Mount Makiling

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From the eastern shore of Laguna de Bay, late in the afternoon, the mountain across the water lies down. A fisherman hauling his net toward Bay or Calauan sees it the way his grandfather did: not a cone but a figure — the high forehead of the northern peak, the long throat, the twin swell of a bosom, and southward the drawn-up line of a bent knee where the summit breaks into lesser hills. The ridge does not resemble a sleeping woman so much as become one for as long as the light holds. Lowland Tagalogs read the mountain as a body for centuries before the Spanish came and gave the body a Christian name, and they read it as a body still. The reclining woman is the first fact of Mount Makiling, older than any survey, and every later way of knowing the mountain is laid over it like a transparency over a portrait.

There are at least three such transparencies. The mountain is the body of a diwata, Maria Makiling, the guardian spirit of its forest and springs. It is a geothermal engine, a dormant volcano whose banked heat still rises through the ground and gave the town at its foot a Spanish name that means, simply, the baths. And it is a working scientific reserve, 4,244 hectares of protected forest run as a teaching laboratory by the state university on its lower slope. All three are true of one slope at once, and the mountain answers to all three.

The leaning mountain

Mount Makiling is an inactive stratovolcano rising to 1,090 meters — about 3,580 feet — on the boundary between the provinces of Laguna and Batangas, in the Calabarzon region of southern Luzon. It stands within the Laguna Volcanic Field, and its slope runs down on the north to the shore of Laguna de Bay, the great inland lake southeast of Manila. It has no recorded historic eruption; the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology classes it as inactive, its last activity placed in the geologic recent, the Holocene. Inactive, however, is not the same as dead. The heat that built the mountain has not entirely left it, and it keeps surfacing.

The name is a plain description of the mountain’s shape, not of the goddess. In Tagalog makiling means leaning, or uneven — and the summit earns the word honestly, rising from the lakeshore to a rugged top and then breaking southward into a scatter of irregular hills, so that the peak seems to lean or slump off true. That the same leaning outline reads from the plain as a reclining human figure is the coincidence on which the whole sacred geography turns: a mountain whose very unevenness draws the eye into the shape of a woman. Which reading came first — the leaning mountain or the lying woman — is not a question the tradition asks. The two are held together, and the name carries both.

The people who hold them are the Tagalog, the lowland people of the Manila Bay hinterland and the Laguna shore, whose sacred world before the conquest was ordered under a remote sky-creator, Bathala, and populated by the anito, the ancestral and household spirits, and the diwata, the resident powers of the mountains, rivers, springs, and old trees. Makiling belongs to the diwata in the strict sense: a power of a single place, near to the people who address her because the highest god is distant and is not approached directly. Reconstructing that pre-Christian order is itself a delicate business, because most of what survives of it was written down by the very missionaries who set out to destroy it — the interested colonial record read against its own grain — and the tidy pantheon of the schoolbooks is partly a Spanish ordering imposed on something looser. But the mountain needs no reconstruction. It is where it always was, and the reading of its body has never lapsed.

Mount Makiling seen across the University of the Philippines Los Baños, its twin summits rising above the forested lower slopes. Florante A. Cruz, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

A body, a furnace, a forest

To the tradition the mountain is not merely shaped like the diwata; it is her. Maria Makiling inhabits Makiling as her house and, in the older reading, is Makiling — the forest is her household, the game and the fruit and the flowers on the slope are hers, and the compact between the mountain and the people who use it is a compact with a resident owner. That is why the mountain is governed less by rules than by taboos, and the taboos are still spoken of on the trail. A walker may eat the mountain’s fruit where it grows, but must not carry it home; to take Maria’s fruit down into the lowland is to take what is hers, and the honest walker who finds a fruit in a pocket at the foot of the mountain is told to throw it away and to turn a garment inside out — to show the diwata, plainly, that nothing of hers is being carried off — or risk being turned around in the mist and led back up among the trees until she is satisfied. Things borrowed from her are returned or misfortune follows. The narrative core of these customs — the golden kitchenware lent for a village feast, the slices of ginger that turn to gold in a poor gleaner’s basket, the suitors and the withdrawal — belongs to the diwata’s own entry and is not retold here; what matters to the mountain is that the taboo is a property line. The forest is somebody’s, and the somebody is watching.

Under the household runs the furnace. The heat that makes Makiling a volcano has not gone out; it has only gone quiet, and it vents at the surface in the mountain’s least restful features. High on the slope steams the Mud Springs — in Tagalog Natugnos — a bowl of gray, bubbling, sulfurous mud where the ground boils gently and the smell of the deep earth hangs in the air, a reminder on any hike that the sleeping woman is warm to the touch. Hot springs seep from the mountain’s base, and to the south, on the flank toward Mount Banahaw, lies the Makiling–Banahaw geothermal area that feeds the region’s geothermal power. It was this banked heat that named the town. The settlement at the mountain’s foot was once called Mainit, “hot,” for the springs; in 1589 a Franciscan, Pedro Bautista, is said to have built public baths there, and the place was renamed Los Baños — Spanish for the baths. As Britannica records, the town takes its name directly from the thermal springs that flow from the base of Mount Makiling. The diwata’s warmth, in other words, is on the map, and has been for four hundred years: the whole town is named for the fact that the mountain is not entirely cold.

The third transparency is the youngest and the most literal. The forested slopes of Makiling are the Mount Makiling Forest Reserve, and they are administered not by a shrine or a parish but by a university — the University of the Philippines Los Baños, whose campus sits at the mountain’s foot and which runs the reserve, through its forestry center for mountain ecosystems, as a living laboratory for the study and teaching of tropical forestry. The forest is extraordinarily rich. It holds, on the account of the ASEAN Centre for Biodiversity (ASEAN Heritage Parks), well over a thousand species of plants — some 28 percent of them found nowhere but the Philippines — across a compact vertical run of habitats, from lowland dipterocarp forest through the mid-mountain to the mossy forest near the summit, together with a dense and much-studied fauna of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and insects. More than a century of collecting on these slopes, since the reserve became a forestry school’s outdoor classroom in the American period, has made Makiling one of the best-documented mountains in the tropics. The summit that hikers reach by the reserve’s main trail is known prosaically as Peak 2. On the same slope, then: a diwata’s reclining body, a geothermal vent named for its heat, and a species inventory. The mountain does not have to choose among them.

Maria, Laong Laan, and the friars’ renaming

The Christian name is itself a document of the conquest. When Miguel López de Legazpi founded the first permanent Spanish settlement at Cebu in 1565, and when Manila fell in 1571, the missionary orders that followed the soldiers set about the systematic extirpation of anito worship across the Tagalog lowlands: the carved figures broken and burned, the ancestral and nature spirits preached against as demons. Part of that work was rebranding rather than destruction — taking an indigenous holy name and pressing a Christian meaning into it. The Tagalog high-god’s own name, Bathala, was for a time enlisted as a word for the Christian God. And the diwata of the mountain, known simply as Makiling, acquired a prefix: the Spanish attached Maria to the native spirit’s name, recasting a Tagalog nature-power as a figure of the Virgin, so that the anito of the forest could be received, or at least tolerated, as something Marian. The name Maria Makiling is a small, exact monument to that strategy — a hyphen, in effect, welded between a Tagalog mountain and the Mother of God.

Underneath the new name lay an older and larger figure who did not survive the renaming intact. Scholars link Maria Makiling 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 — as the record has it — to stop the deluges, the storms, and the earthquakes that break a lowland year. She was sent, in the tradition, by Bathala himself to aid the people. A storm-stilling goddess of the calamities that threaten a whole valley is a very great power; the wistful forest-fairy of the modern tale, glimpsed in the mist and prone to romantic disappointment, is a diminished one. The distance between the two is the measure of what the colonial centuries did to her. The demotion was not accidental. Across the archipelago the friars branded the babaylan and the catalonan — the ritual authorities of the old religion, overwhelmingly women or feminized men, who spoke to precisely such powers on the community’s behalf — as witches and as aswang, monsters of the night, so that indigenous and largely female religious authority became something to be feared and shunned. When the priesthood that had addressed Dian Masalanta was made demonic, the goddess it had addressed slid down the same slope, from a deity who commands the storm to a fairy who sulks in the forest. The term aswang, and the whole apparatus of witch and demon, are the colonizers’; the office they defamed, and the goddess they demoted, were real within the world they found.

That the legend survived at all to be demoted rather than erased owes something to the mountain’s own indifference to conquest. There was no temple on Makiling to pull down, no idol to burn, no state cult to behead — only a mountain that stayed where it was and a story told at the hearth, passing under the friars’ notice as folklore where a shrine could not. And in the national period the folklore was reclaimed. José Rizal, the reformer and future national martyr, was a native of Laguna who grew up within sight of the mountain, and he fixed its legend in the national literature. His essay-tale Mariang Makiling, written in Madrid and published under his pen-name Laong Laan — old Tagalog for “ever ready” — ran in the reformist paper La Solidaridad on 31 December 1890. His Maria is a melancholy spirit, half nymph and half sylph, who watches over a favored man until he abandons her to a human marriage and then withdraws from the sight of men altogether; and in that withdrawal Rizal made her, quietly, an emblem of a native world drawing back from a Spanish one that had grown faithless to it. The diwata whom the friars had turned into a fairy became, in a colonized writer’s hands, a figure of the country itself.

Steam rising from the boiling gray mud of the Mud Springs (Natugnos) on Mount Makiling — the dormant volcano’s heat venting at the surface. Andrew Martin, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

The enchanted reserve

The mountain now carries its heritage in law and in signage. The forest reserve passed toward the university in stages: administration was placed with the University of the Philippines under Republic Act No. 3523 in 1963, and full control of the Makiling Forest Reserve was transferred to UP Los Baños by Republic Act No. 6967 in 1990, confirming the slope as a forestry-education and research reserve. The management has drawn international notice as a model: the reserve has been cited by the Food and Agriculture Organization among cases of exemplary forest management in Asia and the Pacific, a working forest studied and taught rather than merely fenced. And in 2013 Mount Makiling Forest Reserve was declared an ASEAN Heritage Park, the regional designation for protected areas of exceptional biodiversity, joining the short list of Southeast Asian sites held up as the region’s natural patrimony. The mountain that is a diwata’s body is also, on paper, an instrument of regional conservation policy.

Beside the law runs the branding. The reserve’s principal footpath to the summit, the trail up which most hikers climb Makiling, is signposted as the Mariang Makiling Trail, and the diwata’s name is used without embarrassment to market the mountain — its enchantment folded into the tourism of a day-hike out of Los Baños. There is an easy cynicism available here, and it should be resisted. The commercial use of the legend is reception, not proof and not refutation; a trail marker bearing a goddess’s name neither confirms her nor debunks her. What it registers is that the enchantment is a live cultural asset, spoken of in the present tense by the people who climb, precisely because the belief behind it was never actually extinguished. Hikers still turn a shirt inside out at the foot of the mountain. Lowland families still call Makiling enchanted — not as a quaint survival but as a plain description of a place where one behaves with a certain care. This is living, syncretic Tagalog Catholic culture, in which the diwata and the Virgin whose name was welded to hers coexist without either canceling the other, and it is no more a pagan remainder than the Santo Niño danced through Cebu each January is a pagan remainder. It is the faith as it is actually lived on this slope.

Three ways of knowing one mountain, then, and none of them displaces the others. The volcanologist reads the summit as a Holocene vent above a warm chamber; the forester reads it as a stack of habitats and a species list; the fisherman on the far shore of Laguna de Bay reads it, in the last of the light, as a woman lying down with her knee drawn up. The heat that the instruments measure is the heat that names the baths and warms the diwata’s body; the forest the university inventories is the household whose fruit a walker must not carry home; the trail the tourists climb is the trail up which Maria Makiling withdrew, in Rizal’s telling, out of the sight of men. The mountain leans southward off true, as it always has, and holds all of it at once — the survey and the story laid one over the other on a single slope, and no seam showing between them.

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