The Tagalog

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At first light on the third of June, 1571, the tide was running in the narrow channel off Tondo, where the fresh water of the Pasig meets the brackish shallows of the great bay, and a fleet of war-boats was already on the move. They were caracoas and lighter craft, low and fast, crowded with warriors from the towns of the estuary and their Kapampangan allies from the marshes to the north, and they were making for the anchored Spanish vessels of Miguel López de Legazpi. The chronicles remember the leader of that morning as Sulayman, and remember that he did not come to parley. The Spanish had a plan for exactly this. They lashed their boats together into a knot that looked, from the water, like a thing already half beaten, and let the native fleet close and surround them; then the arquebuses and the small cannon opened at short range into the massed hulls, and the channel filled with splinters and smoke. The Battle of Bangkusay was over quickly. Sulayman fell, the fleet scattered, and the last armed resistance of the river-people was broken. Three weeks later, on the twenty-fourth of June, Legazpi chartered a Spanish city on the ashes of the burned native town and called it Manila.

What the cannon settled that morning, the pen would finish over the next hundred years. The same generation of Castilians that took the estuary also took the estuary’s gods in hand — kept one, burned the rest, and turned the river-people’s healer-priestess into a monster. This is the double conquest of the Tagalog: military, and then theological, and then a quieter war over who was permitted to speak to the sacred at all.

A Tagalog couple of the ruling class, drawn for the illustrated Manila manuscript of the 1590s known as the Boxer Codex. via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The people of the river

The name says water. The oldest and most popular reading of Tagalog parses it as taga-ilog, “people of the river” — those who live along the running water — and though the historian Trinidad Pardo de Tavera argued on linguistic grounds for taga-álog, “people of the lowlands,” from an archaic word for ground that floods when it rains, both readings point to the same country. As the survey of the Tagalog people records, that country is the tidal heart of Luzon: the shores of Manila Bay, the length of the Pasig, the lake-and-river basin of Laguna de Bay, and the provinces that ring them — Bulacan, Bataan, Nueva Ecija, Aurora, Cavite, Batangas, Laguna, Rizal, and the island of Marinduque, together with the dense human core of Metro Manila. They are an Austronesian people, kin in language, cosmos, and boat-building to the wider maritime world of island Southeast Asia, and close cousins to the Visayans of the central islands and the Ifugao of the northern Cordillera — sharing with both the world of the anito and the field-spirit, yet distinct from the highland terrace-builders and the tattooed islanders in history and in tongue.

They are also, in plain numbers, the largest single ethnolinguistic group the archipelago names for itself: the 2020 census counted 28,273,666 people who identified as Tagalog, about a quarter of the national population, ahead of the Bisaya who are next. The count carries a caveat worth stating, because the arithmetic is a matter of how one draws the line — the Visayan peoples, taken all together as Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Waray and the rest, outnumber the Tagalog; counted as they count themselves, under their own separate names, the Tagalog stand first. Their tongue carried further still. On the thirtieth of December, 1937, President Manuel L. Quezon proclaimed Tagalog the basis of a national language; it was renamed the wikang pambansâ in 1939, then Pilipino in 1959, and, under the 1987 Constitution, Filipino — the shared speech of a country most of whose citizens now hold it as a first or a second language.

The written memory of this people runs deep. The oldest calendar-dated document ever found in the archipelago is a small sheet of copper, unearthed in 1987 by a laborer dredging sand near the mouth of the Lumbang River in Laguna. The Laguna Copperplate Inscription is dated to the year 822 of the Shaka era — Monday, the twenty-first of April, in the year 900 of the common reckoning — and it is a workaday thing, an official acquittance clearing a man named Namwaran and his children of a debt reckoned in gold. It is written in the Kawi script of Java, in an Old Malay laced with Sanskrit legal terms and Old Tagalog honorifics, and it is proof, in metal, that the polities of this coast were already lettered, already tied into the Indianized trade-world of the southern seas, six centuries before Legazpi. That older Kawi hand gave way, in time, to baybayin, the graceful syllabic script the Spanish found in wide vernacular use on Luzon — a Brahmic-derived abugida of seventeen basic characters, three vowels and fourteen consonants, each consonant carrying an inherent a to be redirected by a mark above or below. The Tagalog wrote it on bamboo and palm-leaf, and wrote letters and verses and tallies rather than scripture, so almost none of it outlasted the damp and the bonfires.

Beneath the writing lay the settlement. Pre-colonial Tagalog society was organized into the barangay — the word is the same as the plank-built boat, a memory of arrival by sea — a kin-based community of some thirty to a hundred households under a hereditary lord, the datu, who judged disputes, led the war-parties, and gathered tribute. The order beneath him was threefold. At the top sat the maginoo, the nobility from whom the datu himself was drawn; below them the timawa, the freemen, and the maharlika, a warrior class who owed the datu their labor and their arms; and at the base the alipin, a graded and negotiable bondage that European observers reached too quickly for “slave.” The alipin ranged from the alipin namamahay, who kept his own house and family and owed only a share of harvest and labor, to the alipin sa gigilid, bound to the lord’s own hearth. It was a hierarchy, but a permeable and debt-driven one, and it turned on obligation as much as on birth.

Bathala and the field that had to be fed

Over this world of boat and barangay presided a religion whose supreme figure kept his distance. The Tagalog named the maker of all things Bathala — Bathala Maykapál, “Bathala the Maker” — and, as the account of Tagalog religion sets out, most scholars trace the name to the Sanskrit bhattāra, “noble lord,” a word that rode the monsoon east and lodged across the Hindu-Buddhist maritime world as batara, god. He had made the sky and the earth and the first man and woman, and then withdrawn to a far bright realm, too vast and too high to be troubled with the daily business of a single life. He was not, as a rule, the one they prayed to.

The ones they prayed to were nearer. Between the remote maker and the rice field stood the anito — the souls of the dead who had become guardians, one’s own parents and grandparents grown into presences that could help or harm, and the non-ancestral spirits who dwelt in the river, the old tree, the mountain, the crossroads. These were the powers within reach, and they were reached at home. A Tagalog household kept small carved figures — likha, larauan — in which a spirit might be lodged or through which it might be honored, and the Spanish friars, appalled, reported homes holding “one hundred or two hundred” of them. Around Bathala the chroniclers arranged a wider company: Lakapati, the deity of the sown and irrigated fields, whom the Franciscan Pedro de San Buenaventura in his Vocabulario de Lengua Tagala of 1613 set down as a single figure “of man and woman together”; Buan, the maiden in the moon; Araw, the sun; Balangaw, the rainbow. How much of this was a genuine ordered pantheon and how much a Spanish habit of tidying a looser field of spirits into ranks is one of the honest uncertainties of the subject — the record that preserves the gods was kept by the men who came to replace them, and it must be read for what it saw and against what it meant to do.

The keeper of that spirit-world was the catalonan. Among the Visayans she was the babaylan, among the Ifugao the mumbaki; among the Tagalog she was the catalonan, and she was, overwhelmingly, a woman — or a man who took on a woman’s dress and role, understood not as disorder but as a kind of ritual balance, a standing between. She healed with a real herb-craft and a real knowledge of the body; she divined; she recovered strayed souls; she carried the community’s words to the anito in trance and chant, and led the rites of birth and harvest, of voyage and of death. She ranked, in her sphere, second only to the datu, and sometimes stood in for him. What passed in the closed heart of her rites belongs to her tradition and is not narrated here; that the office existed, that it was central, and that it was mostly female — this is the plain public record, and it is the hinge on which the rest of the story turns. Alongside the worship ran a strong oral literature of epic and genealogy, and, after the conversion, the pasyon — the sung Tagalog verse-life of Christ, chanted aloud through the days of Holy Week, a Christian form poured into a Tagalog vessel and still poured today.

Guilalo, the double-outrigger craft of Manila Bay, in a mid-nineteenth-century drawing — the working boats of the tidal river-and-bay country the Tagalog have always inhabited. Frank Marryat, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The morning the city changed hands

The Spanish reached the estuary in force in the spring of 1570, when Legazpi’s field commander Martín de Goiti sailed north from the Visayas and, after an uneasy standoff, stormed and burned Maynila; the ruler Sulayman withdrew, and Goiti, lacking men to hold the place, sailed away. Legazpi returned the following year with the main body — by the account of the campaign some two hundred and eighty Spaniards and around six hundred native allies — and found the towns of the bay again defiant. The reckoning came at Bangkusay. The chronicles name Sulayman as the war-leader who refused submission and led the boats against the Spanish line, though historians distinguish more than one man of that name in these years — a Rajah Sulayman of Maynila and a Tarik Sulayman of the Kapampangan town of Macabebe — and it is genuinely unsettled which of them fell in the channel and which lived on. What is not unsettled is the outcome: the fleet was broken, its leader killed, and the estuary lost. Legazpi, meanwhile, secured his flank by alliance with Lakandula, the lord of Tondo across the river, who chose accommodation over the sword. On the twenty-fourth of June, 1571, the Spanish city of Manila was founded on the Tagalog capital, and it would be the seat of a colony for the next three hundred and thirty-three years.

With the soldiers came the friars, and with the friars two opposite motions that fell on the Tagalog gods at once. The first was absorption. Because the Tagalog already possessed a word for a single supreme sky-dwelling maker of all things, the missionaries did not trouble to invent one — they reached for Bathala and pressed it into service as the native name for the Christian God the Father, keeping the one power close enough to their own truth to be kept. The old remote creator was, by a kind of theological annexation, made new. The second motion was demolition. The anito, in the friars’ theology, became demons; the carved likha were sought out, defiled, and burned; and the scattered barangays were gathered by the policy of reducción into compact towns laid out around a church, so that the sacred landscape of household shrine and spirit-haunted grove was pulled up by the roots and replanted under the bell. Idolatry, the friars called it, and the word was theirs, not a description of anything the Tagalog would have recognized in their own crowded, answerable, close-standing world.

From catalonan to aswang

The sharpest edge of the conquest fell on the woman at the center. The catalonan and her Visayan sister the babaylan were not incidental casualties of Christianization; they were its direct rivals — indigenous religious authorities, mostly female, who held exactly the office the friar meant to occupy, and who commanded a loyalty the friar needed to break. So he broke it by defamation. The clergy branded these priestesses brujas, witches, and worse. The record of the Filipino shamans preserves the vocabulary in the churchmen’s own hand — the babaylan “stigmatized by the Catholic clergy as ‘priests of the devil,’ labeled as witches, satanists, or mentally unstable and harshly persecuted” — and notes that the friars “often sought out and persecuted female shamans in particular.” The Dominican Diego Aduarte, writing of the priestesses of the north, is among those who recorded the confiscation of their sacred goods and the punishment of the women who kept them. This was strategy, not accident: to discredit the old religion, the clergy demonized the women who carried it, and made the very word for a holy office into a name for a fiend.

The name the demonization left behind is the aswang. What is today a shape-shifting monster of Philippine horror — the night-flying, self-severing eater of the unborn, the reliable villain of the cinema — was in part, at its colonial root, a slander laid on the healer-priestess: the woman who spoke to the spirits recast as the woman who preyed on the living, the midwife who guarded birth turned into the thing that steals the child from the womb. The essay From Babaylan to Aswang traces this arc — the sacred functionary made monstrous by the people replacing her — and it is a history that Filipino scholars, feminist and folklorist alike, have worked to name plainly rather than to repeat. The aswang belongs to the tradition’s own reckoning with what was done to it; the slander is not folklore fact, and it is marked here as the friars’ work, not adopted as description.

The present tense

None of this killed the sacred world; it drove it into new forms and there it is entirely alive. To file what survives under “pagan survival,” as if it were a quaint fossil, is to miss what it plainly is — a living, syncretic faith. Along the coast and in the towns the devotion to the Santo Niño, the image of the Christ Child, blends seamlessly with an older sense of the sacred image as a dwelling of power. On the flanks of Mount Banahaw, the holy mountain that rises over the Tagalog and Quezon lowlands, the mystical sects and pilgrim brotherhoods — La Ciudad Mística de Dios, Tres Personas Solo Dios, the Rizalista samahan — tend a landscape of sacred stations where the espíritu of the mountain and the Christ are addressed in one breath. The nature-guardian did not vanish either: she still keeps her mountain as Maria Makiling, the diwata whose reclining silhouette watches over the Laguna plain from Mount Makiling; and the serpent Bakunawa still names the eclipse across the archipelago. The deeper human tenure that the burials of the Tabon Caves open onto, and the granary-guardian bulul of the Ifugao Rice Terraces, belong to the wider Philippine world of which the Tagalog are one river-mouth people — kin in cosmos, distinct in history.

And the river-country became, in the end, the cradle of the nation. It was Tagalog Luzon that produced José Rizal, the novelist and physician whose 1896 execution made him a martyr, and it was in Manila’s suburbs that Andrés Bonifacio founded the Katipunan, the secret society that launched the Revolution of 1896. Bonifacio’s word for the nation he meant to free was, tellingly, Katagalugan — the Tagalog country — but he stretched the term on purpose to mean the whole archipelago and all its peoples, as the account of the Tagalog Republic records: “Tagalog” made to stand for “Filipino,” the river-people’s name offered as a name for everyone. The reach exceeded the grasp, and the country would be called by other names, but the gesture holds. Lakapati, meanwhile, the field-deity who was man and woman together, has been taken up by Filipino LGBTQ+ communities as a patron and an ancestor — a modern reclamation, deliberate and pointed, and one that runs somewhat ahead of the thin 1613 line it leans on, honest about being an act of interpretation laid across four centuries. The catalonan whom the friars tried to erase returns in the same spirit, claimed now as a foremother of Filipina feminism and of a wider babaylan revival. The people of the river kept their water. The maker withdrew, the spirits were driven underground and came back wearing new clothes, and the priestess the sixteenth century made into a monster is being called, at last, by her own name.

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