Tikbalang

Also Known As: also Tigbalang, Tigbalan, Tikbalan, Tigbolan; called unglo among the Visayans; Baybayin spelling ᜆᜒᜃ᜔ᜊᜎᜅ᜔
Region/Culture: Southeast Asia
Mythos: Philippine Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A shapeshifting woodland spirit that turns familiar paths into loops and can be bound into lifelong service by whoever tears the three thickest spines from its mane.
Role in Mythos: It is the guardian and tormentor of the wild ground between settlements, punishing travellers who cross its territory without asking.
Relation to Humans: It rarely kills, preferring to strand, exhaust and humiliate anyone who walks through its trees at night, though older accounts describe it stealing children. Courtesy disarms it, and a shirt worn inside out breaks the enchantment outright.

Rain falling out of a clear sky means a wedding. Somewhere past the treeline two tikbalang are being married, and the sun keeps shining straight through the downpour because the guests are not the sort who care about weather. *May kinakasal na tikbalang*, people say, watching warm rain knock the dust off the road and pull the smell of wet earth up out of it. Then they get on with the afternoon.

The groom, if anyone ever got a proper look at him, would be hard to forget. He stands a full head above a tall man and is thin to the point of skeletal, bones showing at the shoulder and the hip, with the long jaw and heavy teeth of a horse and hooves where his feet ought to be. The legs are the part that unsettles people. They fold the wrong way. When a tikbalang squats at the foot of a tree, its knees rise past its ears and the whole silhouette goes from towering to spidery in a single movement.

That portrait comes from a boy in San Mateo who said he had been carried off and had got himself loose. The Jesuit Juan José Delgado wrote the account down around 1750: a very tall, very lean dark figure with a face like a horse, ears and nose absurdly long, short horns on the brow, enormous and frightening eyes, and shins that reached above its head when it crouched. It is the earliest surviving description that gives the creature the shape everyone now recognises.

The horse came later.

There were no horses in the islands before the Spanish brought them in through the colonial trade with China and Japan, and the oldest written notices of the tikbalang give it no animal form at all. Juan de Plasencia, listing what the Tagalogs feared in 1589, sets *tigbalaang* among the phantoms, next to the *vibit* who were the ghosts of the dead. Pedro de San Buenaventura’s Tagalog dictionary of 1613 reaches for the only vocabulary a Franciscan had and calls it a satyr, a gnome, a goblin, filing it beside the tiyanak. A later Tagalog lexicon settles on something plainer and better: *fantasma de montes*, phantom of the mountains. Not one of them mentions a horse.

By the time Juan Francisco de San Antonio compiled his *Cronicas* in the 1740s the animal had arrived. He describes a being greatly feared and greatly reverenced, which knows exactly how frightened people are and shows itself accordingly: now as an old man claiming to be your grandfather, now as a horse, now as a monster. Villagers made bargains with it, he complains, trading away their rosaries for hairs and grasses and stones that were supposed to carry them safely through the dangers. Martínez de Zúñiga, writing around 1803, was still exasperated by the same thing, and grumbled that the tigbalang assumed a variety of uncouth and monstrous shapes and interposed its authority to prevent the performance of duties prescribed by our religion. Three centuries of missionaries found the creature inconvenient, which is one of the better arguments that it was genuinely believed in.

It keeps to the dark and overgrown places: the great strangling ficus the Tagalogs call balete, the kalumpang tree, thickets of bamboo, banana groves, the shadowed underside of bridges. Some hold that the tikbalang is not merely lodged in the tree but is the tree’s own soul standing up and walking about. In Rizal the older belief runs kinder than the horror stories suggest, and speaks of them as guardians who stand at the foot of the big trees keeping watch for anyone who means the ground harm. Picture one on a hot evening with the light going, motionless in the cold air under the canopy, ears turning at the sound of feet on the path below. It has nowhere else to be.

What it does to those feet is the thing it is famous for. A traveller who has offended a tikbalang walks and walks and arrives back where he started, then does it again, and again, the trail folding over on itself until the light fails and the sense of direction goes with it. The countermeasures are cheap, which is part of their charm. Take off your shirt and put it back on inside out and the path releases you. Better still, do not give offence in the first place: say *tabi-tabi po* or *makikiraan po* out loud before you cross, excuse me, I am only passing through, and keep the noise down in the trees.

Where a tikbalang comes from depends on who is telling it. Isabelo de los Reyes, gathering Filipino folklore in the 1880s, recorded the grimmest version, in which the creature is an aborted fetus sent back out of limbo into the world. Others make it simply one of the elemental population of the forest, no more in need of an origin than the balete itself.

It can be broken to harness, though almost nobody manages it. Its mane is a ridge of stiff spines, and the three thickest of those are the prize, since a man who holds one carries an *anting-anting*, a talisman that binds the tikbalang as his servant. Getting one means jumping onto its back with a specially prepared cord, tying on, and staying tied while the creature climbs into the air and does everything in its considerable power to shake the rider off. You hang on until it is too exhausted to fight, and it concedes. Later retellings have gilded the spines into three golden hairs, which sounds better and is a good deal younger than the story.

Its powers follow from what it is. A spirit of the boundary ground can put on any shape that will get it what it wants, so it appears as an old man, as a horse, as something with no name, or as nothing visible at all. It can take a road and tie a knot in it. It rides the air. Its limits follow just as neatly. It is territorial rather than roving, so leaving its trees ends the matter; it answers to good manners, because the whole business is a question of trespass; it is undone by a reversed shirt, a joke at the expense of a creature whose entire trick is disorientation. And it tires. A tikbalang can throw a man off a hundred times, but not forever, and that is the crack in it that the folk tales keep coming back to.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a tikbalang?

A tikbalang is a tall, gaunt spirit of Philippine folklore with the head, mouth and hooves of a horse and unnaturally long limbs. It lives in wild, overgrown places such as balete and kalumpang trees, bamboo clumps, banana groves and under bridges. Its main occupation is confusing travellers who enter its territory, sending them in circles until they are lost.

Was the tikbalang always horse-headed?

No. Horses were not present in the Philippines before the Spanish brought them in, and the earliest records give the tikbalang no animal form. Juan de Plasencia in 1589 lists it simply among phantoms, and the 1613 Tagalog dictionary of Pedro de San Buenaventura glosses it as a satyr, gnome or goblin. The horse shape only becomes standard in eighteenth-century accounts, and Juan José Delgado’s report of about 1750 is the first surviving description of the werehorse everyone now pictures.

How do you escape a tikbalang?

Turn your shirt inside out and put it back on, which breaks the enchantment on the path. The other remedy is prevention: say *tabi-tabi po* or *makikiraan po* aloud before crossing its ground, and avoid making noise in its trees. The tikbalang punishes trespass rather than people in general, so asking permission usually settles it.

Can a tikbalang be tamed?

Yes, but the method is brutal. Its mane carries a ridge of spines, and the three thickest work as an *anting-anting*, a talisman that binds the creature into lifelong service. To get one you must leap onto its back, tie yourself on with a specially prepared cord, and hold on while it flies through the air trying to throw you, until it gives up from exhaustion.

What does “may kinakasal na tikbalang” mean?

It is a Filipino saying used when rain falls while the sun is shining, and it means that a tikbalang is getting married. Similar sayings about a trickster’s wedding during a sun shower occur in many other cultures.