Maria Makiling

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At dusk on the campus of the University of the Philippines Los Baños, the mountain on the horizon resolves into a body. Forestry students and researchers point it out to newcomers the way one points out a familiar face: the high brow of the first peak, then the twin summits that read as a sleeping woman’s face and breasts, and the long fall of the southern slope taken for her loosened hair. The campus sits at her foot, and the reserve’s principal footpath, signposted in the plain officialese of a state university, is the Mariang Makiling Trail. Hikers who climb it still say what their grandparents said — that the game and the good weather favor the walker who takes only what the mountain gives and no more.

The mountain is a person, and the person is a diwata. Maria Makiling — in Tagalog, Mariang Makiling — is the guardian spirit of Mount Makiling, and she is the most widely known diwata in the Philippine sacred world: not a distant creator but the near, resident power of a single forested peak, a being whose body is a working reserve and whose name a trail marker carries without irony. She gives freely to those who keep faith with her, and she withdraws from those who do not. Everything else in her story turns on that exchange.

The reclining mountain and her names

She belongs to a class of being the Tagalog and their neighbors distinguish carefully. The anito are the ancestral powers — the souls of the dead and the spirits of the household and the field, venerated through carved figures and the sharing of food; the word runs back through the Austronesian languages to a proto-form, qanitu, meaning the ancestral spirit, and the same root surfaces across the islands from Taiwan to the Pacific. The diwata are something else: the nature-spirits and lesser deities who reside in the mountains, the rivers, the springs, and the old trees. Their name arrived by sea. It descends from the Sanskrit devata, “celestial being,” carried into the archipelago on the maritime trade that linked it to the Indianized courts of Southeast Asia, so that the very word for a Philippine mountain-spirit records a current of exchange older than any European sail. Maria Makiling is a diwata in this precise sense — a power of place, of the forest and its springs and its game.

Beneath the Christian name lies an older one. Scholars link her to a pre-Christian Tagalog goddess, Dayang Masalanta or Dian Masalanta, whose title carries the sense of the lady who halts ruin, and who was invoked to stop the deluges, the storms, and the earthquakes that break a lowland year. The continuity is fitting: a being who stills the floods and a being who owns a mountain of watersheds are two readings of one guardianship over the forces that feed and threaten a valley. The mountain she guards is exact in its geography. Mount Makiling is an inactive stratovolcano rising 1,090 meters — some 3,580 feet — on the boundary of Laguna and Batangas provinces on Luzon, its dormancy still breathing through mud springs and hot springs on its flanks. Its forested slopes make up the Mount Makiling Forest Reserve, 4,244 hectares administered since the American period by the university at its foot, and from the lowlands its ridgeline is read, without effort, as the reclining figure that gives the diwata her form.

Mount Makiling seen from the lowlands, its ridgeline read as a reclining woman. Robertmarrel, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Maria does not sit at the top of her world. Above the resident diwata and the ancestral anito, the Tagalog know a transcendent creator: Bathala, Bathala Maykapal, whose byname carries the sense of the maker, the owner of what has been shaped from the clay of the earth. Bathala dwells in Kaluwalhatian, the place of glory, and he does not deal directly with the living. When the early Spanish asked why offerings went to the anito rather than to Bathala himself, the Tagalog answered — as the missionaries recorded it — that Bathala was too great a lord to be approached, and that one reached him only through intermediaries. He speaks through omens and dreams, and above all through the tigmamanukan, the blue omen-bird whose flight across a traveler’s path carries his will. His is a tiered cosmos: the remote creator at the height, the anito as ministers and advocates below him, and the diwata resident in the land — and Maria Makiling, a diwata of a single mountain, stands within this order, near to the people who address her precisely because the highest power is not.

Between the human world and all of these stood the specialist. Across the Tagalog country the mediator was the katalonan (also written catalonan); among the Visayans, the babaylan. These were the ritual authorities who spoke to the powers on the community’s behalf, and they were overwhelmingly women — with a place, too, for feminized male mediums, the Visayan asog or bayog, who took up the women’s office and the women’s dress. What passed between the katalonan and the diwata — the divination, the trance, the songs that summoned the spirit to descend — belongs to that office and is named here only from the outside, at the distance the record keeps. The point that matters is that Maria Makiling’s world was one in which a mountain could be addressed, and in which the addressing was a vocation held mostly by women.

What the mountain gives, and takes back

The heart of the tradition is a single principle: benevolent guardianship conditioned on reciprocity. Maria protects the forest, the game, the springs, and the fish of her mountain, and she rewards the honest poor who take only what they need. The most widespread of her tales fixes the principle in a small miracle. A struggling farmer, or a gleaner, or a mother seeking a cure for a sick child, meets her on the slopes, and she presses on them a gift so modest it seems a kindness rather than a fortune — slices of ginger, luya, to carry home. On the road down, in the basket or the fold of a shirt, the ginger has turned to gold. She lends, too: cooking pots and gold kitchenware handed to villagers for a wedding or a feast, on the one condition that the borrowed things be returned. She guides the lost hunter and the strayed traveler back down the mountain; she heals the sick; and she is glimpsed as a young woman of great beauty who never ages, her white garments so like the mist that a wisp of cloud through the trees is taken for the hem of her dress.

The gift is never unconditional, and the tradition’s darker register turns on the breaking of the condition. In one cycle Maria loves a mortal hunter, watching over him on the mountain, until he leaves her to marry a human woman. In another, three suitors compete for her: Captain Lara, a Spanish officer; the wealthy Joselito; and Juan, a humble farmer, the one she favors. When Juan is framed on false charges and executed, Maria curses the rivals who destroyed him — and, in the fuller versions, all men who cannot bear to lose in love. In Rizal’s telling the favored man is a farmer whose unaccountable good fortune the townspeople credit to a charmed talisman, a mutya, until he agrees to an arranged marriage to escape conscription, and the diwata, who had watched over him, tells him only that she had hoped he was devoted to her, and is not seen again.

That ending is the tradition’s constant. After greed, or a broken promise, or the injustice of men, Maria withdraws — climbing ever higher up her own mountain, no longer showing herself, her white robes at last indistinguishable from the clouds. In some tellings villagers break into her garden and she retreats from their greed; in the colonial-era versions it is the soldiers and the faithlessness of men that drive her from the world of humans altogether. What the folklore encodes is at once ecological and moral, and the two are not separable. The mountain gives to those who keep faith and take only their need; it withholds — the game vanishes, the hunter loses his way, the storm comes down — from the greedy and the treacherous. In present-day Philippine environmental and cultural discourse this makes Maria Makiling a living emblem of forest stewardship, not a quaint fairy: the reserve’s own reciprocity ethic given a face and a name, and a warning attached.

Rizal’s nymph, and the friars’ witch

The version now taught in Philippine schools was fixed by the national hero. José Rizal — a Laguna native who grew up within sight of the mountain — retold the oral tradition in an essay-tale, “Mariang Makiling,” published under his pen-name Laong Laan in the reformist Propaganda-movement fortnightly La Solidaridad. It ran in the issue of 31 December 1890, the last piece he wrote for the paper. There he called her a fantastic creature, half nymph and half sylph, born of the rays of the Philippine moon in the mystery of the forest and the murmur of the neighboring lake — a benevolent spirit estranged from a world that had grown faithless to her. His retelling standardized the figure, and the reserve’s main path bears her name today in his wake.

That the legend survived at all to be retold is itself a story shaped by conquest. When Miguel López de Legazpi established the first permanent Spanish settlement at Cebu in 1565, and when Manila fell in 1571, the missionary orders that followed set about a systematic extirpation of anito worship — the carved figures broken and burned, the ancestral spirits recast as demons. The absorption ran in two directions at once. The friars took the Tagalog high-god’s own name, Bathala, and pressed it into service as a word for the Christian God, a bridge built of an indigenous name; over the course of the nineteenth century that usage faded, displaced by Diyós and Panginoón, before nationalists reclaiming an indigenous past revived Bathala as the name of the old Tagalog creator. Maria Makiling herself came through the storm intact in the way the household and the landscape powers tended to: there was no temple to pull down, no state cult to decapitate, only a mountain that stayed where it was and a story told at the hearth.

A colonial illustration of pre-colonial Philippine figures from the Boxer Codex, compiled in Manila about 1590. via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The gravest violence of the extirpation fell on the ritual women. The friars branded the babaylan and the katalonan — those mostly-female authorities and their feminized male counterparts — as brujas, witches, and servants of Satan, and the demonization was a strategy as much as a verdict: turn a community against its own healers and the old religion loses the office that held it together. The recasting did not stay abstract. It hardened into the folk figure of the aswang — the shapeshifting, viscera-devouring monster of Philippine night — so that the indigenous woman of religious authority was inverted into a cannibal witch, a colonial figure that endures now in Philippine horror cinema. The scholarship on the point is direct: the monstrous nightflier is read as a deliberate inversion of the babaylan meant to discredit her, so that “witches in the Philippines” are, on this account, a Spanish propaganda before they are anything else. The term is theirs; the office it defamed was real.

The women so branded repeatedly anchored the resistance. In Bohol the babaylan Tamblot drew four villages to the old diwata, promising his followers the spirit’s protection and abundance, before a Spanish force under Juan de Alcarazo broke the rising — the campaign opening on New Year’s Day of 1622. In 1663 Tapar rose at Oton in Iloilo, syncretizing native shamanism with Catholic titles and taking on, in the old manner of the asog, women’s dress, until the revolt was crushed and its leaders killed. The pattern outlasted the Spanish centuries. On Negros in the late nineteenth century Ponciano Elofre, called Dios Buhawi, the Whirlwind God, led a politico-religious movement that revived the babaylan rites and whose followers, the babaylanes, numbered about two thousand; he was killed raiding Siaton on 22 August 1887. His movement’s remnants fed the later rising of Papa Isio — Dionisio Magbuelas — who fused folk Catholicism with the old belief and agrarian revolt, fighting first the Spanish and then the American colonial army before surrendering in 1907. Across three centuries the diwata’s world supplied the language of refusal.

It is a living world still, and syncretic rather than superseded. The devotion to the Santo Niño, the child Christ whose image Legazpi’s men found kept and honored in Cebu, gathers each January into the Sinulog, a festival danced to a drumbeat that is Catholic and older than Catholic at once. On the holy mountain of Banahaw, not far from Makiling, folk-Catholic and mystical sects keep their pilgrimages to the sacred stations of the slope. In the Cordillera to the north the Ifugao bulul, the carved rice-gods, still stand in the granaries to guard the harvest. None of this is a pagan remainder; it is the faith as it is actually lived, the diwata and the anito folded into a Catholic year without either being felt to cancel the other.

The reclaiming continues into the present. Alongside Maria Makiling, contemporary Filipinos have reached back for other figures of the old sacred world — among them Lakapati, the dual-gendered Tagalog deity of the fertile field, invoked now as a queer and transgender ancestor in a modern reclamation of a pre-colonial gender order. The reclamation is real and its impulse is sound; scholars caution, though, that the “transgender goddess” framing reads a modern category onto a fragmentary record, and that the surviving notices of Lakapati are not so easily mapped onto present terms as the reclamation sometimes assumes. The caution is not a dismissal. It is the same discipline the whole tradition demands — to hold what the record actually says apart from what a later age needs it to say.

Which returns the matter to the mountain, where the discipline is easiest to keep because the thing is plainly there. The diwata’s body is a forest reserve with a boundary and a budget; her trail has a signboard; her ginger-into-gold is a lesson a ranger could endorse. Maria Makiling withdrew up her own slopes long ago, the tellings agree, and is not seen. But the mountain keeps her form against the dusk, the walkers keep the compact — to take only what they need — and on those terms the guardian of Makiling has never actually left.

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