Bakunawa

Also Known As: also Bakonawa, Baconaua, Vakonawa; Baconaua in Hiligaynon; traced by linguists to Proto-Western-Malayo-Polynesian *ba(ŋ)kuq, “bent” or “curved”, plus *sawa, “large snake, python”, giving roughly “bent snake”
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Philippine Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: It swallows the moon, and its slower movements through the year were read as a cause of eclipses, earthquakes, rain and wind.
Role in Mythos: It is the reason the sky goes dark, and the reason Visayan households once kept something worth banging within reach of the door.
Relation to Humans: It does not hunt people so much as rob them of light, and the response was collective and immediate, whole villages outdoors with pots and gongs until the moon came back. Its position through the four quarters of the year was also charted by the babaylan and consulted before a house was built.

Off the western coast of Negros the water turns black fast, and the old accounts insist the blackness has a floor, and the floor has a mouth. Something lies down there in the part of the sea that never warms. For three months it holds its head to the north and its tail to the south. Then it turns, and holds west for three months, and then south, and then east, and having gone all the way round it begins again. Nobody claimed to have seen it do this. They simply knew where it was pointing, the way you know which way a river runs, and they would not put up a house without checking.

The name is old and the linguists have taken it apart. Underneath Bakunawa sit two ancient Austronesian words, one meaning bent or curved and one meaning a big snake, so the creature’s oldest identity is simply the crooked python, the thing that does not lie straight. What the Visayans built on top of that root is considerably stranger than a python. In the tellings gathered on Panay it is shaped like a shark, with gills working along its throat and a mouth as wide as a lake, and a tongue the colour of a fresh wound. Whiskers a handspan long trail from its jaw. It carries two sets of wings, a great ash-grey pair and a smaller pair further back along the body, which is an unnecessary amount of wing for something that lives at the bottom of the sea. Carvers who put it on things gave it a looped tail and a single horn above the nose, and on Panay they set its head on the hilts of swords, so that a man going into a fight went in holding the animal that eats the moon.

Where it came from, nobody says. The stories open with it already present, already hungry, already coiled around the world.

The version everybody now knows was written down in Cebuano in 1913 by Fernando Buyser, a Leyte-born poet who had been a guerrilla’s secretary at seventeen and later became a bishop of the Philippine Independent Church. In his telling, Bathala made seven moons, one for each night of the week, and the nights were bright because of them. Then the serpent came, envied them, and swallowed six. Bathala planted bamboo on the last moon so it could not be taken, and the dark patches on the lunar face are that bamboo, seen from very far away. It is a lovely story and it is not quite as ancient as it looks. Buyser footnoted his own text, and the footnotes point at the seven churches of Asia, the seven golden candlesticks, and the great red dragon of Revelation 12 that swept the stars from heaven with its tail. He was a bishop, and it shows. When E. Roa translated the piece for Damiana Eugenio’s collection of Philippine myths, the Christian scaffolding came out and did not go back in, and that stripped version is the one that has been retold, illustrated and expanded ever since.

Not every telling agrees about the bamboo. In a Panay variant the serpent got six moons down without trouble and then met the seventh, which was the largest, and could not swallow it whole. So it bit, trying to break the moon into pieces it could manage, and the marks it left are the ones we still look at.

The belief itself is older than either version. In 1731 a Spanish friar, Tomás Ortiz, wrote an irritable note about the racket: during an eclipse the people go out into the streets and fields with bells and pans and strike them with great force and violence, because they say the moon is being eaten or swallowed by a dragon, a tiger, or a crocodile. The Tagalogs, he added, say *linamon ni laho ang buwan*, Laho has swallowed the moon. So the eating was already two hundred years old as written record before anyone counted the moons at seven.

Its powers follow from its size and its appetite. It reaches the sky from the sea floor without apparent effort. It takes the moon whole. The heavier movements attributed to it, the shaking of the ground and the turning of the weather, are the movements of something that large simply shifting position. And because those shifts were regular, they were useful: the serpent doubled as a calendar, its head and tail sweeping counter-clockwise through four quarters of the year, and the babaylan who kept that chart could tell you which way to face a doorway.

Against all of which the defence is a kitchen. Startle it, and it lets go. Pots, pans, drums, gongs, anything with a hard voice, and the moon comes back up. Some accounts say the noise should instead be sweet, music to put the creature to sleep so it can be driven off quietly, but the loud school clearly won on the ground. The bamboo helps too. As long as it grows on the moon’s face, the serpent cannot finish what it started.

Children played the thing out as a game, recorded in the 1930s and probably much older, with one child as the moon inside a ring of linked hands and one as the Bakunawa outside, asking each link in turn what chain it was and being told iron, which cannot be broken, until somebody decided to be abaca and let go.

Buyser added a note of his own, dated October 1917. He was leaving Almeria by boat with his mother-in-law, already well out from shore, when the people on the beach began shouting after them. *Return our Moon.* He wrote that he cried.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Bakunawa?

The Bakunawa is a giant sea serpent from Visayan and Bicol folklore in the Philippines, blamed for lunar eclipses. Panay accounts describe it as shark-bodied rather than snake-bodied, with gills, a mouth the size of a lake, a red tongue and two sets of wings. Its name traces to Austronesian roots meaning roughly “bent snake.”

Why does the Bakunawa eat the moon?

In the best-known version, written down by Fernando Buyser in 1913, the god Bathala created seven moons and the Bakunawa envied their beauty, swallowing six of them before Bathala protected the last by planting bamboo on it. A Panay variant says the serpent could not swallow the seventh moon because it was too large, and bit it instead, leaving the marks visible on the lunar surface.

How did Filipinos drive the Bakunawa away?

They made as much noise as possible. During an eclipse people went outdoors with pots, pans, drums and gongs and struck them until the startled Bakunawa released the moon. A Spanish friar named Tomás Ortiz recorded the custom in 1731, and some accounts describe soothing music being used instead, to lull the creature rather than shock it.

Is the Bakunawa’s story genuinely pre-colonial?

The belief that a great animal swallows the moon during an eclipse is attested in the Philippines by the early eighteenth century, well before the seven-moons narrative was recorded. That narrative itself was first documented by Fernando Buyser in 1913, and Buyser’s own footnotes tie it to the Book of Revelation. The widely retold modern version comes from a translation that removed those Christian references.

What does the Bakunawa have to do with building a house?

Its position through the year was used as a directional calendar. The Bakunawa’s head and tail were understood to rotate through four quarters, north, west, south and east, in three-month phases, and the babaylan priestess consulted that chart to decide which way a new house should face.