Amihan

Also Known As: Tagalog, Visayan and Bikol name of the cool northeast monsoon; the season it brings is tag-amihan; in modern retellings a primordial bird deity
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Philippine Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: In the colonial-era record Amihan is the named northeast wind and the season it rules, and only modern retellings turn it into a bird deity who frees the first humans from a stalk of bamboo.
Role in Mythos: Modern versions of the Tagalog creation story set Amihan beside Bathala and Aman Sinaya as one of three first beings, while the older dictionaries treat it as one of the named winds that divided the year.
Relation to Humans: The wind decided when boats could sail and fish could be taken, and an example sentence in the old Tagalog dictionary describes a whole party marooned by it. In the modern myth Amihan is the rescuer of Malakas and Maganda, the first man and woman.

Binibingbing tayo nang amihan. We are marooned by the amihan. The boats stay drawn up on the sand with their sails bundled, and the cool wind keeps leaning on the shore, day after day, until nobody sensible puts out. The sentence sits in the great Tagalog dictionary compiled by the Jesuits Juan de Noceda and Pedro de Sanlúcar, first printed in Manila in 1754, and the 1860 edition offers it as a model for the verb meaning to be cut off by bad weather. It is one of the oldest places anyone can hear Amihan spoken. In it, Amihan is a wind.

That is what the word meant for as long as it was written down. Noceda and Sanlúcar gloss amihan as the brisa, the steady seasonal breeze of Spanish sailors, and hang a small family of verbs from it: to blow, to be caught by it, to blow hard. They also list the seasons built on it. Tag-araw was the dry time and tag-ulan the rains, tag-amihan the months of the easterly breeze and tag-habagat the time of the vendavales, the heavy squalls from the southwest. A Bikol dictionary printed in 1865 uses the same word for the north wind. Among the Visayans of Leyte and Samar, as the historian William Henry Scott reconstructs them from the Spanish lexicons in Barangay (1994), every cool wind blowing in off the Pacific was amihan, reckoned from December to April and set against the habagat of April to September. When the missionaries needed native names for the four winds of European navigation, amihan was one of the four Visayan words they chose.

What none of these records contains is a god. The same Tagalog dictionary that calls Bathala the greatest of the anitos and Amansinaya the idol of fishermen gives amihan no altar, no offering and no story. It is weather, named precisely enough to argue over. The Tagalogs placed it in the east, Visayan pilots in the northeast or the north, and the Jesuit Juan José Delgado, writing in the 1750s, set it at the north point of his island compass. Nobody in the colonial record prays to Amihan.

The bird comes from somewhere else. One of the oldest creation stories written down in the islands, an account attributed to Miguel López de Legazpi in 1567, begins with nothing but sky and water and a hawk flying between them. Angry at finding nowhere to land, the hawk turned the water against the sky, and the offended sky scattered the sea with islands. Walking the new shore, the hawk had a length of bamboo thrown at its feet by the current. It pecked the stalk open. From one section came a man, from the other a woman, and they married with the approval of Linog, the earthquake. Miguel de Loarca, writing in 1582, makes the bird a kite. In a Panay version the bamboo itself is born from the marriage of the sea breeze and the land breeze. The bird is never named, and neither breeze is called Amihan.

The version most people meet today is assembled from these parts. At the start of things there are three beings: Bathala in the sky, Aman Sinaya in the sea, and Amihan, a bird. Sky and sea quarrel, the islands are made, and Amihan, flying over them, hears voices inside a bamboo stalk and pecks it open, and out step Malakas, the strong one, and Maganda, the beautiful one. Other modern tellings make Amihan and Habagat children of Bathala, allowed to rule by turns for half a year each because together they wreck everything they touch, or cast Amihan as the gentle wind courted by the rougher habagat.

The Aswang Project, an online archive of Philippine folklore run by Jordan Clark, traces the three-being version’s spread online to the years just after a 2009 Marvel Comics reference, the Encyclopaedia Mythologica, which listed Amihan among its Philippine gods as a god of the wind. Whether or not that was the spark, the arithmetic is plain. The hawk and the bamboo come from a sixteenth-century Visayan myth. The name comes from the weather. Aman Sinaya comes from a Tagalog dictionary that files the name as the idol of fishermen, not as a goddess of the sea. The three were first set side by side in modern retellings, not in the colonial record.

As a wind, Amihan’s body is the season itself: cool against the skin after the wet months, steady from the northeast, strong enough to raise a chop that keeps small boats ashore. The modern retellings give it the body of a bird, and a few make it a woman who watches over fishermen. No older image exists to check them against.

Its power, as the old dictionaries record it, is exactly the power of a monsoon. It sets the calendar, divides the fishing year, cools the land and strands the traveller who misjudges it. Its limit is just as regular. Every year, after a few months, it gives way to the habagat, and the rains and the southwest squalls take their turn. The modern myth turns that rhythm into a truce between siblings. The dictionaries only record the wind changing.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Amihan in Philippine mythology?

Amihan is the Philippine name for the cool northeast monsoon, the seasonal wind the Tagalogs, Visayans and Bikolanos all called by that word. In modern retellings of the Tagalog creation story, Amihan becomes a bird deity who lives alongside Bathala and Aman Sinaya and frees the first humans from a bamboo stalk.

Is Amihan an ancient Filipino god?

No early record treats Amihan as a god. Spanish-era Tagalog, Visayan and Bikol dictionaries from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries define amihan only as a wind and a season, with no worship or story attached. The bird deity appears in modern retellings, and the Aswang Project links the spread of that version online to the years after a 2009 Marvel Comics reference listed Amihan as a wind god.

What does the word amihan mean?

Amihan means the cool seasonal wind from the northeast, known in English as the northeast monsoon. Noceda and Sanlúcar’s Tagalog dictionary, first printed in 1754, glosses it as the brisa, the steady breeze, and its 1860 edition names the season of that wind tag-amihan. Among the Visayans of Leyte and Samar it covered every cool wind off the Pacific from December to April.

What is the story of Amihan and Malakas and Maganda?

In the modern version, Amihan is a bird flying over the newly made islands who hears voices inside a bamboo stalk and pecks it open, releasing Malakas and Maganda, the first man and woman. The older Visayan myth recorded in 1567 tells the same bamboo story, but its bird is an unnamed hawk, and Miguel de Loarca’s 1582 account calls it a kite. Neither of those early accounts names the bird Amihan.

What is the difference between Amihan and Habagat?

Amihan is the cool northeast wind and Habagat is the wet southwest wind, and together they divide the Philippine year. Old Visayan reckoning ran amihan from December to April and habagat from April to September. Modern myths personify the pair as siblings who take turns or as a gentle wind courted by a rougher one.