Lakapati

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In a field freshly cut from the forest — the earth still raw where the trees had stood, the ash of the burned brush worked into the soil — a Tagalog farmer would lift a child up off the ground and hold it out over the turned ground. Then he spoke one sentence. Lakapati, pakanin mo yaring alipin mo; huwag mong gutumin. “Lakapati, feed this your slave; let him not hunger.” That is nearly the whole of it. A cleared plot, a child raised into the air, and a single line of address to the power on whom the harvest depended — a request not for wealth or victory but for the plainest thing there is, that the small body held aloft would eat and not starve. The sentence survives because a Spanish friar compiling a dictionary of the Tagalog language wrote it down in 1613, under the name of the deity it named. It is almost the only verbatim word the rite has left us, and everything else about Lakapati has to be built out from around it.

A farmer setting rice in a flooded Philippine field, photographed around 1917 — the planting labor over which Lakapati, deity of the sown and tilled ground, was invoked. Townsend, Henry S., via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The lord of the fields

The name arrives already carrying a rank. Lakapati — also written Lakanpati, Lacapati, Lakan Pati — joins two words from two different worlds. The first is lakan, a Tagalog title for a paramount noble or ruler, the highest grade of the maginoo aristocracy, the same word that stands in the name of Lakandula, the lord of Tondo whom the Spanish met at Manila Bay. The second is pati, a title of Sanskrit derivation meaning “lord” or “master,” a fossil of the Hindu-Buddhist current that reached the archipelago on the monsoon trade centuries before the galleons. Read together, the theonym means something like the noble lord — or lady — of the fields. It is a courtly name for a farmyard power, and the doubleness is fitting, because Lakapati’s whole domain was the meeting of things: the seed and the furrow, the wet and the dry, the male and the female.

Lakapati was the deity of agriculture — of the sown and tilled fields, of fertility and abundance, and, in some accounts, of the irrigation water that fed the rice and of the fishermen who worked the rivers and the shore. Among the lowland Tagalog of Luzon, the farming and fishing communities of the Manila-Bay river country and the wider south, this was the power a person addressed to keep the community fed. The survey of the indigenous religious beliefs of the Tagalog people records the plain title the deity carried: the giver of food. Not a remote maker of worlds and not a lord of the dead, but the near power standing over the one transaction on which survival turned — that the cleared field would bear, that the animals would thrive, that the rice would come in.

To place Lakapati one has to sketch the world the deity belonged to, because the parts only make sense together. Over everything stood Bathala, the supreme creator of the Tagalog, whose name, like pati, is a Sanskrit loan — from bhattāra, “noble lord.” But Bathala was distant, a sky-dwelling maker too high to be troubled with the daily business of a single field, and between him and the living pressed a crowd of nearer spirits: the anito, a category that gathered the deities, the non-ancestral spirits of nature, and the souls of the dead who had become guardians. Lakapati sat among these nearer powers, in the company the chroniclers name — Dimangan of the good harvest, Idianale (or Idiyanale) of labor and husbandry, Amanikable of the sea and the hunt — and set against the one figure everyone feared, Sitan, the keeper of the land of the dead. In that arrangement Lakapati was benevolence itself: the deity one fed so that one in turn would be fed.

How any of this reaches a written page is the delicate matter that has to be kept in view. The Tagalog wrote — in baybayin, the syllabic script incised on bamboo and palm-leaf — but they wrote letters and verses, not scripture, and little of that perishable writing outlasted the damp and the extirpators’ fires. So the earliest descriptions of Lakapati are colonial and Catholic: Juan de Plasencia’s account of the Customs of the Tagalogs in 1589; the illustrated Manila manuscript called the Boxer Codex, around 1590; and, richest of all for the language, Pedro de San Buenaventura’s Vocabulario de Lengua Tagala of 1613, the first Tagalog dictionary, which is where the field prayer is set down. The modern synthesis that gathers these fragments into a coherent picture is William Henry Scott’s Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society of 1994, the standard scholarly reconstruction. Every one of these witnesses is indispensable and interested at once — the friars preserved the name of the deity in the same decades their brothers were burning the images of the spirits — and a reader has to hold the record and its purpose together, reading it for what it saw and against what it came to do.

The giver of food

The rite the sources describe is a rite of the planting season, done at the field itself. When a plot was newly opened, a sacrifice was made in it to Lakapati, and it is there that the farmer lifted the child and spoke the line San Buenaventura recorded: Lakapati, pakanin mo yaring alipin mo; huwag mong gutumin — “Lakapati, feed this your slave, let him not hunger.” The offering was of the field’s own kind, rice and produce, and it might be made in a balag, a small hut-like shrine or oratory raised on the plot to be protected — a chapel of sticks over the growing crop. The larger occasion of such offerings was the maganito, the communal rite at which the anito were fed and consulted. What passed in the closed heart of those observances belongs to the specialists who led them and is not narrated here; the field prayer survives as public record — an ethnographer’s line in a dictionary, not an instruction — and it is enough to show the shape of the thing. A person stood on the ground that had to feed him, held up the next mouth that would need feeding, and asked the lord of the fields to see that it was fed.

The feature that arrested the Spanish observers, and that has become central to Lakapati today, is sex. In the early accounts the deity was, in William Henry Scott’s rendering of the 1613 dictionary, “represented by a hermaphrodite image with both male and female parts, and was worshiped in the fields at planting time” — a figure, in San Buenaventura’s phrase, of man and woman all together. Lakapati was androgynous, dual-sexed, and the logic of it is agricultural before it is anything else: the deity of fertility embodied the union of male and female that alone makes seed and field bear fruit. A power over generation was itself both generative principles at once. To a friar this was a scandal or a curiosity; inside the frame it is simply coherent — the god of increase is the god in whom increase is already complete.

And it did not stand alone. The ritual specialists of the Tagalog were the catalonan — among the Bisaya of the central islands, the Visayans, the babaylan; among the Ifugao of the mountains, the mumbaki — and these mediators of the anito, who led the maganito and healed the sick and carried the community’s words to the spirits, were overwhelmingly women. Where a man held the office he customarily took on women’s dress and role, the asog of the islands or the bayog of Luzon; the very word for the office descends from a Proto-Malayo-Polynesian term for a medium who might be female or feminized. The record of the Filipino shamans preserves the proportion in hard numbers — in one confiscation the friars logged 148 ritualists, of whom 145 were women. A fertility deity of indeterminate sex sat easily in a ritual world where gender-crossing carried spiritual authority, where the power to mediate between the seen and the unseen ran, by preference, through women and through men who became like them. Lakapati’s dual body was not an anomaly. It was of a piece with the priesthood that served it.

The open question of Ikapati

Here the sources leave a genuine knot, and it deserves to be named as one rather than smoothed over. The Lakapati of San Buenaventura — the hermaphrodite field-image, addressed with the child and the prayer — is not obviously the same figure as the Ikapati who appears in some later retellings as a goddess, the benevolent giver of food who marries Mapulon, the deity of the seasons, and bears a daughter, Anagolay, the finder of lost things. That domestic, maternal Ikapati, wife and mother, comes largely from the twentieth-century systematizing of the Tagalog pantheon in the work of the folklorist F. Landa Jocano — his Outline of Philippine Mythology and the family trees of deities built from it — and it reads oddly against the dual-sexed field-power of the 1613 dictionary.

Are they one deity or two? The critical reading advanced by the essay “the ‘Transgender’ Tagalog Deity? Not So Fast” presses exactly this uncertainty: that a mother-goddess who marries and bears children and a hermaphrodite image with both male and female parts may be distinct figures later folded into a single entry, and that the confident modern portrait of one androgynous deity may rest on a conflation the primary record does not license. The sources do not settle it. What can be said with care is that the earliest witness, the dictionary, describes a dual-sexed power of the sown field; that the maternal Ikapati is a later and partly reconstructed figure; and that the tidy name-by-name pantheon in which both are slotted may itself owe something to a Spanish, and then a modern scholarly, habit of ordering imposed on a looser field of overlapping spirits. This is one of the honest contested places in the subject, and it matters most exactly where the modern reception has invested the most.

A Tagalog couple of the maginoo noble class, drawn in the Boxer Codex, the Manila manuscript of around 1590 — among the earliest colonial images of the people among whom Lakapati was worshiped. via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The conquest and the name that survived

Two colonial ruptures frame what became of Lakapati. The first was the conquest. Miguel López de Legazpi’s expedition settled Cebu in 1565, the first permanent Spanish foothold in the islands; in 1571 his forces took the Tagalog heartland at Manila Bay, and on 24 June 1571 he proclaimed Manila the capital of the new colony, coming to terms with the local lords Rajah Sulayman and Lakandula after the fighting at Bangkusay. With the soldiers came the friars and the long campaign against anito worship. The nearer spirits were recast in the missionaries’ theology as demons; the carved figures that housed them were sought out, defiled, and burned; and the whole occasional, practical religion of the field and the household — the offering at the balag, the maganito, the prayer over the child — was pressed down as idolatry. The name of Bathala, the ready-made supreme creator, was kept and turned to new use as an appellation for the Christian God, close enough to the truth to be annexed rather than smashed. The lesser powers had no such shelter. Lakapati, giver of food, was among the anito the new order set out to erase.

The second rupture fell on the priesthood, and it is the one that has to be told soberly, as the documented religious violence it was. The catalonan and the babaylan were indigenous religious authorities, and they were mostly women — precisely the authority the friars needed to break to break the old religion. So they were demonized. The chronicler Antonio de Morga, in his account of the islands, cast the catalonan as deceivers and sorcerers who worked on the credulity of the people; earlier, Antonio Pigafetta, sailing with Magellan, had already set down the native priestesses as witches. The clergy denounced the babaylan as witches and worse, and the label pressed onto them was, among others, aswang — a word whose afterlife is its own bitter lesson. The aswang is today the shapeshifting monster of Philippine horror film, a commercialized creature of the movies; it is easy to forget that in the extirpation the name was fixed onto the very priestesses whose office was being destroyed, a sacred functionary turned into a night-fiend by the people replacing her. Where a colonial term did that work of demonizing, it is marked here as theirs and not adopted; the office it slandered was a real one, and its persecution was real.

Yet the sacred world was interrupted, not ended, and what followed is not “pagan survival” but living, syncretic faith. The devotion to the Santo Niño that anchors Cebu’s Sinulog, the folk-Catholic pilgrimages to the holy stations of Mount Banahaw, the bulul rice-guardians still watching the granaries above the Ifugao Rice Terraces, the nature-guardian who survives as Maria Makiling on her mountain, the serpent Bakunawa who still names the eclipse, the deep human tenure of the islands that the burials of the Tabon Caves open onto — these are the present tense of a religious imagination the sixteenth century could not overwrite. The rice is still planted, and someone still stands over the field.

What Lakapati reclaims

The clearest sign that this world is still being argued over is the modern return to Lakapati. In the 2010s the deity was taken up as an icon of Filipino LGBTQ+ identity and a symbol against colonial gender-erasure — a pointed rereading of a pre-colonial world that gave sacred office to the feminized asog and honored a power that was both male and female at once. The reclamation moved through the Filipino diaspora and its media: essays on sites such as Hella Pinay and Making Queer History, popular retellings and illustrations, and a widening use of the name in Pride season, so that a farmyard deity of the sown field became a banner for a community insisting that its history did not begin with the friars’ gender binary. The account on The Aswang Project is among the pieces that carried the figure to a wide readership under the heading of the transgender Tagalog deity.

The reclamation rests on something genuine in the record — pre-colonial Tagalog society plainly accommodated more than a rigid binary, in its priesthood and in this deity’s own body. But it asks to be rendered with the same care the whole subject demands, and paired with the caution its own critics raise. To read “hermaphrodite” in a 1613 Spanish dictionary as straightforwardly modern “transgender” is to lay a present vocabulary over a document that did not have it, and risks an anachronism of its own; the confident single deity may fold together a Lakapati and an Ikapati the sources keep apart; and a Spanish friar’s word for a field-image is a fragile thing to hang a great deal on. Both truths hold at once. The pre-colonial acceptance of gender-crossing spiritual authority is genuine and documented, and the modern label is an interpretation laid over that documentation — an act of reading, offered in the present, about a past that will not fully confirm or deny it.

What is beyond dispute is the sentence in the dictionary, and the gesture it froze in place. Before Lakapati was a question about identity, before the deity was a scandal to a friar or an emblem to a movement, there was a person standing on cleared ground with a child in his lifted arms, asking the lord of the fields for the one thing the fields exist to give. “Feed this your slave; let him not hunger.” Four centuries of conquest, erasure, demonization, and recovery have crowded around those words, and the words have outlasted all of it — a small, exact record of hunger and of the power addressed against it, spoken over a field that, somewhere in the islands, is being planted again this season.

→ Related: The Tagalog · Bathala · Aswang · Bakunawa · Maria Makiling · The Visayans · The Ifugao · Ifugao Rice Terraces · Mount Makiling · Mount Banahaw · Tabon Caves