Pagbubuwaya & other animistic tales

What are you doing? I asked a person putting sugar in a hole in the ground. I was in Maguindanao and they explained to me that this was where a coconut tree was going to be planted and the sugar would make the fruits of the coconut sweet at kasama na rin ang maraming pagbubunga.

My other experience was seeing the construction of a house. A hole was dug where the center post was to be erected. Before putting the post inside the hole, a bottle filled with water and a written prayer from the Qur’an were tied to the post. Coins were put inside the hole – the way Christians do when building a house – so the house would receive good investments and profitable transactions.

We certainly have many animistic practices until today.

Before Christianity arrived in the Philippines, Filipinos believed in a supreme being, in a world of spirits that animated the varied objects of nature, heavenly bodies, the seas, the lakes and rivers, the mountains, the trees and animals. Thus, some adored the crow as the lord of the earth, called Maylupa. The crocodile was an object of reverence called Nono or grandfather. They also had faith in spirits which, according to popular opinion, were souls of the dead. The Tagalogs believed in good spirits, which they called anito, and the bad spirits which they called mangalo. Among the Visayas and Mindanaoans, spirits were called diwata. In honor of their deities, the natives carved stone, wood, ivory and bone images but they had neither temples nor special sites designated for worship. To win their gods’ favor, they worshipped them everywhere. The offering ritual was done by priests, generally women, called katalonan, babaylan or shaman.

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In Tawi-Tawi, circa 1991. Once there was a very exceptional volleyball player from the Sulu National Regional Agricultural School, now the Tawi-Tawi Regional Agricultural College. His name was Wadja. Although a small fellow, he jumped high even with his spikes on that his shoulders were at level with the top of the net. He easily "killed" the ball and directed it to any opening on the opposite court. He played on the national level of the interscholastic meet. In fact, it was only when Wadja joined the team that Mindanao won first place in volleyball.

For his ability, he was sought out by local teams. Bets for Wadja’s team reached as high as P1,000 per game and they always won. Opposing teams started to avoid participating whenever Wadja played.

It came to pass that a game was scheduled in a remote barrio of Tawi-Tawi. This competition was agreed upon with the understanding that Wadja was not to play. Nevertheless, as the barrio team did not know how Wadja looked, he did play.

Afraid of losing, Wadja’s team did whatever they could to disguise his presence. The scores were close and Wadja’s team was leading, but because the game was so intense, they started to shout his name.

The other team and their supporters discovered that they had been cheated. They sought the help of an old man known in the barrio as possessing magical powers through powerful prayers. He agreed to help the losing team.

The old man took a thin stick, uttered some prayers and snapped the stick in two. He timed the breaking of the stick to coincide with Wadja jumping high during the game. As Wadja came down, he broke a leg.

Wadja never recovered. He has never been able to play volleyball again – or walk without the help of a cane.

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Governor Pax S. Mangundadatu of Sultan Kudarat Province is the seventh-generation descendant of Rajah Buayan of the Royal House of Buayan in Maguindanao. He told me of his experience with his crocodile ancestors. "One afternoon my son-in-law Raden fell asleep by Lake Buluan, Maguindanao. He awoke to find his face lopsided. We didn’t know what had happened except that Raden said he had watched the crocodiles in the lake which he should not have done. An old friend told us to perform the Pagbubuwaya by Lake Buluan." Raden’s face was disfigured for three weeks. Pax and his family performed the rite, Raden was cured in a week’s time. Gov. Pax recalled that his family had not performed the Pagbubuwaya in a very long time in spite of its being a duty of the community.

Pax believes in the crocodile myth and attributes his rescue from his enemies to his belief. On December 28, 1988 at high noon, Pax said, "I rode on a patrol boat on my way to attack the MNLF headquarters. While returning gunfire, we realized that our boat was burning. We jumped off. Some of us didn’t even know how to swim. I was struggling for 30 minutes when I remembered that the buayas were my ancestors and asked for their intercession to save my life. Suddenly a banca arrived, driven by a man. He took me out of the water, brought me on land and disappeared. To this day, I believe I was saved by a ‘crocodile man.’"

As my ethnographic studies in Mindanao have revealed, the adoration of crocodiles remains. A story was told to me in 1995 about a crocodile caught in Lake Buluan. When the community found out about it, they begged those who caught the crocodile to return it to the lake or it would bring the community bad luck. The fishermen had disturbed these creatures – and they could be anybody’s relatives! The crocodile they caught was promptly returned to the lake.

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I met Abdul, an Iranun from Basilan who taught me the crocodile worship his parents from Zamboanga del Sur performed a month after a woman gives birth. It was pretty much the same as the Maguindanaoans except that in Maguindanao the crocodile was placed on a small raft and made to sail down the river as an offering to the spirits. Nevertheless, the Iranuns of Isabela de Basilan, some Maguindanaoans and Maranaos also believe men are born with a crocodile twin.

Here are the preparations from Abdul: The figure of a crocodile has to be formed from boiled tapul sticky rice and placed on top of banana leaves. Chicken is cleaned and boiled. Four eggs are hard-boiled. The crocodile’s head is special so it is made of yellow rice, the color of royalty. The hard-boiled eggs are placed on the crocodile’s eye area and two below the crocodile’s neck because they believe the crocodile has four eyes. How else would he see in the blackish waters that he wallows in?

On the back portion of the crocodile’s neck near the front leg is the boiled chicken, its breasts upward. Bananas are his claws placed by each of his four legs. If there are no bananas, the elongated sugar candy called lukot-lukot is formed like an egg roll, simulating the claws.

The scales of the buaya are pancakes called pañalam, made of flour and red sugar, piled bit by bit on the crocodile’s back – one on top of each other, sometimes covering the crocodile completely or placed edge to edge on a line all over its back. Chicken blood is placed in front of the buaya inside a coconut shell.

Cigarettes are placed under the leaves holding the crocodile in case anyone wants to smoke after eating the croc. Prayers are uttered by the iman or pandita. Chicken blood is placed on top of the mother’s hands. She turns around the crocodile a few times and sits to eat first.

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Tarlac in the north has its own customs. Let me tell you how we found out about one of them in 1997. It was a melancholy day in Sta. Ignacia, Tarlac, one of those afternoons when alternating brightness and darkness leaves one baffled about the weather. I saw a white T-shirt on a hanger swinging from a branch of a mango tree. "What’s that?" I asked. "We put it there so it wouldn’t rain," Amy Antonio, the mayor’s wife, told me.

Nueva Ecija, too, has its stories to tell. Just recently a man cut a branch of a tree and fell ill with high fever in Nampicuan, Nueva Ecija. An atang (thanksgiving and food offering) was performed by his wife to remove the evil spirits from his sick body.

Thelma, the wife, prepared one coconut, one bottle of gin, nine black and nine white cigarettes, one candy, one piece of bread, 1/4 kilo of pork and chicken, one glass of water one cup of rice, one cup of malagkit and two pieces of white candles.

This is how she prepared it: Thelma boiled the rice and the malagkit rice separately. She broke the coconut into halves and put the boiled rice in one half of the coconut shell. On the other half, she put the malagkit rice. She placed all the items in a bilao neatly. At 6 o’clock that evening, the spirits would be appeased by the food offering. The following day at 5:30 in the morning, Thelma buried all the ingredients in her garden except for the water. The water left behind was used as medicine and applied on the part of the man’s body that was painful while prayers were said.

Education has not made us forget our ancestors’ superstitions. Culture really dies hard. Fe Mangahas would agree with me.