The Visayans

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Watch the feet, not the crowd. In the third week of every January the whole of Cebu City pours into the streets behind the drums, and a million dancers move the same short figure: two steps forward, one step back, forward again, a rocking shuffle that never quite lets the body get ahead of itself. The word for it is sulog — a Cebuano term for the running of water, the way a river current pushes and draws at once — and the step is meant to look like a current. Held high over the dancers is the reason for all of it: the Santo Niño, a dark, palm-high image of the Christ child in a red cape and a small crown, the oldest Christian relic in the Philippines. Ferdinand Magellan put that image into the hands of a newly baptized Cebuano queen in the spring of 1521. Forty-four years later, Spanish soldiers found it unburnt in the ashes of a torched town and took the survival for a miracle. And the step the crowd dances to it is older than the saint himself: the sinulog was danced in Cebu long before Magellan came, before the wooden anito figures, to petition the spirits of the old religion. One movement carries the whole story of the people who dance it — the tattooed Pintados, the priestesses, the conquest, and a faith that was never simply swapped for another but folded back over what it found.

The people are the Visayans, the Bisaya: the Austronesian-speaking inhabitants of the central Philippine islands, and one of the great peoples of the archipelago.

A family of peoples in the middle sea

The Visayans are not a tribe but a family. They occupy the wide belt of islands between Luzon to the north and Mindanao to the south — Cebu, Bohol, Panay, Negros, Leyte, Samar, and much of the northern and eastern coasts of Mindanao — and they are bound less by a single polity, of which the pre-colonial Visayas had none, than by a cluster of closely related Bisayan languages. Under the umbrella live distinct peoples with their own homelands and their own names: the Cebuano or Sugbuanon of Cebu and its reach; the Hiligaynon, called Ilonggo, of Panay and Negros; the Waray of Samar and Leyte; and beside them the Boholano, the Aklanon, the Capiznon, the Surigaonon, the Butuanon and others. They are the largest ethnolinguistic bloc in the country. By self-identification the Visayans numbered roughly 15.5 million in the 2020 census; counted by mother tongue, speakers of the Bisayan languages total on the order of 33 million, and Cebuano alone, with some twenty million speakers, rivals Tagalog as the most widely spoken language of the islands. They are the near kin of the Tagalog of the Luzon lowlands and of the Ifugao of the Cordillera highlands — sharing an Austronesian inheritance, a spirit-world, and a priesthood — yet each carries its own deities, its own epic, and its own history with the sea and the Spaniard.

To the Spaniards who first met them, the most arresting thing about the Visayans was written on the skin. Antonio Pigafetta, who chronicled Magellan’s voyage, and the missionaries after him called them Los Pintados, the Painted Ones, for the dense tattooing that covered the bodies of the men from ankle to throat. The tattoos — batok or batuk — were not decoration in the idle sense. They were a record and a rank. A Visayan man earned his marks in stages, and the design announced what he had done: a warrior added to his tattoos with the raids he had survived, so that a heavily marked body was a legible account of courage and standing. Women wore finer work on the hands and forearms. The tattoos were a script of the self, tied to a whole ordering of the person that reached down into the sacred. The manuscript known as the Boxer Codex, compiled around 1590 by hands in the Spanish colonial administration, illustrates the Pintados in color — an outsider’s record, interested and imperfect, but among the earliest images of the Visayans that survive.

Society along the coasts was arranged into the barangay, the settlement-and-kin-group under a datu, a chief who led in war, judged disputes, and organized the sea trade. Above the ordinary people stood a nobility, the tumao, the datu’s class; below them the timawa, the freemen and warriors who rowed the raiding boats and owed service; and beneath them the oripun, a broad dependent class that ranged from household servants to the deeply indebted, and which the Spaniards flattened, inaccurately, into the single European word esclavo. This was a maritime world. Visayan boats ran the inter-island trade in gold, wax and cloth, and reached into the wider commerce of Southeast Asia; Chinese porcelain came in along the same routes, and trade wares in Visayan graves show how far the network ran. When Magellan’s ships came up out of the Pacific in 1521, they did not stumble on an isolated people. They sailed into a busy sea that already knew how to receive strangers, treat with them, and — when the terms turned bad — kill them.

The diwata, the babaylan, and the epic three days long

The Visayan world was alive with spirit. Its powers were the diwata — the presences that dwell in the river and the balete tree, in the mountain, the field and the sea, the same order of being the Tagalog call the anito — and alongside them the umalagad, the venerated spirits of the ancestors, who did not depart the living but stayed near to guard and to be fed. Above this near company of spirits stood higher powers: Kaptan, the sky god, and Magwayan, goddess of the sea and of the dead, to whose realm the souls of the departed traveled by water. On Negros the people held Kan-Laon, the ancient one of the volcano Kanlaon, lord of time and of the harvest. These were not remote abstractions. They were the parties to a daily reciprocity — fed with offerings, consulted before planting and sailing and war, appeased when sickness announced that something in the exchange had gone wrong.

The one who managed that exchange was the babaylan, and she stands at the center of Visayan religion. Called also balian or daetan across the islands, the babaylan was most often a woman; where the office fell to a man he commonly took it up as an asog, wearing women’s dress and living in the woman’s role, for the authority itself was gendered female. She was healer, diviner, and medium at once — the one who read the cause of an illness, recovered a soul that had strayed or been seized, guided the newly dead toward Magwayan’s country, and led the community’s sacrifice, the pag-anito, in which the spirits were summoned, fed, and asked. Hers was a real authority, and it ran parallel to the datu’s rather than beneath it: the chief held the barangay in the visible world, but only the babaylan could reach the invisible one on which the visible depended. The tattoos of the Pintados belonged to this same sacred ordering, a cosmology worn on the body. What the babaylan did within the ritual itself is known only at the distance of the sources and the worshipers — the colonial chroniclers who watched from outside and disapproved, and the living practice that keeps its own counsel — and it is properly left there, described but not laid open.

The Visayans are also the keepers of one of the longest oral epics on earth. In the mountainous interior of Panay live the Suludnon, the Panay-Bukidnon, a Visayan people who kept the old chanted verse alive after the coasts had turned Christian. Their epic is the Hinilawod, “Tales from the Mouth of the Halawod River.” It sings of the goddess Alunsina — also called Laun Sina, the Unmarried One — and of her three demigod sons by the mortal ruler Datu Paubari: Labaw Donggon, the eldest and greatest, and his brothers Humadapnon and Dumalapdap, whose journeys, courtships and battles carry the chant through a whole cosmos of upper and lower worlds. In 1955 the anthropologist F. Landa Jocano, himself a son of Panay, came on the tradition while gathering folklore in the Iloilo uplands; he recorded portions from the chanter Ulang Udig, and then, in 1957, worked over some three weeks with the singer Hugan-an to set down the epic in full. What he had captured ran to roughly 29,000 verses and takes about three days to chant from end to end — a scale that places the Hinilawod in the company of the world’s longest epics, beside the Tibetan Epic of King Gesar. In 2024 the Hinilawod Epic Chant Recordings were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register for Asia and the Pacific, the first documentary heritage from outside Manila to be so honored.

None of this is a closed chapter. The diwata are still fed and still consulted in the folk healing of the countryside; the babaylan’s craft survives in the albularyo and the manghihilot, the herbalist and the healer to whom people still go; and the Suludnon chanters still carry the Hinilawod in living memory. Visayan religion did not end. It went underground, went syncretic, and in places simply continued.

Pintados of the Visayas — a tattooed Visayan noble and his wife, from the Spanish-compiled Boxer Codex of about 1590. Boxer Codex, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The founding scenes of a conquest

The Visayans hold the opening scenes of Philippine colonial history, and both of its faces — the convert and the resister — belong to them. On 7 April 1521, Magellan’s expedition reached Cebu and came to terms with its ruler, Rajah Humabon. A week later, on 14 April, the chaplain Pedro de Valderrama baptized Humabon — christened Carlos, for the emperor — his consort, christened Juana, and, in Pigafetta’s account, some eight hundred Cebuanos. To the queen Magellan gave the small image of the Christ child, the Santo Niño, as a baptismal gift. It was, on its face, a swift and bloodless conquest of souls. It did not last twenty days.

Across the narrow channel on the island of Mactan was a datu who had not submitted, named Lapulapu. When Magellan sailed over on the night of 26 April with a small landing force, meaning to punish the holdout and impress his new Christian ally, he found the beach defended in strength. On the morning of 27 April 1521, in the shallows off Mactan, Lapulapu’s warriors — the Battle of Mactan puts them in the many hundreds against a few dozen Europeans caught in the surf — overwhelmed the Spaniards and cut Magellan down at the water’s edge. It is the first recorded defeat of Europeans by a native Philippine force, and Lapulapu is honored today as an early hero of the country, his name on a city, a fish, and a hundred monuments. The circumnavigation limped on without its captain; the Visayans had killed the man who joined the two halves of the world by sea.

Permanent conquest came a generation later. In 1565 Miguel López de Legazpi crossed the Pacific with orders to settle the islands, and he began where Magellan had. In March 1565, on Bohol, he sealed a sandugo — a blood compact, the Visayan rite of alliance in which two men drew their own blood, mixed it with wine, and drank, so becoming of “one blood” — with the Boholano chief Datu Sikatuna. The Sandugo is remembered as the first treaty of friendship between Spaniard and Filipino, and it fixed the pattern of the whole enterprise: alliance where possible, force where not. Legazpi then took Cebu and founded there the first permanent Spanish settlement in the archipelago. The town had been abandoned and burned before he entered it, and in the ashes, on 28 April 1565, a sailor named Juan Camus found the Santo Niño — Magellan’s image of 1521 — intact in its little pine box. The Spaniards read the unburnt image as a sign that the child Jesus had waited out the intervening years for their return. From that discovery grew the devotion that fills Cebu’s streets to this day.

The god absorbed, the priestess demonized

Conquest brought a campaign against the old religion, and it worked along two lines that pulled in opposite directions. The first was absorption. When the friars found that the Visayans and their neighbors already knew a high creator above the crowd of spirits, they did not so much destroy that idea as annex it: the name and role of a supreme sky-god could be poured into the Christian God with little friction — the move made most plainly among the Tagalog, whose Bathala the missionaries simply adopted as a word for God. The top of the old order was, in effect, promoted into the new one.

The bottom of it was demonized. The near spirits — the diwata and the anito, the powers a household actually lived with — were recast by the friars as demons; the carved figures that housed them were gathered and burned; and the pag-anito was forbidden as devil-worship. The hardest thread runs through the babaylan. The most powerful religious figure of the old world was a woman, and the incoming church could neither ordain her nor tolerate her. So the friars branded her: the babaylan and her Tagalog counterpart the catalonan were denounced as brujas and witches and folded into the growing figure of the aswang — the night-flying, child-eating monster of the barrios. A theory long current in Philippine folklore studies, surveyed in the essay “From Babaylan to Aswang?”, reads the female viscera-sucker as in part the babaylan under colonial slander: the community’s most powerful woman reimagined as its most monstrous. This is a reading of the record, not a fact preserved in it, and the colonial sources are too thin to prove a clean line from priestess to monster; but the shape is hard to miss. To demonize the aswang was, in some measure, to demonize a real and largely female religious authority — and that recasting is a colonial act to be named, never a judgment to be adopted. Whatever else it is, the aswang is a wound the conquest left.

The Visayans did not take it quietly, and their resistance came, fittingly, through the priesthood. In 1621 a Boholano babaylan named Tamblot called his people back to the diwata, promising that the spirits would turn Spanish weapons aside and that the land itself would feed the faithful — vines running with wine, leaves becoming fish and cloth. Thousands rose with him. By the first days of 1622 a force out of Cebu, some fifty Spaniards and a thousand allied natives, had broken the revolt in about two weeks of fighting. Four decades later, around 1663, a babaylan named Tapar led a nativist rising in Oton on Panay, founding a syncretic faith that took the Christian names and offices and set native ones in their place, with himself at its head; the Spanish curate who came to argue the people back was killed, the church was burned, and Tapar and his leaders were hunted down and killed in the mountains. These were not banditry. They were the old religion in arms, led by the very office the friars had set out to destroy.

One dance, folded over itself

The outcome was neither erasure nor survival but a fusing of the two. The Visayas today are overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, better than nine in ten, and their Catholicism is the living, syncretic faith of a people who did not so much abandon the old world as build the new one on top of it, load-bearing. Its great public expression is the devotion to the Santo Niño, the child Magellan gave and Camus found — and its festival is the Sinulog. The dance is genuinely old: the coastal Cebuanos danced the sinulog to their anito long before 1521, and when the image of the child arrived, the step was simply carried over to him, the same current-motion offered now to a new lord of the household. The Sinulog as a great civic parade is recent — organized in 1980 by David S. Odilao Jr., a regional sports and youth official, who dressed a group of students and taught them the step to the drums — but the gesture inside it reaches back past the saint. Its kin light up the same islands each January: the Ati-Atihan of Aklan, the oldest of them, and the Dinagyang of Iloilo, both likewise dancing the Santo Niño.

And the demonized layer is being turned back over as well. The aswang has taken on a commercial afterlife as the reigning monster of Philippine horror cinema, split at the waist for the camera as she once was for the storyteller at a wake. But beneath that, scholars, feminists and artists across the Visayas and the diaspora increasingly reclaim the babaylan — not as devil or witch but as what she was, a healer and leader and keeper of the spirit-world, and a symbol of a women’s and asog’s spiritual authority that the colonial church could not abide and so tried to bury under a monster’s name.

Which returns the whole story to the feet in the January street. Two steps toward the child raised overhead, and one step back toward the diwata and the wooden figures the step was first made for; forward into the imported faith, back into the older one it never fully left; a current that pushes and draws at once. The Visayans dance their history exactly, and have been dancing it, in one form or another, far longer than there has been a saint to dance it to.

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