Sarimanok

The feast was already loud when the bird came down through the smoke. Lamplight caught its wings first, and then the whole hall saw it whole: a cock nearly the size of a child, its plumage running through every color a dyer could mix, a small fish clamped bright and wet in its beak. It came to rest among the guests of the sultan of Lanao, and the drums stopped, and for one long breath nobody moved.

The story the Maranao tell begins with a daughter. Her name was Sari, and she was the sultan’s only child, loved along the shore of the lake for her beauty and her kindness both. On the night of her eighteenth birthday the household set out a feast worthy of her, and it was into this gathering that the shining cock descended. Before the guests could gather their wits it changed shape, standing up as a young man of impossible grace, and he told the sultan a plain thing: that he had watched over Sari since the hour of her birth, and that the time had come to take her home. He became a bird again. He gathered the girl, and he rose, and he flew straight into the face of the sun. Neither of them was ever seen on the lake again.

Grief made the sultan an artist, or made him hire the finest ones he had. Unable to follow his daughter into the sky, he ordered his carvers to fix the vanished cock in wood so that it could never fully leave him, and from that first likeness the Sarimanok spread outward until it became the single most recognizable thing the Maranao make. That is the shape of the legend, at least. Like most origin tales it is tidier than the thing it explains, and the bird is almost certainly older than the princess said to have summoned it.

To see one is to understand why a father would want it kept. The Sarimanok stands as a rooster with a great arched tail thrown up behind it like a fan of flame, wings and body worked in bands of red and gold and green, the head all but buried under curling scroll, leaf, and spiral. Those curls are okir, the flowing carved ornament that is the signature of Maranao and Iranun craft, and on the bird they cluster so thickly that the beak seems to grow out of a garden. In that beak, or gripped in the talons, there is nearly always a fish. The name holds the whole creature in two words: sari, the assorted colors of good cloth, and manok, the fowl. A garment of a bird.

Where it truly comes from is a longer argument than the legend allows. Older Maranao belief speaks of a totem fowl called Itotoro, a bird that served as a medium to the world of spirits through an unseen twin, the Inikadowa, that shadowed it always. In that reading the Sarimanok is the visible half of a two-bird pair, one wing in the daylight and one in the dark. A later layer arrived with Islam, which the Maranao embraced, and with it the tale of the vast rooster the Prophet is said to have found in the first of the seven heavens, so tall its crest brushed the heaven above and its crowing woke every living thing except sleeping men. Some who study the motif reach back further still and see, under all of it, the long shadow of Garuda, the divine bird of the Hindu and Buddhist worlds whose forms turn up on old Philippine gold. The bird has been many things and kept the shape of all of them.

What it has never been is a god to kneel to. The Sarimanok lives in objects, and its home ground is the torogan, the great ancestral house of a Maranao datu, where it perches carved along the panolong, the long prow-like beams that jut out from the walls. The richer the carving, the higher the standing of the family beneath it, so the bird is at once ornament and a claim about blood and rank. Bird-figures ride the boats of the heroes in the Darangen, the vast sung epic of Lake Lanao that the wider world now counts among its treasures of oral heritage. For more than three decades the Sarimanok was the emblem of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, carrying a lake-country bird onto the letterhead of a nation. It is tangled all through maratabat, the fierce Maranao sense of honor, because to display the bird well is to display the worth of the house.

Its gifts are the gifts of fortune. The Sarimanok is held to bring prosperity, prestige, and protection to those it favors, and the fish it carries is part of that promise; the one clutched in its claws is called its helper across open water, while the smaller fish held in the beak carries the message of the sultan. It is a bearer of blessing and a bridge to the spirits, a thing that makes a household lucky simply by being present in it. But its blessing was never something anyone could seize or command. It comes to the favored and withdraws from the unworthy, and it belongs to lineage and to beauty rather than to prayer. The oldest story about it is a story of loss: the bird that came to the richest table on the lake did not stay to be admired. It took the best thing in the room and climbed into the sun. No one has ever kept it. What the Maranao keep is its image, carved and painted and handed down, a fortune held in the one form that cannot fly away.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Sarimanok?

The Sarimanok is a legendary bird of the Maranao people of Lake Lanao in the Philippines, a brightly colored rooster that carries a fish in its beak or talons. It is a symbol of good fortune, royalty, and spiritual power, and it is the best-known motif in Maranao okir woodcarving.

What does the Sarimanok symbolize?

The Sarimanok symbolizes good fortune, prestige, and protection. Displaying its image is believed to bring prosperity and blessing to a household, and the richness of a carved Sarimanok on a torogan signals the rank and wealth of the family who lives beneath it.

What is the legend of the Sarimanok?

In the Maranao legend, a shining cock descended on the eighteenth-birthday feast of Sari, daughter of the sultan of Lanao, and transformed into a prince who said he had watched over her since birth. He turned back into a bird, carried Sari into the sun, and neither was seen again. The grieving sultan had his craftsmen carve the bird’s likeness, and that carved image became the Sarimanok.

Why does the Sarimanok carry a fish?

The fish stands for prosperity and for the bird’s link between the earthly and spirit worlds. In Maranao tradition the fish gripped in its talons is its helper on journeys over water, while the smaller fish held in its beak carries the message of the sultan.

Where does the Sarimanok appear in Maranao culture?

The Sarimanok appears above all in okir woodcarving, especially on the panolong beams of the torogan, the ancestral house of a Maranao chief. Bird-figures also feature in the Darangen epic of Lake Lanao, and the Sarimanok served as the logo of the Cultural Center of the Philippines from 1969 to 2005.

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