. They raise the children nobody else wanted, they overpay for a corpse that turns out to be alive, and they hold a grudge about a single bead.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Alan in Philippine mythology?

The Alan are winged forest spirits from the folklore of the Itneg people of Abra, in northwestern Luzon. They are described as being as large as a grown person, with wings, toes set at the back of their feet, and long fingers attached at the wrist that point backward. They live deep in the forest and sleep hanging head-down from tree branches like bats.

Where do the Alan live?

The Alan live in the depths of the forest, in places people rarely visit, and are often placed beside springs. Their houses are described as far finer than human ones, built with gold and valuables, with plates and dishes serving as stepping stones and the pebbles of the spring made of gold and beads.

How do the Alan have children?

The Alan take the discarded material of human reproduction, a drop of menstrual blood, a miscarriage, or the afterbirth, and transform it into a living child which they then raise as their own, without the real parents knowing. Fay-Cooper Cole recorded this as a live belief among the Tinguian in 1907 and 1908, not only as a story motif. A child made this way was held to be more powerful than an ordinary mortal.

Are the Alan dangerous to humans?

They are more unpredictable than hostile. In one tale an Alan gives a hunter fire and helps him butcher his pig, and in another the Alan cover a fallen man with gold and beads because they believe he is dead. They turn dangerous when they are wronged, and in the tales they can also be killed: one is tricked into climbing a vine feet first and falls to her death.

Are the Alan the same as the Aran?

No. The Aran are beings of the Isnag people of Apayao Province with cannibalistic traits, and the two were merged in later compilations, most influentially by Maximo Ramos. The Alan recorded among the Itneg of Abra are foster mothers and forest householders rather than man-eaters.

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