Tala

Before the roosters, before the cook fires, one light holds on in the east while everything else in the sky lets go. The Tagalogs had a word for it. They called it Tala, and unlike the other stars overhead, which they watched without troubling to name, this one they worshipped.

That is the oldest thing anyone can say about her with confidence, and it survives because a hostile witness wrote it down. In 1589 the Franciscan Juan de Plasencia compiled an account of Tagalog custom and religion so that his fellow missionaries would recognise what they were dismantling. Among the practices he catalogued was star worship. The Tagalogs adored the stars, he reported, though they did not know them by name as the Castilians knew the planets, with one exception: the morning star, which they called Tala. He added two more pieces of their sky, Mapolon, the cluster the Spanish knew as the seven little goats, by which the people tracked the turning of the seasons, and Balatic, which he matched to the Great Bear.

So the record begins with a name, an act of reverence, and nothing else. No parentage. No temple. No face. Whoever Tala was to the people of sixteenth-century Luzon, the friar either did not ask or did not think it worth reporting, and the men who might have told him were gone within two generations.

The word itself is ordinary. *Tala* is simply a bright star in Tagalog, the way *araw* is the sun and *buwan* the moon, and a linguist reading a 1955 study of Philippine star myths pointed out that it looks like a cousin of Sanskrit *tārā*, which also means star, or shining. Trade carried Sanskrit vocabulary across maritime Southeast Asia for centuries before any Spaniard arrived, so the borrowing is plausible. It proves nothing about a goddess. It only tells you that the word travelled.

The gap where her story should be did not stay empty. In 1934 an American writer living in Nueva Ecija, Percy A. Hill, published a tale in a Manila collection of short stories, and it has been reprinted as Philippine myth ever since. In it the sun god Arao and the moon goddess Buan each had a great family of stars, his golden and blazing, hers silver and cool. Buan grew convinced her children could not survive the heat of his, and persuaded him to a pact: both would destroy their own. Arao swallowed his. Buan hid hers in the clouds, and they kept slipping out. The sun has been chasing her since, and when he gets close enough to bite her there is an eclipse.

The best part is the smallest. At dawn the moon gathers her stars back into hiding, and she will not release them again until her eldest daughter tells her the coast is clear. That daughter is Tala, the evening and morning star, the one who is out when nothing else is, watching the horizon for the glow that means it is not yet safe.

Rudolf Rahmann, a Divine Word ethnologist who assembled every Philippine sun-and-moon myth he could find, quoted Hill’s tale in full and then admitted he could not discover which part of the archipelago it came from. He never did find out. Nobody has.

What Rahmann could show was that the shape of the thing is genuinely old and enormously wide. The motif of a moon who tricks the sun into eating his own children turns up among the Santal, the Munda, the Birhor and the Savara of eastern India, and among the Jahai Semang and Ple Sakai of the Malay Peninsula, and in several of those versions the one child who escapes the eating is Venus, hidden in an armpit or away at a distant dance. The stories collected from named Philippine communities carry the same bones without the same names. A Pampanga myth recorded by Dean Fansler in 1921 has Bathala die without a will, his son Apolaqui and daughter Mayari fight over the earth with bamboo clubs, and Mayari lose an eye, which is why the moon is dimmer. A Visayan version gathered by Mabel Cook Cole in 1916 makes the sun and moon a married couple whose children are the stars, and ends with him flinging sand into her face. Neither one mentions Tala.

The family she is best known for is younger still. The anthropologist F. Landa Jocano set down, in his notes on Philippine divinities, that Mayari was the most beautiful divinity in Bathala’s court, that she had two sisters, Hanan of the morning and Tala of the stars, and that all three were daughters of Bathala by a mortal wife who died bearing them. That paragraph is the entire foundation of the three sisters. Every illustration, novel and tattoo that has grown out of it since traces back to those few lines and stops there.

Nobody in the sixteenth century described what she looked like, and it is worth resisting the urge to supply the omission, because the one physical trace that does survive is stranger than any invention. Around 1686 Felipe Pardo, then Archbishop of Manila, mentioned in a letter an *anito* that the Tagalogs of Laguna still remembered a full century after the conquest. Its name was Bulactala, flower of Tala. The philologist Jean-Paul Potet, working through the earliest Tagalog dictionaries, reads the name as evidence that this spirit was something other than the planet personified, which leaves a flower named for a star, remembered by people who had been forbidden to say why.

Her powers follow from what she actually is. She is the last light standing at dawn and the first at dusk, which makes her a clock and a compass and, in Hill’s telling, a sentry whose word the moon waits for. She survives the destruction that takes the other stars, not by strength but by being somewhere else when it happens.

Her limits follow just as directly. She cannot be seen in daylight, and she never strays far from the sun she is hiding from, which means her freedom is measured out by the distance of the thing that wants to devour her. She has no cycle of adventures, no weapon, no consort of her own. What she has is a name in a friar’s report, an ordinary word made holy by four hundred years of people looking east and finding her still burning.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tala in Philippine mythology?

Tala is the Tagalog name for the morning and evening star, the planet Venus, and the goddess associated with it. The earliest surviving record, Juan de Plasencia’s 1589 account of Tagalog customs, states that the Tagalogs worshipped the morning star and called it Tala, making her the only star in their sky that the friar recorded a name for.

Is Tala really one of the three daughters of Bathala?

That story exists, but it is modern. The version in which Tala, Mayari and Hanan are the daughters of Bathala by a mortal wife comes from the anthropologist F. Landa Jocano’s notes on Philippine divinities, and no earlier source for it has been found. The Pampanga myth actually collected in the field, published by Dean Fansler in 1921, features Bathala’s children Apolaqui and Mayari and does not mention Tala at all.

What does the name Tala mean?

Tala is simply the Tagalog word for a bright star. Scholars have noted that it appears related to Sanskrit tārā, which also means star or shining, a plausible loan given centuries of trade contact across maritime Southeast Asia. The connection is linguistic rather than mythological and says nothing about the origins of the goddess.

Where does the myth of Arao, Buan and Tala come from?

It was published by the American writer Percy A. Hill in a 1934 Manila collection of short stories, in which the sun Arao and the moon Buan agree to destroy their star children and only Buan cheats. The ethnologist Rudolf Rahmann quoted the tale in a 1955 study and reported that he could not determine which Philippine community it came from. Its central motif, however, is genuinely widespread, appearing among the Santal, Birhor and Savara of India and the Semang of the Malay Peninsula.

What did Tala look like?

No source from the period describes her appearance. Plasencia recorded the worship and the name but nothing about a form, and the later retellings that made her a goddess added a genealogy rather than a face. The only related physical trace is a spirit called Bulactala, “flower of Tala,” which an archbishop of Manila noted around 1686 was still remembered by the Tagalogs of Laguna.

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Bathala, Mayari, Apolaki, Diwata, Santelmo, Tigmamanukan, Bakunawa, Minokawa, Tara, Inanna, Ishtar, Eos, Ushas, Pleiades, Selene