Tag Archives: Myth

The Myths of the Bagobo, Tagakaulo and Mandaya: An Ethnological Analysis

The great historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, said that myth defines itself by its own mode of being. It can only be understood in so far as it reveals something as having really happened, as in an event that took place in primordial times. Primordial time is not the same time as our historical time. In fact, it is timelessness. Mythical stories are usually one in which gods mingle freely with men who also have access to heaven or the abode of gods and divinities.

Mythical stories are always about explanations of mysteries such as how the world was created, or how men and women and the littles insects came to be. As such, myths reflect a people’s understanding of the whole reality of existence, and the individual’s place in it. The two most significant constituents of myths are the universal  and the exemplary. Myths do not treat of individual in relation to the total reality, or cosmos. Men’s individual problems are precisely caused by violations or deviations from their assigned roles and to resolve these problems one has to do through the correct or prescribed act of behavior the way it was done “at the beginning”. Many rituals fall in this functional category. The whole catalogue of oral literature of many traditional cultures, e.g. fables, legends. riddles, etc.. serve to remind the individual about the exemplary deed and right behavior, In myth, man is an integral part of creation but not necessarily the most important or distinguished.

Above all these, myth and myth-making have a deeply spiritual and religious dimension. The apprehension of a myth is considered as a very religious experience because it is a revelation of sacred reality. Eliade describes the phenomenon as “the irruption of the sacred into the profane”. That is to say that the human mind cannot of itself come to a realization of the whole cosmological reality. Those who have participated in myth-making were able to do so only because they have actually experiences a hierophany.

For this reason, it is very interesting to study the myths of other people for then one would be able to understand their own particular religious experience and how this experience is contextualized in their culture. The best way to understand a myth is to refer to the culture. The best way to understand a myth is to refer to the culture of those to whom the myth is the perception of total reality or cosmogony. We will now proceed to an ethnological analysis of the myths of the Bagobo, Tagakauolo and Mandaya.

An ethnological analysis has a number of cultural referents. The sociological structure of the myth is held to reflect the structure of the society or community to whom the myth belongs. In this wise, the web of relationship among gods and men would be very similar to, if not the same as those in human society. The motifs or elements would indicate the adaptations made by the local authors. Finally, encoded in the mythical story is the people’s ideology or belief system, the very foundation of the spiritual and religious experience of the people.

Bagobo Mythology

The bagobo believe that Tiguiama, a good god, created all things but other gods have their own specialized participation:

1. Mamale – created the earth
2. Macoreret – created the air
3. Domacolen – created the mountains
4. Macaponguis – created the water

An ancient ideology is encoded in the Bagobo ideology and belief system. The myth of a terrible god who lived in the volcano, and who demands, as well as devours human victims has animated Mt. Apo. This has enabled the Bagobos to structure a relationship and define a code of conduct towards a dominant and therefore significant feature of the environment. The myth of Mandarangan and Darago, husband and wife guardians of Mt. Apo, renders intelligible the practice of human sacrifice among the Bagobos. The myth conveys the Bagobo notion of evil as an inescapable part of reality and how it is dealt with.

The polytheistic belief system allows the worship of other gods. While Mandarangan permits the Bagobos to come to terms with the terrible reality of evil, Eugpamolak Manobo, another divinity, reflects the Bagobo’s appreciation of the good, which notion is equated with nature’s bounty. Pamolak is the word for plant as well as for flower, the harbinger of the fruits of the earth, and the placement of this deity in the Bagobo pantheon pays homage to nature and an agricultural existence.

The most eloquent abstraction of the Bagobo’s ineffable regard for nature’s bounty is found in the story of Tuglay and Tuglibong, the archetypes of the first man and first woman. The couple’s progeny would have all but perished were they not refreshed by a single stalk of sugarcane, a gift from the gods, growing lustily in the midst of a scorched plot of earth.

The memory of a scorching period is distinct in the origin myths, especially in the story of how Tuglibong, the first woman, along with the rest of the mythical figures of old, were said to have lived an intolerable existence because the sky and the sun hung low over the earth. The mythical people, known as mona, had to live in holes and crevices under the earth to protect themselves from the sun’s heat. Moreover, important activities were severely constrained, e.g. pounding rice was a difficult activity since one could hardly move one’s elbow, cramped as it were by a low hanging sky. All these changed when, finally, through Tuglibong’s sustained scolding, the sky, and with it the sun, bolted up to their present position thus ushering in a new epoch whereby the mona lived on the surface of the earth instead of underground. They were able to build houses, the temperature cooled, and nature and the human race were regenerated — the mona who were already old began to have babies!

The god Lumabat and his sister, Mebuyan, goddess of fertility (she is depicted as a woman with breasts all over her body) and guardian of a Bagobo Limbo for dead babies, were children of Tuglay and Tuglibong. The tale of Lumabat is the story of a culture hero who journeyed to the ends of the earth, i.e. the horizon, and after successfully avoiding a number of pitfalls reached the land of the diwata or gods. Lumabat himself became a god when the diwata divested him of his intestines after which he no longer was bothered by hunger. Lumabat’s journey to the sky country was fraught with a number of obstacles; he and his companions passed a region where one could be turned into a stone or a tree if one responded to any of these objects that could talk. This land was conceived as lying beyond the sea, the Gulf of Davao. The sky country itself was thought to be located on the other side of the horizon, the idea of which was construed as a pair of giant jaws which mechanically opened and shut to the peril of those who, like Lumabat, attempted to cross to the other side. Giant jagged teeth and kampilan (swords) fencing by themselves added to the dangers of the traveller.

Mebuyan’s myth was woven differently from that of her brother. Unwilling to go with Lumabat to the sky country, Mebuyan plummeted to the underworld by sitting on the rice mortar which began to spin downward as soon as Mebuyan sat on it. Mebuyan soon founded a kingdom of her own, Banwa Mebuyan, a place where she fed babies until they were weaned from her many breasts. She also personified death; by shaking a lemon tree people died according to the kind of leaves that fell from the tree. If old and yellowed leaves fell, old people would die, but if the leaves were green and newlygrown, young people would perish from this earth.

Human sacrifice, which the Bagobos practiced until the turn of the present century, was an offering to Mandarangan and Darago as well as to Malaki T’Olu K’Waig, which name literally means “man at the head of the river”. Malaki is also the mythological firstborn of Tuglay and Tuglibong and is the Bagobo word for man in the same way that Bia, Malaki’s sister, is the word for woman. In a sense, Malaki and Bia are even more appropriate archetypes of first man and first woman who became diwata or gods in the following legend of the founding of Sibulan.

The legend of Sibulan, the biggest Bagobo settlement in historic times, began with the passing of the Tuglay and Tugbilong an all the mona into the land of the diwata. Only the children of Tulay and Tugbilong were left in Sibulan. Then a long drought cam to pass upon the land so that the people could not plant their crops and famine soon stalked the Bagobo highlands. The children of Tuglay and Tugbilong began to leave their home and travel to other lands in pairs. As soon as any pair found a place to their liking, they settled there and begot progenies who became he ancestors of the other tribes in Mindanao.

One pair chose to remain in Sibulan even as the parched already could no longer provide for them. Then one day, as the man, too weak from hunger, hobbled across the barren fields in search of food, he saw a single stalk of sugarcane growing lustily in the midst of a scorched earth. As he cut the plant with his bolo (a long knife), fresh water gushed forth from its stalk and the fl w did not cease until both the couple’s thirst and the earth w re quenched and refreshed. From the plant’s abundant flow the rivers and the streams were once more filled with water until the rains fell to water the crops in the fields.

The palpable significance of the story lies in the mythological death and rebirth cycle: the passing of the mythical people as followed by the rebirth of new life in Malaki and Bia in Sibulan and by the other pairs of children of Tuglay and Tugbilong as founders of the other tribes in Mindanao. At the same time, a claim for some ethnic and cultural hegemony is implicit in the story which tells of the origins of the other tribes in Mindanao from the children of Tuglay and Tugbilong. The legend thus depicts an expansive stage in Bagobo mythological experience and a broadening of horizons from the confines of ethnic perspectives.

In the structure of Bagobo myth, the primordial ancestors, with the possible exception of the mona, were always represented in pairs Tuglay and Tugbilong, Malaki and Bia, and the children of the latter who departed from Sibulan, also in pairs, to become the heads of further progenies of the Bagobo. There are no androgynous figures in Bagobo mythology. The prominence of paired ancestors appears as a Bagobo valorization of the man woman tandem and the high value placed on the family and ancestors.

The differentiation of gender roles is strictly delimited as in the roles of Lumabat and Mebuyan. Fidelity to her chores made Tuglibong relentlessly scold the sun until it was offended and bolted away to unprecedented heights. Mebuyan’s refusal to go with her brother to the sky country underscores her own distinct role. Even as she plummeted in the opposite direction (to the land of the dead) she continued to perform her role, that of nourishing life.

The Myth of the Tagakaulo

The Tagakaulo are one of the native groups who inhabit the mountainous interiors of Davao del Sur province. They are said to have derived their name from their preferred type of settlement, i.e. the origins or headwaters of rivers and mountain streams. The rootword is ulo which means head. This was an explanation given by a missionary account in the 19th century and which in the course of modern day research we were able to validate.

In 1987, the fourth volume of Tambara, the Ateneo de Davao University Journal, was being prepared as a special commemorative issue for the anniversary of the missionary Fathers of the Foreign Mission Society of Quebec (PME). The PME Fathers have had a long history in Davao and for this special issue the editors of the Tambara were invited to Lanipao, one of the PME missions among the Tagakaulo. We were asked to document the mission and undergo a sort of immersion process that would give us a feel of the mission. The documentation of their missionary works was to be contextualized in the history of Davao, an exciting enterprise since we were about to merge the writing of religious and secular histories.

About an hour’s drive from the Malita Parish, the trail to Lanipao started from a small stream. Our party alighted at a lay leader’s house in Talugoy and from there we picked up the trail. For the first two hours we followed the course of the stream, walking sometimes on its banks but most of the time in the stream itself. After a while, the significance of the name Tagakaolo (dwellers of the origins of rivers) dawned on us; we were following the river or the stream to its source up in the mountains.

The PME Fathers follow a strict pattern of inculturation before beginning to work in a mission. They all have to learn to speak the native tongue. One of the Fathers was Fr. Gilles Belanger who was assigned to work among the Tagakaolo of Sangat, Malita. Fr. Belanger lived with a native Tagakaulo family for four months in order to learn the language. He said the the Tagakaulo responded easily when one talked to them about their native culture. The Tagakaulo culture, like any other native culture, is steeped in oral traditions which in turn are reflective of their collective experience or history as a people. In the last century, the Tagakaulo were said to have held the region between Malalag and Lais in the southwestern  part of the Davao Gulf. Being upland dwellers, they were barred from the sea by the Manobo and Muslims who lived along the coast, while in the mountains they had to contend with the powerful group of the B’laan, another indigenous group of the Davao Region.

In Fr. Pastell’s Mapa Ethnografico the Tagakaulo were described as being more or less the peers of the Bagobo in terms of industry, but without the cruelty of the latter, who were known to practice human sacrifice. In particular, the missionary account praised the Tagakaulo widowers who were known as brave warriors displaying much courage in the battlefield. This was because according to Fr. Pastell, being a good warrior was an index of male attractiveness and desirability. Tagakaulo widowers who were eager to be remarried had to demonstrate their prowess in the battlefield in order to obtain a new wife or wives. The missionary account also mentioned the sub-groups of the Tagakaulo: the Kalagan (Kagan) and the Loac, the latter being very primitive and described as cimarrones.

Sometime during the latter half of the 19th century, the heretofore scattered groups of Tagakaulo from Malalag to Lais were said to have united under one chieftain whose name was Paugok. This was ostensively due to inter-tribal conflicts with the Bagobo against whom they waged war successfully with the result that the Bagobo were driven from the rich valley of Padada and Balutakay. The establishment of Tagakaulo settlements in these valleys resulted in their prolonged exposure to Kulaman Manobo and Moro. They Tagakaulo had friendly relations with these two groups. They were probably friendlier with the Moro than with the Manobo for at the turn of the present century  the accounts of the Tagakaulo described their culture as being strongly influenced by the Moro or Muslim. The influence of the Moro among the Tagakaulo was so great that they not only adapted the Moro style of dressing but also substituted cotton for hemp in the manufacture of their garments. During this time, the Tagakaulo were recognized by their close fitting suits of red and yellow stripes from which the word Kagan was derived

In 1897, Malalag, together with two other reducciones, Balutakay and Piape, was being prepared for conversion into a pueblo or town status along the Kulaman coast. A census was taken of the houses in twenty-one reducciones in the area.  Here, the native Tagakaulo of Malalag used to engage the Moro in frequent and sanguinary conflicts. The arrival of the first Spanish colonists worsened the lot of the Tagakaulo who became the prey of the latter in the traffic of slaves. Eventually, because of these insufferable conditions, the Kulaman coast was depopulated of its native populations. In particular, the Tagakaulo fled to the interior and upland regions. Thusm the Christianization of the Tagakaulo of Malalg originally started from the uplands and not in the coastal areas. In 1891, the reducciones or resettlements of the Tagakaulo in Malalag and Malita were given pueblo status.

In the American period, the Kalagan Tagakaulo lived on the American plantations along the padada and Balutakay rivers. The Kalagan remained on friendly terms with their Tagakaulo kinsmen and, except for professing the Islamic faith were in every way like the Tagakaulo in language,custom, and oral traditions.

A tribal historian of the Tagakaulo has said that they were descended from Lakbang and Mengedan and their wife Bodek. At the beginning, the three lived on a small islang in the sea. Later, two children were born and they in turn becane the parents of two birds, the kalaw and the sabitan. These birds flew away to other places and returned with bits of soil which their parents patted and molded with their hands until they formed the earth. Other children were born and from them came all other people who came to inhabit the island.

Two powerful spirits, Diwata and Tiumanem, watched the formation of the earth and when it was completed the latter spirit planted trees upon it. Each year he spent the spirits Layag and Bangay as stars to tell the people when to prepare the fields for planting. Other spirits, less friendly than these two, also existed. One named Siling caused much trouble by confusing travellers, thus causing them to lose their way in the forest.

Spirits of the unborn known, as the Mantianak, were believed to wander through the forest crying “Ina-a” (mother) and often attacked human beings. The only defense was to run to the nearest stream and throw water on their abdomen. The spirit Larma owns the deer and the wild pigs and is kind to hunters who offer him the proper gifts. Failure to make such offerings could result in getting lost or injured. Mandalangan, the warrior god of the Tagakaulo, is identical with the Bagobo Mandarangan.

Kawe are the shades of souls of the dead, the chiefs of whom were the ones who created the earth. In life, the kawe live in the body but, after death they go to the sky. They return to earth at certain seasons, usually during times when the rice fields need to be protected and guarded.

The baylan or priestesses can talk to spirits and from them have learned the ceremonies which the people should perform at certain times of at crucial periods in life. The rituals for birth, marriage, and death are similar to those of the Kulaman Manobo. A slight variation was noted by the anthropologist Faye Cooper Cole after a rice planting at Padada when all the workers placed their planting sticks on an offering of rice and then poured water over them. Another difference was noted in the rituals following the death of a warrior. A knife lies in its sheath beside the body and can only be drawn if it is to be used for sacrificing a slave. If such an offering is made it is usually carried out in the same manner as among the Bagobo. If it is impossible to offer a slave, a palm leaf cup is filled with water and is carried to the forest. Here, the relatives dance and then dip the knife and some sticks in the water “for this is the same as diping them in blood:. According to custom, warriors must go to fight once a year when the moon is bright.

The Mandaya of Caraga

In the 19th century, Spanish missionary account identified the people of the eastern coast of Mindanao as the Caragans. They were described as “an honorable people, peace-loving, respectful, obsequious, docile, submissive, and patient.” Their complexion was brown and sometimes white and their noses were tall and even aquiline. The men grew the hair in their head as long as the women’s but they trimmed their long beards with pincers. Their kinglets were called Hari-hari or Tigulang and were said to occupy their social station on account of their wealth. The Hari-hari took precedence over the principal families who had their own followers or sacopes and was consulted and obeyed even by the gobernadorcillo and other Spanish officials in the locality. He alone had the power to declare war on others, demand satisfaction for insults to his ranch or famstead, and act as an arbiter and court of last appeal after hearing the opinion of the principales in the trials of subordinates. It appeared that the Caragans retained their traditions and native institutions up until the 19th century. The writer of the account attributed this to the close family ties among them. Relatives always sought to live close together. For this reason, they remained inseparable from their native beliefs and believed they would die if forced to abandon them to become Christians. Today, the Caragans are known as the Mandaya.

The Mandaya believe that Mansilatan, the principal god and father of Badla, descended from the heavens to create the world. Afterwards, his son, Badla, also came fown to protect and preserve the world against the evil spirits Pundaugnon and Malimbong (man and woman, respectively). A spirit known as Busao proceeded from Mansilatan and is said to animate fighting men or warriors known as bagani.

When the Mandaya wish to cure someone, priestesses known as bailan invoke Mansilatan and Badla in the religious sacrifice called balilic.

. . . Ten, twelve or more bailanes come together according to the speldor they want to give to the feast. A small altar of the diwata is previously erected in front of the house of the man who spends for the ceremony: the owner comes out with the huge hog and present it to the bailanes in the presence of 100 to 200 invited guest. The hog is set on the altar and bailanes, dressed meticulously for the occasion, immediately gather around it. The Mandayas next sound (the) guimbao music consecrated to the diwatas, as the bailanes keep time with their feet, dancing around the hog and altar, singing “Miminsad”, etc. Shaking from head to foot and swaying from one side to the other, they form several semicircles with their movements. They raise the right arm tothe sun or moon, depending on whether it is day or night, praying for the intention of the patron … All at once the chief bailan separates from the others and pierces with her balarao the victim on the altar. She is the first to share in tha sacrifice, putting her lips to the wound to suck and drink the blood of the animal … The others follow and do the same . . . They return to their place, repeat the dance, shake their bodies, utter cries … (and) converse with Mansilatan who they say has come to them from heaven to inspire them in what they later prophesy.

It could be that the Mandaya’s creation myth was strongly influenced, and hence modified or altered, by Christian mythology. Caraga is the oldest town in Mindanao and has a history of colonization that dates back to the 16th century. The myth of a principal god creating the world is very similar to the Christian story of creation. The notion of gods being exclusively male is also familiar. Moreover, Badla, the son of Mansilatan, also came or descended to the world to protect and preserce it from the evil pair Pundaugnon and Malimbong. Finally, a spirit called Busao, which also originated from Mansilatan, completes the triumvirate.

On the other hand, the bailan, priestesses who officiate in various rituals and ceremonies, appear to be a survival of a more authoctonous tradition and institution. Bailan are diviners, healers, and soothsayers. The description of their roles in rituals, in which they dance, go into a trance and speak in strange voices, believed to be God’s, is strongly evocative of the shamanic techniques of ecstasy.

…during his trance, the shaman seeks to abolish this human condition that is, the consequences of the “fall” and to enter again into the condition of primordial man as it is described in the paradisiac myths. The ecstacy reactualizes, for a time, what was the initial state of mankind as a whole except that the shaman no longer mounts up to Heaven in flesh and blood as the promordial man used to do, but only in the spirit, in the state of ecstacy.

Comparative Analysis of the Three Myths and Conclusion

Of the three mythological creators, only the Tagakaulo made use of an agent, a bird which initiated creation by bringing some bits of soil to the gods who later fashioned it into the earth or the world. All three myths have more than one divinity invilved in creation, and among the three, the Bagobo mythology is distinguished for having the most number of creators, each with its own special creation. Only the Tagakaulo creation myth has a participant who is clearly interested in the welfare of man on earth. Tiumanem, one of the diwata who watched the formation of the earth, came down and planted trees. This diwata also sent the man who was the teller of the myth called Tiumanem “our oldest”, thus ascribing direct kinship between men and gods.

The Bagobo myth is alone (exceot for a T’boli variant) in the myth of Tuglibong, she whose scolding made the sun angry and precipitated its bolting to the high heavens and its present position. The outcome of this mythological event is however, unique in the annals of mythology. All over Southeast Asia and Oceania many similar myths tell the story about the sky being previously close to the earth. This element is regarded as a paradisaic motif, i.e. an expression of lost paradise, of rupture between heaven and earth or the cosmic schism. On the other hand, the outburst of Tuglibong led to a new beginning and a regeneration of life and the world. After the sun rose to its present height, the first people began to build houses on the earth’s surface instead of living in holes under the earth and the mona (primeval ancestors), who were already old, began to have babies!

The Bagobo mythical figure Lumabat has Higaonon and Tagakaulo variants. In the former variant, Lumabat was a folk hero who left the earth (or died) and then became a god himself who continued to provide useful knowledge to his people. In Malita, Davao del Sur, the Tagakaulo have been urging me to visit a place called Lumabat to see for myself his tima-anan or landmarks.

The Bagobo Lumabat is paired with a sister, Mebuyan, who refused to accompany him to the sky country. So, Lumabat went alone. The journey was long, arduous, and full of dangers and followed the typical pattern of a shamanic flight, i.e. descent to hell and final ascent to heaven. Upon reaching the sky country, Lumabat came upon a group of diwata chewing betel nut. As he approached, one of them spat betel juice at his stomach and immedately, Lumabat’s  intestines disappeared. From then on he was never again bothered by hunger. Lumabat, of course, became a god himself. This, too, is a pattern of shamanism, Lumabat might have been a great shaman.

In the Mandaya mythology, the various rituals and ceremonies officiated by the bailan invoke the gods Mansilatan and his son, Badla. Although the Bagobo were also known to have the mabalian, priestesses who guard the secrets of their ancestors, their activities have not been described as prominently as have the Mandaya bailan. The bailan in Southern Borneo are acknowledged shamanesses or female shamans, who like the Mandaya bailan, invoke the gods through ecstatic techniques, fall into a deep trance and make prophecies.

Eliade considers shamanism as a great religious tradition among Asiatic peoples, although shamanic phenomena are by no means limited only to them. As a religious experience, shamanism pertains to the genre of “nostalgia for lost paradise”.

… the most representative mystical experience of the archaic societies, that of shamanism, betrays the Nostalgia for Paradise, the desire to recover the state of freedom and beatitude before the “the Fall”, the will to restore communication between Earth and Heaven; in a word, to abolish all the changes made in the very structure of the Cosmos and in the human mode of being by that promordial disruption. The shaman’s ecstacy restores a great deal of the paradisiac condition.

By means of special techniques, the shaman endeavors to rise above the present condition of man and to re-enter the state of primordial condition described in the paradisiac myths. Shamanism is the counterpart of Judeo-Christian mysticism.

From an ethnological perspective, the myths of the Bagobo, Tagakaulo, and Mandaya show a uniqueness adn distinctiveness which is significant considering a number of factors, e.g. interenthnic  or mixed marraiges among them and overlapping geograohical boundaries. Although the Bagobo and the Tagakaulo occupy contiguous areas in Davao del Sur and have been known to marry across cultural boundaries within the last one hundred years, their creation myths are clearly distinct from one another. The Bagobo has the most number of creators; the Tagakaulo creators consist of a family of two husbands and their wife, and children which are birds. The Mandaya creator is a father-god.

On the other hand, if we take a broader look at the religious pantheons, we will note some close similarities among the gods. Tiumamen of the Tagakaulo is identical with the Bagobo Eugpomolok Manobo while Lumabat has a Tagakaulo variant. This would seem to leave the Mandaya out of the picture, were it not for the bailan, the Mandaya shamaness. The bailan appears to be an indigenous substratum in the Mandaya tradition. As a pre-Christian institution, it has survived Spanish colonization and Christianization. Lumabat of the Tagakaulo and Bagobo might have been a great shaman. It would seem that shamanism is a unifying element in the religious experiences of the three. As an intensely religious experience, shamanism owes nothing to western mysticism although sharing in its spiritual and religious attributes. If we agree with Eliade, who said that the sacred never ceases to manifest itself, here then is a meeting point between pre-Christian and Christian beliefs.

In what way do these mythologies address ecological concerns?

In covert and sometimes overt terms, the myths of the Bagobo, Tagakaulo,and Mandaya tell us about the meaning and significance of nature in their lives and how they relate to it. The Bagobo gods are guardians of specialized creations, e.g. earth, mountains, water, etc. Each element of the natural environment is regarded as having deeply spiritual attributes and is in fact animated or held to have a life of its own. Spectacular features of the landscape, as in the case of Mt. Apo, exert a powerful influence in their lives, more so because the spirits who were supposed to dwell there were anthropomorphised. In this case, the relationship becomes institutional or social as between fellows in the same social group. The myth of Tuglibong and the sun is particularly interesting. Agricultural peoples commonly weave their myths around celestial bodies which, to a great extent govern their agricultural and economic activities. However, the story of Tuglibong reveals a perception of the sun as a not too benign entity. The Bagobos are known to worship the sun. Even the grim practice of human sacrifice has an ecological significance, nature’s bounty is not free. The Bagobo have to propitiate the gods of Mt. Apo with offerings of human victims in exchange for a bountiful harvest and valor in the battlefield.

The Tagakaulo construed the world as having been molded from bits of soil brought by a bird. Of the three myths, this is probably the most worldly or earthly. That the world as created is less than perfect may be inferred from the act of planting trees on it by one of the diwata that watched the formation of the earth.

Although the bailan experience is spiritual, a motif in the shamanic dance is particularly unusual. The Mandaya bailan calls upon the god to come down instead of her going up: “Miminsad, miminsad, Mansilatan”. (“Come down, come down, Mansilatan:) an insight to a most earthbound worldview.

Worldview, Community and Lumad Poetics

Take note. Ehhrm. (Pause) Here we are gathered to talk about Philippine poetics, and my topic is about Lumad poetics. What/   will do is present some Lumad story-telling conventions, some myths and legends, and some new Lumad literary productions in order to show the relationship between literature, worldview and community. Finally, I will present the ethnokinship theory of literature and explore its implications to Philippine national literature.

You have probably noticed that I have just used a Lumad literary convention. This particular verbal convention comes from the Arumanen Manobos of North Cotabato. To catch the attention of listeners, the storyteller always opens with an obligatory “Hane” (Take note), followed by throat clearing and a pause.

Compare the Manobo verbal opening convention with modem storytelling convention. As we do not have the luxury of face-to-face storytelling, and we must compete for the attention of the literary editor, we have to do a lot textual acrobatics in our very first paragraph. Otherwise, our work will be thrown into the waste basket.

Another verbal convention involves the introduction to the setting of each scene. If the action occurs near, the phrase to use is “Here we are.” If far, the phrase to use is “There we are.” Here we are, talking about Lumad poetics.

The rest of the introductory paragraph above is pure Jesuit. It is Jesuit pedagogical convention for the speaker or writer to tell the audience what he is going to tell them, then he tells them, then he tells them that he has just told them.

But to go back to our topic. Because of the vast body of unrecorded Lumad oral literature, Dr. E. Arsenio Manuel’ had long ago advised folklore researchers to go on a collecting and archiving mission to preserve folkloristic materials, which include folk literature. Famous anthropologist H. Otley Beyer’ had made a similar suggestion. Fay-Cooper Cole who made ethnographic studies of Davao and Bukidnon tribes in the 1910s pioneered attempts to reconstruct past society and culture thru folklore, which involved a lot of literary materials. Dean Fansler who collected folktales from Christianized areas was interested in speculating about the origins of the tales and how they are diffused.

Indeed, apart from the verbal conventions, the study of folk literature of which Lumad literature is a part, can yield many other interesting information useful to sociologists, anthropologists, ethnographers, psychologists, historians and many others. Current interests, at least in our school, focus on the values embedded in Lumad poetics for use in values education.

Other interests seek to discover Lumad spirituality, or even systems of governance. Others yet again only seek inspiration from the oral narratives for story materials in theatre productions, including copying of music, chanting patterns, dance steps and costumes.

It is therefore appropriate to ask: Why does Lumad literature allow for such diverse approaches and provide fruitful results in various disciplines?

Folklorists will tell us that Lumad literature has several functions. It is entertainment; it is an educational and instructional tool; it serves to justify rituals and institutions; and it guides the members of the community to follow certain patterns of behavior.

In effect, take note. Ehhrm. (Pause.) Lumad literature embodies the Lumad’s worldview, and as such it is the very record of the life of the community, both its past and its present.

Let us recount a Lumad creation myth.

“When the world first began there were one man and one woman and they lived on Mt. Apo near Sibulan. The man was Tuglay and the woman Tuglibong The place had many fruits; the forest was filled with game, so it was easy for them to get food. After a while, they had many children, both boys and girls who, when they grew up, married.

“One day, Tuglay and Tuglibong told their oldest boy and girl to go far away across the ocean, for there was a good place for them. So the two left and were riot seen again. Later their descendants, the white people, would come back to Davao.

“When Tuglay and Tuglibong died, they went to the sky where they became spirits. Shortly after their death the country suffered a great drought. No rain fell for three years, so that there was no food in the land. The people said: ‘Manama is angry and is punishing us. We must go to a new place where there is food or we shall die’

“Two started on the way toward the sunset, carrying stones with them from the Sibulan river. They settled in a good land where there were water, plants, pigs and deer. Since then they have become Maguindanaos because of the stones which they carried with them when they left Sibulan.”

Let us quicken the story now, to use another convention…

“One pair brought a basket—biraan–and so the children are now called Blaans. Another pair brought a doll, and the children are now the Atas. The other pairs went in other directions. Finally, only one pair remained at Sibulan. They wanted to go away, but were so weak from hunger and thirst that they could not walk far. One day, the man crawled out onto the fields and saw a single stalk of tubo – sugar cane. He cut a piece and water began to flow so the couple finally had a drink. Because of this they called the place Bagobo (Bagong tubo) and the people have since borne that name.”

What do we have here? First I draw your attention to the fact that Tuglay and Tuglibong who were the ancestors of all human beings, but particularly of the Bagobos, became spirits, thus establishing the kinship between the said tribe and the spirit world. Another point is the abode of the ancestors, Mt. Apo, and the home of the tribe itself, Sibulan.

To us these are trivial literary matters, but to the Bagobos these constitute sacred literature that affirms their worldview and establishes their claim to their homeland. Anthropologists and other social scientists would probably be able to trace the origin of the Bagobos prior to reaching Davao. That would be interesting, but what is more important is that they have staked a claim on Mt. Apo and Sibulan. By naming these places, they came to own them. These places that didn’t have a meaning before acquired a meaning and entered Bagobo history.

The land, the spirits, the people and their worldview define and create the community. You cannot imagine the Bagobos without Mt. Apo, Sibulan and Tuglay and Tuglibong and Manama.

When the Spanish Jesuit missionaries encountered the Bagobos in the late 1860s, they were able to record an eight-level genealogy among these people. In 1911 American ethnographer Fay-Cooper Cole found that both the young and the old still knew Saling-olop who begat Bato who begat Boas who begat Basian who begat Lumbay who begat Banga who begat Panguilan who begat Manib who begat Tungkaling. Manib was contemporaneous with Jose Oyanguren who conquered Davao Gulf in 1848, while Tungkaling lived during the American colonial period.

Indeed, a teal community can and should trace its origins all the way back to its very first ancestors. It is what binds them together. The past continues to live and is continually relived. Storytelling in verse or in prose, whether chanted or narrated recreates and reaffirms this link. We will find many ,examples of origin myths and legends that mark out the parameters that define the community, drawn from a common worldview. Lumad poetics then not only performs a constitutive function, creating meaning and reality; but its retellling also recreates the meaning, and reestablishes and reaffirms a real sense of community.

Observe how this operates among the other Lumads in the simple act of naming places.

Places are usually named after certain landmarks, or they could be named to commemorate events or to memorialize an ancestor or hero or deity.

Mamacaw is a tree and is the name of several barangays located in Davao del Sur and Davao del Norte. Kadaatan refers to a place where there are many daats or the triangular-stem grass. Here is an example of a place named to commemorate an event:

“Once upon a time, there was a male giant named Agasi who terrorized the Arakan Manobos. He cooked his captives in a big kawa (wok). One day, Apo Agio one of the greatest Manobo ancestors, fought and killed Agasi by piercing him with a poisoned spear. This made Agasi stomp and dance in terrible pain. The earth shook as he fell to the ground. The place on which he danced is now called Sinayawan. One of his feet landed in Nassut (which means foot), and his palms fell in Mahapalad.”

Hane. Ehhrm. (Pause.) His penis and his balls fell in… guess where?

Among the Dulangan Manobos, there’s a barangay named Lagubang derived from the oldest resident of the area, while a nearby sitio bears the name of his wife, Kapatagan. Barangay Midpanga was named in honor of a certain datu who went hunting in the forest one morning and never returned. His family and relatives searched for him and found him dead under a big tree. Since then they have called the place Midpanga. Among the Blaans in South Cotabato, they have a sitio named Mali named after a creek called Malo which means diwata (or guardian spirit). They say the creek is like the diwata who is sometimes there and sometimes not there. The creek has water flowing in some portions, but has no water in other portions. But eventually the water emerges and empties into the Silway River.”

Another motif in place name legends is death by drowning of an important person in the community. The Tran River was named after Datu Tran of the Teduray”, and the Kulaman River was named after Datu Kulaman of the Dulangans.” These rivers are located in the province of Sultan Kudarat, itself named after a fierce Maguindanao sultan.

All of these legends have the function of making things around the community familiar to the members. They are in intimate relation with their surroundings. The land, the caves, the mountains, the rivers, the creeks, the forests — they belong to the community. The act of naming is an act of appropriation, an act of community ownership.

It is not only in the land that the naming occurs. Even the sky is “owned” by the community. We are familiar with the Greek zodiac signs and such legends as Castor and his twin Polydeuces17 forming Gemini. What are these but attempts to make sense of the cosmos by making the heavenly bodies familiar to the Greeks. Among the Bagobos, they will point out the Balatik, which is shaped like a trap in the sky. When it appears at a certain angle, it signals the planting season.” Among the Atas, there Is Dawa, a cluster of stars as plentiful as millet.19 The Tedurays will point out three bright stars that make up Seretar, the hunter, and two smaller ones nearby making up the jaw of a pig that Seretar had killed. There is another bright star identified as Fegeferafad, a man known as a brave defender of his family’s honor. With him are his three cousins.’ Lumad poetics then is an act of communitization whereby what is strange or alien becomes familiar to the community.” The earth, the sky, the water, the forest, the people, their ancestors, their heroes and the spirits all have a place in the community worldview and are understood intimately. All these establish, foster and strengthen distinct ethnokinship ties. By ethnokinship I mean the organization of people according to certain ethnic identifiers such as race, ancestry, language, traditions, beliefs, customs, rituals, practices and history. The more elements of identity people have in common, the stronger their bond and attachment to each other. The family, clan, tribe and nation constitute the levels of ethnokinship communities.

Hane. Ehhrm. (Pause). In an ethnokinship community there is no gap between storyteller and listeners because the storyteller draws his or her vocabulary, imagery, symbols, and themes from a worldview shared by the entire community. Or to borrow from Saussure,23 the storyteller and the listeners possess a common langue, so that the storyteller’s parole or individual utterance is immediately grasped by the listeners.

The act of imagining is always a community act and has a recognizable community stamp or brand. This is what makes a specific Lumad poetics unique, helping define the identity of the community, as reinforced by rituals and other cultural and traditional practices.

But it should not be understood that Lumad poetics is fixed nor static. New materials are being created as the community members encounter new experiences and integrate them into their common langue. Most members can do extemporaneous compositions. A welcome chant created on the spot will greet visitors. They may use traditional forms, but the content will be new. New stories and their variants are created as new heroes are born, sometimes shared only in secret among themselves.

One such case involves the exploits of Mangunlayon, the Tagacaolo tribal ward assistant leader. He assassinated the first American politico-military governor of Davao District, Lt. Edward C. Bolton, in 1906 in the Malalag area, Davao del Sur. This was at the height of the Lumad unrest caused by the entry of American settlers who set up plantations in Davao in the early years of American occupation. While some Lumads can already talk about it, those closely associated with the assassination are not so open. The reason us that the Americans are still present — that is, their descendants still own some of the plantations in the area. As American hegemony prevailed in the entire country. Mangunlayon became villain instead of hero, and was lost in obscurity instead of becoming famous. However, underground heroic legends about Mangunlayon circulated among the Lumads of Davao del Sur.

As we all know, the Lumads today have been effectively minoritized, marginalized and excluded in mainstream Philippine society. Oftentimes, they are caught in the crossfire between government and insurgent forces, and there are reports of genocide perpetrated against them. It is the sad end of a once proud people who resisted foreign subjugation, only to find themselves subordinated in the present political set-up. In Lumad conferences therefore, we will usually hear Lumads lamenting their fate. The more politicized will speak with angry voices as they recall a bygone era when the community was whole and supreme in their own land.

If they say that Lumad literature is a record of community life itself, will we find this new situation of the Lumads reflected in their new artistic creations?

In 1989, the Development Education Media Services where I was executive director produced a song tape album if authentic Mandaya songs and music as part of our program to preserve Lumad culture. The four Mandaya artists, which included an old baylan (priestess), had a free hand in choosing their repertoire. What came out was a revelation, since it was the first time I noticed the theme of community lament in Lumad literary creation.

As you may be aware, an important aspect in the scholarly study of folk literature is establishing traditionally of folk materials by subjecting them to the so-called vertical and horizontal tests. Traditional means old, to put it simply. The vertical test or the three-generation test seeks to know if the informant has learned the material from his or her grandparent(s), as the very least. The further the genelogical line that is can be traced to, the better. The horizontal test meanwhile seeks to find several versions of the same tale, which would also attest its age. However, in the album production, the Mandaya artists chanted many materials that show their present plight as marginalized people. The theme of lament comes out very strongly. The baylan chants: “… Our situation as natives/ As Mandaya / We were all so soon forgotten / O we have become outcasts / Because of the evil ones / The rapacious exploiters / They told us / You will not improve / You will not progress / Just give them (arts/designs) to us / Give us your gold / Give us your most precious things.”

Another Mandaya chanter laments: “All our lands are gone / O, gone is out pristine world / O, caused by strangers / Those foreigners.”

The significance of the chants is that it affirms the view that literature is a community record, the community’s past and present life. Literature is ethnokinship worldview and record. While the traditionality of materials may be very important, and in fact it is being used as evidence for establishing ancestral domain claims of the Lumads, that should not make new Lumad literary productions less important, for these are the continuations of their life as a community.

Using Aristotelian mimetic, we can say that the object of imitation in these new literary outputs is the community’s lament of the loss of their land, and the threat of disappearance of their worldview and ultimately of their identity as a culture and as a people. This is not an imitation of an individual ‘s lament alone, but an imitation of the lament of the entire community.

Later I would also find echoes of the same theme among the Tbolis of South Cotabato. According to the legend, Lake Sebu was owned by Boi Henwu. When the goddess ascended to the sky, she decreed that only the Tbolis would be the stewards of the lake. But today, we hear this lament from The Dream Weavers-. “This lake of Sebu/ Other people claim it/ Other people lord over it/ The Thai have no place to go/ The outsiders have prevailed/ They rule over the Tboli/ Do you understand my song?/ There is nothing you can do/ We have lost everything that we had/ They are the only ones who benefit…”

It is lamentable indeed that the community of the Lumads is being threatened. It is not the scope of this paper to discuss the reasons for this, except to observe that the world of the Lumads is shrinking, and could be lost in another generation or so. While we, who belong to the majority have our own Bohol province, Tagalog region or Ilocano region that ensures our survival as a community, the Bagobos, the Tbolis, the Subanons, have no such secure home bases because of massive intrusions by foreigners.

With the subordination of their community to the majority community, their culture and worldview are also being subordinated to the majority culture and worldview. This situation has the effect of a double alienation. They are alienated from their own world, and they are alienated from the majority world. Hence the lament. Hence the anger. The theme of heroism of past heroic legends and epics has been replaced by the theme of despair. To be sure, some of the Lumads are not taking this passively and have began to assert themselves. Some have even launched occasional paggaws or wars to defend their land, but this is subject of another paper.29What interests us here for the moment is their literature and its place in their community.

Based on the discussion above, I now present the general features of the ethnokinship theory of literature. This theory advances the view that literature serves the entire community. The myths, epics, legends and other artistic creations are community acts of imagining and appropriating. They are entertainment, instruction, justifier of rituals, both sacred and secular history, social guide and control. That is, literature is the community worldview that unifies the community and strengthens community identity and loyalty. All aesthetic expressions are community-based and are therefore familiar and understood by the entire community. Literature seeks to build and rebuild community.

Now while we are witness to the marginalization and minoritization of Lumad culture and worldview, and even the possible extermination of the Lumads as a people, how do we, as the majority, fare? We have survived physically as a people, but how about our literature and worldview as a community?

First, an observation. After 100 years of existence as a country, we still talk of nation-building or forging a national identity as a task not only of literature, but also of the other arts and other cultural and political institutions. My theory as to why it is taking us so long to have a so-called national identity is that we are composed of many different communities, or ethnokinship identities. In effect, we are many nations, some big, some very small. These vertical ethnokinship splits practically make it impossible to create a single national identity.

Apart from the multiethnokinship character of the majority, we will find that our worldview is truncated as an effect of conquest and subjugation, so that the worldviews of our conquerors had been grafted into our very thought processes. Three hundred years in a Spanish convent, 50 years in Hollywood — this is the colorful description of our condition. As we all know, grafting is good practice in agriculture, but in social engineering this results in a monstrosity — the bifurcation not only of. personality but also of community. We have an educated elite heavily influenced by the conqueror’s worldviews and languages, and the vast masa with their own worldviews and languages. These horizontal splits within communities complete the fragmentation of the national community, which incidentally, makes us easy prey to other more powerful ethnokinship systems.

As a complex society with many communities, we will necessarily find many literatures in our country. Instead of reflecting the worldview of a single community, our fragmented literatures present many competing worldviews and loyalties. Within the context of Philippine society, literature has become a site of struggle because the processes of political and cultural integration and assimilation are also being resisted by counter processes of ethnokinship, as well as class, assertion. Instead of being a site of unity to fight external battles, literature has become a site of internal struggles. We are a national community continually at war with itself, which translate, at the political level, into a weak, unstable state.

This condition also afflicts many former colonies all over the world, offering many interesting challenges for poets and storytellers, nationalists or otherwise. Let us mention the responses of some of the better-known African writers.

Nigeria, like most former colonial countries, is composed of many nations which were forcibly brought together under one colonial rule, in their case, by the British. Since it became independent in 1963, it has experienced at least two secessionist attempts. The secessionist Biafran Republic was crushed in a brutal two-year civil war. Apart from this problem of multiethnic composition, there is also the question of an English-speaking elite. Within this context, Chinua Achebe, an Ibo acclaimed for his novel Things Fall Apart, asks: “Can a writer ever begin to know who his community is, let alone devise strategies for relating to it?”” Achebe has always problematized his use of the English language, but ends up justifying its use because of the “unassailable logic of its convenience.” But in his works he attempts to construct a new English by imitating the speech patterns of the Ibo community.

Wole Soyinka, the first African Nobel Laureate does not concern himself with the language issue. Writing in English, he worries more about how the African world can be understood in terms of African cultural concepts and categories. He does this by making “mythic or ritual concepts” relevant to modern Africa. For example, he identifies the Yoruba deity Ogun, god of iron and war, with electricity, thus combining Western culture with African traditions.

Meanwhile, Ngugi wa Thiongo of Kenya makes clear his decision with regard to the relationship between language and culture. He states that “the choice of language and the use to which it is put is central to a people’s definition of themselves in relation to their social environments.”  Awarded a British Council Scholarship, he was the first African member of the University College in Nairobi, Kenya where he pushed for the study of African literatures at a time when they were virtually unheard of Having identified his community, Ngugi converted to the use of Gikuyu and has been writing in his own language ever since.

Ngugi’s complete return to his community actually reenacts the solution of some European countries confronted with the problems of fragmentation and identity. In the 18th century, Germany was a confusion of more than 20 independent states. As the Romantic Movement swept Europe, a new nationalist mood also began to rise, represented by the Sturm and Drang in literary circles of which Johannes Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) were the more prominent members.

Herder encouraged the study of folklore because it is “not only a view of the past, but a means to create a unique and characteristic formal literature of its own.” He pushed the idea of a “world of nations defined by vernacular and by folk culture.” He is credited with the adoption of the German language as the medium of literature in Germany which during his time was considered inferior to French and Latin.

Goethe, meanwhile “freed the German language from clumsiness and foreign literary domination in a vast output of easy, natural and personal lyrics …” His dramas, of which Faust is his masterpiece, and novels have influenced German literature for generations.

Folk literature likewise preserved and developed nationalism in Finland. Under Sweden for 700 years, and under Russia for 100 years, the Finns were perhaps more confused as a people than Filipinos are today because their subjugators were powerful neighboring colonizers. Their elite, and the entire reading public, were Swedish-speaking. But once the nationalists made a decision as to who their community was, there were no ifs and buts, no equivocation whatsoever, in their choice of language. Kalevala, the Finnish epic reconstructed by Elias Lonnrot from oral traditions of rural folks and published in 1849, helped spread the fire of nationalism, and the crude Finnish of peasants, servants and tradespeople, would later become the language of the entire community, elite and masa. And that was how the Finnish worldview and community were finally restored after almost a millennium of subjugation and marginalization.

Confronted by the plurality of traditional communities in our country our political and cultural leaders sought and continue to seek unificatior by trying to transform all the communities into a new community of English speakers in the image of the colonizers.” The subordinating processes to unite all the ethnokinship systems operated and continue to operate in all fields. After one hundred years, this new imagined community’s is still non-existent. What has been created instead is an intelligentsia whose members are recruited from all the communities, but who have become divorced from their very own communities. They have become a separate community whose borrowed worldviews have become dominant, but whose loyalties are suspect. Having identified themselves with the colonizers, they couldn’t care less about their own masa, their roots. Other well-intentioned elite seek to uproot the masa and reshape them into their own borrowed image. All political and cultural apparatuses, chiefly the educational system, have been used to achieve this end. And speaking in the parole of a foreign worldview, the chanters and storytellers of the elite are no longer understood in the ethnokinship langue. The symbols and the images are no longer familiar to the community.

What is tragic in all this is that the majority culture is the product of subjugation, and therefore it has a negative self image of itself While it has subordinated the Lumads, the majority culture is in turn subordinated by foreign cultures. Many analysts have already taken note of the tendency of the subjugated to efface the defeated self and put on the mask of the colonizer to hide the sense of national inferiority complex. Ashamed of themselves, many Filipinos, particularly the educated, would rather be Americans, or Japanese or British rather than be Filipinos, the worst form of colonial mentality.”

I suggest that a lot of us, myself included, belong to this new community which has no roots, and whose worldview is neither here nor there. I am sure a lot of us have asked ourselves this question: Who is my community? Well, who among us have gone the Achebe or Soyinka way? How many of us have gone the Ngugi way? And how many of us are simply lost on the way…?

Although our problems are complex, there is no need to lose hope. Our multiethnic and multireligious composition may be the source of our weakness now, but it can be the source of our strength if we reimagine a new community that will respect the differences and know how to give full play to the energies of the various ethnokinship systems in the country. Perhaps the bigger problematique is the horizontal split—how the disjointed elite and masa can reclaim each other and restore the community. For only then can the community become whole again and face up to the challenges of a highly competitive world.

In this regard, it may be appropriate to borrow the image from a Japanese animated TV series—the popular Voltes 5. This machine is composed of separate independent units, but when faced with a threat, they “volt in” to create an invincible superhero. It is my view that the Filipino elite and masa need to volt in to become an invincible ethnokinship unit.

In the meantime, in Lumad poetics there is no gap between poet or storyteller and his/her listeners. They speak the same language; they have common symbols drawn from the same worldview. The poet or storyteller is capable of new and fresh expressions, but these are always within the context of a familiar world. Threatened by more powerful forces, Lumad poetics has taken on a note of lament and of anger.

The Mandaya chanter issues this call: All those who can hear/ Ye all our friends/ Let us all awake/ Let us not sleep in unconcern/ Lest our race be gone/ Let us help each other/ Let us unite!”

Somewhere some war drums are being sounded, and the balyans are summoning the spirits for help in expelling the evil forces who are stealing their land, their gold, their arts and craft.

What will happen to the Lumads as a people and as a culture? Where will they go? Only the future can answer that, but for the Kulaman Manobos of Davao del Sur, they know where they want to go. To the skyworld, to paradise.

And when it was time to baloy (go to heaven), so a legend says, the tinayok or airship appeared and Lomabot gathered his seven wives, his son, and his rooster. His favorite wife and the most industrious among them, Wolispo, asked permission to gather camote for the trip. Lomabot said yes, but for her to hurry, instructing her to stop gathering camote when she reaches the part of the camote vine that has yellow leaves because it is the signal that the Tinayok is leaving And so Wolispo went to the camote patch. So intent was she about filling her buon (head basket) that she forgot his warning to stop after reaching the yellow leaves. She continued gathering camote, only stopping when her buon was filled. She hurriedly went to the tinayok, but it had taken off and was now cruising the sky She ran after it, calling Lomabot’s name. She stumbled and fell, and stood up and ran again. But the tinayok was already very far. And so she stopped by the river, sat on a stone and wept. Lomabot happened to look down and saw Wolispo. He took pity on her and transformed her into stone. Today, you will see a weeping stone figure in Lapuan, Don Marcelino, and people will tell you it is Wolispo who was left behind during the baby. Lomabot likewise saw his faithful dog Tuyang chasing a deer! He transformed both dog and deer into stone, and today you will see Tuyang chasing a deer in Caburan, Don Marcelino.

When the busaws (evil spirits) saw the tinayok, they were angry. They took a long bamboo pole and maneuvered it to hook and pull the tinayok down, but the tinayok was too far up they could not reach it anymore. One busaw blew his nose at the tinayok, and a huge glob of phlegm stuck to the back of the airboat, causing it to shake vigorously and to tilt precariously. Lomabot’s whetstone fell, and now you can see this giant whetstone in Santa Cruz, Davao del Sur. The rooster crowed, saying: “Scrape it off; scrape it off!” And Bengit, one of the wives, used the tuwg shell which is for mixing with betel chew, to scrape off the phlegm. The pieces fell on the busaws who ran in all directions. The tinayok regained its balance and went on.

In desperation, the busaws threw huge stones at the tinayok. One stone hit Mt. Apo, splitting its peak. Today you can see this huge scar on the east side of the mountain. The tinayok continued its flight northward to the skyworld without further incident. And so Lomabot and his family reached paradise. It is said Lomabot will come back again and bring his entire community with him to paradise.

Hane. Ehhrm. (Pause ) I know that our own journey in search of worldview and community will be as exciting and as perilous as Lomabot’s trip.