Babaylan

On a grass mat in Cebu in the spring of 1521, a woman was handed a spear and set to work on a bound hog. She did not kill it straight away. She feinted, drew back, feinted again, circling and quickening until the movements ran together and the animal’s squealing filled the whole enclosure, and then she put the point through its heart with a single unerring stroke. Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian gentleman travelling with Magellan and writing everything down, noted that no man was permitted to perform this ceremony. It is the earliest description of a babaylan at work that survives, and it was recorded by someone who had no idea what he was watching.

The word belongs to the Visayas. It is a doubling of an older form, baylan, which still names the same office among the interior peoples of Mindanao, and it sits inside a much larger Austronesian family of words for spirit medium that runs from Borneo through Java and Bali and up into the islands. The Tagalogs said catalonan. The Suludnon of Panay said banawangon. The Spanish, casting about for a category that fitted, settled on priest and priestess and then, once the conversion campaign was properly under way, on witch.

A babaylan was rarely a marginal figure. William Henry Scott, working through sixteenth-century Spanish dictionaries and relations, found the office held mostly by women from prominent families who were wealthy in their own right, and the babaylan stood beside the datu as his counterweight rather than his servant. The datu commanded raids. The babaylan read the omens that decided whether the raid happened at all, then chanted the genealogies that explained why the datu was entitled to command anything. Cure, forecast, remember: three jobs, one person, and no possibility of doing without her.

Most of that work was quiet. A child stops eating, sleeps badly, wakes crying at nothing. The family sends for the babaylan, who arrives with her leaves and her small offerings, sits with the child in the smoky half-dark of a house raised on posts, and begins to talk to somebody nobody else can see. Sickness in this system was rarely just sickness. The Visayans reckoned a person carried two souls, a breath-soul seated in the gut that answered to herbs and antidotes, and a wandering one that slipped loose in sleep and went travelling, which is what dreams are. A soul could get lost out there. It could also be taken.

That is why the vocabulary of Visayan healing reads like a hostage negotiation. Scott catalogued the verbs. Agaw meant to carry off by force, and it was what the babaylan did to a pain, snatching it out of the sufferer. Tawag meant to call someone out, in the sense of summoning the spirit that had done the kidnapping. Bawi meant to rescue, to prise the patient loose from whatever had hold of them. The tradition also gives the babaylan a companion for this work, an abyan or spirit familiar received at initiation, whose job is to guide the medium through country she cannot navigate alone and to fight beside her when something out there objects.

The seances themselves were not serene. Scott describes babaylanes seized and shaking, speaking in the voices of diwata, acting out combats happening somewhere the audience could not follow, brandishing spears, foaming at the mouth, and often becoming violent enough that they had to be held down. Whatever else the office was, it was physically strenuous, and the Spanish were both appalled and unable to look away.

Gender ran through all of it in ways the friars found genuinely confusing. The office was open to men, but a particular kind of man kept turning up in it. Juan de Plasencia, listing twelve native priestly offices among the Tagalogs in 1589, described eleven of them by what they did and the twelfth, the bayoguin, simply as a man whose nature inclined toward that of a woman, as though nothing further needed saying. The Boxer Codex, compiled in Manila around 1590, called them so effeminate that a stranger would take them for women. Alcina, writing from the Visayas in 1668, recorded that the asog considered themselves more like women than like men in how they lived and moved and worked. In Bikol they were said to be unaccustomed to marriage with women. Among the Subanon of Mindanao, Francisco Combes met a class of celibate male healers who dressed in women’s skirts, and a Zambales account of 1680 gives the local shaman a woman’s tapis and a woman’s knotted hair, worn with a fighting blade at one hip and a dagger at the other. The Boxer Codex, having noted that these figures conducted the rites with more pomp, ceremony and authority than anyone else present, filed their role under helping the priestesses.

Then the missionaries arrived, and the record changes character. Pedro Chirino, whose account of 1604 remains one of the fullest, describes a bayog who came down out of the mountains, cut off his long hair in public, and was received; and, two chapters later, a group of catalonan women in San Juan del Monte who were hunted down, had their idols taken and burned, were made to renounce their errors in the church, and were then handed over to reliable Christians in case they lapsed. The asymmetry is not subtle. Between 1679 and 1685 an investigation in Bolinao worked through two hundred and seventeen women and nineteen men; three of the men were bayog, and two of those three helped the Spaniards against the catalonans. Within a few generations the babaylan of the chronicles had been rewritten as the bruha, the witch, and the traditions of the community had become the sins of an old woman.

They lost. What the office could do had always been bounded by the same thing that made it work, which was the community itself: a babaylan’s authority came from the people who called on her and the spirits who answered, and neither of those held up against an institution that could outlaw the practice, seize the idols, and educate the next generation of children to inform on their grandmothers.

The office did not vanish so much as go up into the hills and come back armed. In 1663, in Oton on Panay, a babaylan named Tapar led several towns into revolt, making offerings to the old gods while styling himself God the Eternal Father and assigning followers the parts of the Son, the Holy Spirit and the Virgin. A friar, Casimiro Diaz, noted that Tapar went about in the garb of a woman on account of the office. The rising killed a priest and ended with Tapar’s death and his body displayed. Two centuries later the pattern repeated on Negros, where Ponciano Elofre took the name Dios Buhawi, the whirlwind god, wore women’s clothes though he had a wife, drew hundreds of people up into a mountain settlement that refused to pay colonial taxes, and was killed attacking Siaton in 1887. The remnants of his movement were regathered as babaylanes under Papa Isio, who tied the old religion to land redistribution and the expulsion of foreigners and fought the Spanish and then the Americans. The historian Alfred McCoy counted two great waves of babaylan revolt, the seventeenth century and the nineteenth, and noticed that the leaders were almost all men. Scholars have been arguing ever since about what happened to the women.

There is a bitter coda in the language. In the Visayas the word for the divine intermediary decayed into bayot, a slur for an effeminate man, which is roughly the distance the culture was made to travel in four hundred years. The name is being taken back now, by Lumad communities who still appoint baylan, by chanters and healers and by Filipinos in the diaspora who have gone looking for what was buried. The oldest surviving description of the office is still a foreigner’s note about a woman with a spear, killing a pig correctly.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a babaylan?

A babaylan was a spirit medium, healer and ritual leader in the precolonial Philippines, most often a woman. Babaylan entered trance to speak with the voice of the diwata and the ancestral dead, treated the sick, presided over births, harvests and funerals, and kept the community’s history in chant. The Tagalog equivalent was the catalonan.

Were all babaylan women?

No, but most were. Spanish accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describe the office as ordinarily held by women, frequently women of rank and wealth, while noting a recurring class of men who took the role and lived and dressed as women. These were called bayog or bayoguin among the Tagalogs and asog in the Visayas and Bikol.

What did a babaylan actually do in a healing?

A babaylan treated illness as a problem of the soul rather than only of the body. Visayan belief held that a person carried a wandering soul that could be lost or abducted by spirits, and the healing vocabulary reflects it: agaw, to snatch the pain away by force, tawag, to summon the spirit responsible, and bawi, to rescue the patient from its grip. A spirit companion called an abyan, received at initiation, accompanied the babaylan into the spirit world for this work.

Why did the Spanish target the babaylan?

Because the babaylan was the point where religion, medicine, history and political counsel met, and no conversion campaign could succeed while she was still standing. Missionaries confiscated and burned idols, forced public renunciations, and recast the babaylan as a witch. A single investigation in Bolinao between 1679 and 1685 interrogated two hundred and seventeen women.

Did babaylan lead rebellions?

Yes. Babaylan-led revolts came in two main waves, the mid-seventeenth century and the late nineteenth. Tapar rose in Oton on Panay in 1663 with a syncretic religion of his own devising, and on Negros in the 1880s and 1890s Ponciano Elofre, called Dios Buhawi, and then Papa Isio built armed movements around babaylan authority, tax refusal and land redistribution.

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Bathala, Diwata, Aswang, Engkanto, Kapre, Tigmamanukan, Bakunawa, Manananggal, Multo, Hudhud, Amalanhig, Witch, Rishi, Solomonari, Zduhać