A Living Tradition of Southeast Asia

In 1521, Ferdinand Magellan's fleet made landfall on the island of Homonhon in the eastern Visayas, and the chaplain Antonio Pigafetta recorded the first European observation of Philippine spiritual life. He described priests who "wore their hair reaching to the waist" and entered states of ecstatic trance, communicating with beings the Spanish would never fully understand. The people called these intermediaries babaylan — the ones who stood between the visible world and the invisible, between the living and the dead, between the community and the forces that sustained it.

Within fifty years, the Spanish friars had identified the babaylan as their primary rival. The colonial project required not merely political submission but spiritual replacement — the anito and diwata of the archipelago had to yield to the saints and angels of the Church. The babaylan were denounced as witches, their sacred objects burned, their rituals driven underground. And yet, five centuries later, the babaylan never died. In highland communities across the Cordillera and Mindanao, they continued to heal, to mediate, to maintain the covenant between the human world and the spirit world. In lowland Catholic Philippines, the anito wore the faces of saints and the diwata slipped into the mantles of the Virgin. And now, in Manila and Los Angeles and Toronto, a new generation of Filipinos is asking the question that colonialism tried to bury: what did we believe before they told us what to believe?

I. The Name and the Tradition

There is no single word for what this tradition is, and that absence is itself meaningful.

"Philippine indigenous religion" is the most neutral scholarly term — preferred by anthropologists like F. Landa Jocano and historians like William Henry Scott because it makes no claim about unity where diversity is the fundamental fact. The Philippines comprises over seven thousand islands and more than one hundred and eighty distinct ethnolinguistic groups, each with its own spiritual vocabulary, its own cosmology, its own relationship with the invisible world. What the Tagalog call anito, the Visayan call diwata, the Ilocano call al-alia, the Ifugao call bulul. What the lowland Filipino experiences as folk Catholicism, the highland Igorot experiences as living ceremonial tradition. There is no pope, no scripture, no creed. There is a family of practices.

"Anitism" is the academic term coined by Zeus Salazar in the 1990s, derived from anito — the Tagalog word for ancestral and nature spirits. Salazar's project was explicitly decolonial: by naming the indigenous religious system, he gave it the same categorical dignity that "Buddhism," "Hinduism," and "Islam" enjoy. The term has been adopted by some scholars and activists, resisted by others who argue that no single term should flatten the archipelago's diversity, and embraced by parts of the babaylan revival movement as a way to name what was nearly erased. This profile uses "Philippine indigenous religion" as the primary term and "Anitism" as the scholarly shorthand, acknowledging the debate.

What holds the family together across its diversity is a shared Austronesian substrate: the conviction that the world is populated by spirits — the dead who have not departed, the beings who inhabit mountains and rivers and trees and stones, the forces that must be negotiated, fed, thanked, and occasionally feared. The intermediary who conducts this negotiation — the babaylan — is the tradition's most distinctive and most endangered figure.

II. The Archipelago — Geography and Spiritual Diversity

The Philippines is one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse nations on Earth. Its geography — seven thousand six hundred and forty-one islands spread across one thousand eight hundred and fifty kilometers from north to south — produced a spiritual landscape of extraordinary variety.

The Cordillera highlands of northern Luzon are home to the Igorot peoples — Ifugao, Bontoc, Kalinga, Kankanaey, Ibaloi, and others — whose ceremonial traditions survived colonialism more intact than anywhere else in the archipelago, partly because the Spanish never fully conquered the mountains. The Ifugao rice terraces, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, are not merely agricultural engineering but a landscape shaped by religious practice: the terraces are maintained through rituals addressed to the bulul (rice granary guardians), and the munhapiy (indigenous priest) presides over a ceremonial calendar tied to the agricultural cycle.

Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago hold the Lumad peoples — T'boli, Manobo, Bagobo, B'laan, Subanen, and dozens of others — whose traditions exist in complex relation to both Islam (which entered the southern Philippines centuries before Christianity) and an older animist substrate. The T'boli dreamweavers of Lake Sebu produce t'nalak cloth from patterns received in dreams, and the designs are understood as gifts from the spirit Fu Dalu. The textile is scripture.

The Visayan islands — Cebu, Panay, Leyte, Samar — were the first sites of intensive Spanish colonization and the first to undergo the synthesis that would produce lowland folk Catholicism. But the pre-colonial Visayan religion, reconstructed from Spanish-era sources, was elaborate: a ranked pantheon of diwata, a complex afterlife geography, and a class of babaylan who wielded social authority equal to or greater than the political datu.

The Mangyan peoples of Mindoro island maintain the Hanunuo script — one of the few pre-colonial Philippine scripts still in active use — and carve love poems (ambahan) on bamboo tubes in a syllabary descended from the Indic Brahmi script. The Tagbanwa of Palawan similarly preserve their ancestral script and the pagdiwata ceremony, during which the babaylan drinks rice wine and enters a trance to communicate with the spirits.

This diversity means that any generalizing statement about "Philippine indigenous religion" is, at best, a statement about tendencies and family resemblances. The following sections describe the structural features that recur across traditions, not a unified theology.

III. The Spirits — Anito, Diwata, and the Supreme Being

The spirit world in Philippine indigenous religion is not a separate realm above or beyond the visible world. It is woven into it. Spirits are in the trees, the rivers, the anthills, the crossroads, the old house, the rice field, the darkness beneath the floor. The boundary between the human world and the spirit world is not a wall but a membrane — permeable, negotiable, and constantly traversed.

Anito (also anitu, in various Austronesian cognates) is the broadest category: the spirits of the dead, nature spirits, and supernatural beings generally. In Tagalog usage, the anito include the departed ancestors who continue to affect the lives of their descendants, the environmental spirits who inhabit specific locations, and the beings of power whose favor must be maintained. The word carries no inherent moral valence — an anito can be benevolent, indifferent, or dangerous depending on its nature and the quality of the relationship maintained with it. The practice of feeding the anito — leaving rice, betel nut, tobacco, or other offerings at designated places — is one of the most persistent features of Philippine spiritual life, surviving colonialism essentially intact. The common Filipino practice of saying "tabi-tabi po" (excuse me, with respect) when passing through forested areas, anthills, or other spirit-inhabited spaces is an anito practice in vernacular form.

Diwata (from the Sanskrit devata, "deity") entered Philippine languages through centuries of Hindu-Buddhist cultural contact before the arrival of Spain. In many Philippine traditions, diwata refers specifically to nature spirits of particular beauty and power — the guardians of forests, mountains, and bodies of water. In Visayan traditions, the diwata include ranked beings of considerable cosmological importance. Maria Makiling, the diwata of Mount Makiling in Laguna, is perhaps the most famous — a beautiful woman who appears to travelers and punishes those who abuse the mountain's resources. She was never a Catholic saint, but she survived Catholicism by becoming a folk figure, a legend "everyone knows" whose reality is neither affirmed nor denied.

The question of a supreme being is complex and contested. Many Philippine groups have a concept of a highest deity: Bathala (Tagalog, from Sanskrit Bhattara), Kabunian (Igorot), Magbabaya (Bukidnon), Maguayan (Sulod). Whether these represent genuine pre-colonial monotheism or reflect post-contact theological reinterpretation is debated among scholars. Jocano argued for a genuine pre-colonial concept of a supreme creator; Salazar was more cautious, noting that colonial-era sources are inevitably shaped by the friars' monotheistic framework. What is clear is that even where a supreme being is recognized, the practical focus of religious life is on the intermediary spirits — the anito and diwata with whom humans have direct and ongoing relationships. The Supreme Being created the world and generally does not micromanage it. The anito, by contrast, are paying attention.

IV. The Babaylan — The Spiritual Intermediary

The babaylan is the living heart of Philippine indigenous religion. Without the babaylan, the tradition is a collection of beliefs. With the babaylan, it is a practice.

The term babaylan (sometimes baylan, balian, or catalonan in different regional variants) refers to the ritual specialist who mediates between the human community and the spirit world. The babaylan heals the sick, presides over agricultural ceremonies, leads funerary rites, communicates with the dead, and maintains the spiritual health of the community. In pre-colonial Philippine society, the babaylan held social authority parallel to the datu (political chief) — the datu governed secular affairs, the babaylan governed the sacred. This dual structure is a common Austronesian pattern, found across Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

What makes the Philippine babaylan tradition distinctive — and what made it a primary target of Spanish suppression — is its gender fluidity. While the majority of babaylan were women, the role was not restricted to women. Men who practiced as babaylan often (though not always) adopted feminine dress and social presentation. The Spanish called them asog (or bayog, bayoguin) — a category that scholars now recognize as a pre-colonial third gender, analogous to the Polynesian fa'afafine, the Thai kathoey, or the South Asian hijra. The asog babaylan dressed in women's clothing, performed women's social roles, and were understood to possess particular spiritual power precisely because of their gender liminality — standing between male and female as they stood between the visible and invisible worlds.

The Spanish friars targeted the babaylan on both counts: the babaylan's spiritual authority rivaled the priest's, and the asog's gender presentation contradicted Christian norms. The campaign against the babaylan was systematic. Sacred objects were confiscated and burned. Babaylan were denounced from the pulpit as servants of the devil. The reduccion policy — concentrating scattered communities into church towns — physically separated communities from the sacred sites where the anito were fed and the ceremonies performed. Over three centuries, the public role of the babaylan was largely destroyed in the lowlands. But largely is not completely.

The babaylan survived in three forms: in the highlands, where colonial control was weak and ceremonial traditions continued openly; in the lowlands, where the babaylan's functions were absorbed by the albularyo (folk healer) and the faith healer, figures who practice within a nominally Catholic framework but whose methods — herbal medicine, prayer formulas, trance states, spirit communication — descend directly from the babaylan tradition; and in the revolutionary tradition, where babaylan-led uprisings punctuated the entire colonial period. The 1622 Bancao Revolt in Leyte, the 1663 Tapar Revolt in Panay (led by a babaylan named Tapar who declared himself the god of the new age), the Dagohoy Rebellion in Bohol (1744–1829, the longest revolt in Philippine history), and the Dios-Dios and Pulahanes movements of the late nineteenth century were all led or inspired by babaylan figures who combined indigenous spiritual authority with anti-colonial resistance. The babaylan was not merely a healer. She was a revolutionary.

V. The Sacred — Ritual, Offering, and Communication

Philippine indigenous ritual is fundamentally transactional, and this is not a pejorative. The relationship between humans and spirits is understood as a relationship of reciprocity — the spirits provide protection, fertility, health, and guidance; the humans provide attention, offerings, and ceremony. Neglect brings consequences. Respect is rewarded. The system operates on mutual obligation, not worship in the Western sense.

Offerings (atang in Tagalog, paganito in various terms) are the most basic form of spiritual maintenance. Rice, betel nut (buyo), tobacco, chicken, pig, rice wine (basi or tapuy) — these are presented to the anito at designated locations: beneath old trees, at crossroads, on altars in the home, at the rice granary, at the boundaries of cultivated land. The offering is simultaneously feeding the spirits and acknowledging them — the worst thing a human can do is ignore the anito. Sickness, crop failure, accident, and misfortune are frequently interpreted as the consequence of a broken relationship with a neglected spirit.

Healing rituals are the babaylan's primary public function. Illness in indigenous Philippine understanding is not purely biological — it can be caused by spirit intrusion, soul loss, sorcery, or the anger of a neglected anito. The babaylan diagnoses the spiritual cause through divination (sometimes using betel nut, sometimes through trance) and prescribes the appropriate remedy, which may involve offerings, prayers, herbal medicine, or a full ceremony to appease the offended spirit. This framework has not disappeared. The albularyo (folk healer) in contemporary Philippine society continues this diagnostic tradition, often combining herbal remedies with Catholic prayers and indigenous spirit-address in a single healing session.

Funerary practices are among the most elaborate and persistent features of Philippine indigenous religion. The dead do not simply leave. They must be properly sent. In Ifugao tradition, the bogwa ceremony involves days of rituals to guide the spirit of the deceased to the afterlife. In many lowland traditions, the wake itself — the extended gathering around the body, the gambling, the storytelling, the keeping of the dead company — carries pre-colonial resonances. The nine-day prayer novena that follows death in Catholic Filipino practice is structurally identical to pre-colonial mourning periods.

Agricultural ceremonies tie the spiritual calendar to the rice cycle. Planting, transplanting, and harvesting each have their ceremonies. The Ifugao punnuk (tug-of-war) at harvest, the Bontoc begnas (rest day and purification), the Kalinga pattong (peace pact ceremony) — these are not folklore performances but living practices that continue to structure community life in highland areas. The rice is not merely food. It is the gift of the spirits, and the gift must be reciprocated.

VI. The Collision — Four Centuries of Colonialism

The Spanish colonization of the Philippines, beginning with Magellan's arrival in 1521 and Legaspi's permanent settlement in 1565, was simultaneously a political conquest and a religious campaign. The two were inseparable. The patronato real — the arrangement by which the Spanish Crown funded the Church in exchange for the right to direct missionary activity — meant that every soldier was accompanied by a friar, and every friar was backed by a soldier.

The process of conversion was called the reduccion — literally, "reduction." Scattered barangay communities were concentrated into church towns under the bell tower. The physical reorganization was a spiritual reorganization: it separated communities from the sacred sites where the anito were fed, placed the church at the center of community life, and put the friar in the position previously held by the babaylan. The baptismal record replaced the oral genealogy. The saint's feast day replaced the agricultural ceremony. The confession replaced the divination.

The friars' own records — the Augustinian, Franciscan, Dominican, and Jesuit chronicles — are simultaneously the most valuable source for pre-colonial Philippine religion and the most compromised. They describe elaborate rituals, complex cosmologies, and powerful spiritual specialists, but they describe them as idolatry, superstition, and demonic activity. Father Juan de Plasencia's "Customs of the Tagalogs" (c. 1589) is the single most detailed account of pre-colonial Tagalog spiritual practice, but it was written as an administrative guide for the purpose of more efficient conversion. Father Francisco Ignacio Alcina's "History of the Visayan Islands" (1668) describes Visayan cosmology with genuine ethnographic curiosity, but his theological framework — that the diwata are demons and the babaylan their servants — shapes every observation.

The American colonial period (1898–1946) added a second layer: Protestant missionaries, secular public education, and an English-language framework that further displaced indigenous knowledge systems. The Americans brought neither the friars' theological ambition nor their ethnographic curiosity; they brought a bureaucratic modernity that rendered indigenous religion invisible by treating it as irrelevant rather than dangerous.

The conversion was never complete. In the lowlands, what emerged was not the replacement of one religion by another but a synthesis — a complex negotiation in which indigenous practices were absorbed into Catholic forms, Catholic saints were mapped onto pre-existing spiritual beings, and the resulting folk Catholicism was neither fully Catholic nor fully indigenous but something new, dynamic, and remarkably resilient. In the highlands, the conversion often simply did not happen.

VII. The Synthesis — Folk Catholicism as Survival

The folk Catholicism of the Philippines is one of the most elaborate and creative religious syntheses in the world, and it is a survival strategy, not a contamination.

The Santo Nino — the Child Jesus of Cebu, whose original wooden figure was given by Magellan to Queen Juana in 1521 and rediscovered by Legaspi's soldiers in 1565 — is the most beloved religious image in the Philippines. Millions process through the streets of Cebu every January for the Sinulog festival. But the Santo Nino's function in Filipino religious life is not that of the infant Christ in European Catholicism. The Santo Nino is a guardian, a luck-bringer, a household protector — functions that mirror the anito-guardian of pre-colonial practice. The figure is bathed, dressed in elaborate miniature costumes, and spoken to in terms of intimate personal relationship. The devotion is Catholic in form and Austronesian in function.

The pasyon — the verse narrative of Christ's Passion, Death, and Resurrection — has been the most widely read and performed text in Philippine literary history since the eighteenth century. Communities chant it continuously during Holy Week, often for days. The pasyon is thoroughly Catholic in content, but the act of communal chanting, the marathon duration, and the spiritual efficacy attributed to the performance itself recall the pre-colonial practice of extended ritual chanting for community protection.

The albularyo (folk healer), the manghihilot (traditional midwife and massage healer), and the various regional faith healers who practice throughout the Philippines occupy the social niche of the babaylan. They diagnose and heal, they communicate with the spirit world, they use herbal medicine alongside prayer. Their prayers are Catholic — but the framework of diagnosis (spirit intrusion, soul displacement, sorcery) is indigenous. The albularyo knows which saint to invoke for which condition, but she also knows which tree has the diwata and which crossroad should not be passed at noon.

The most striking synthesis is in the fiesta — the patron saint's feast day that is the social apex of every Philippine municipality. The fiesta involves Mass, procession, and prayer, but also feasting, dancing, reunion, and an expenditure of resources that makes no economic sense and makes perfect cultural sense. The fiesta is the Catholic feast day performing the social function of the pre-colonial agricultural ceremony: a moment when the community comes together, the spiritual forces are honored, and the abundance of the community is displayed and shared.

VIII. The Highlands — Where the Old Ways Never Died

In the Cordillera mountains of northern Luzon and the interior highlands of Mindanao, indigenous spiritual traditions continued essentially unbroken because the colonial apparatus never fully reached them.

The Ifugao of northern Luzon maintain one of the most elaborate indigenous ritual traditions in Southeast Asia. The mumbaki (ritual specialist) presides over a ceremonial cycle tied to the rice terraces — the same terraces that have been cultivated for approximately two thousand years. The baki ceremonies address the hundreds of named deities and spirits (the Ifugao pantheon is one of the most detailed in the Austronesian world) and can last days. The bulul — carved wooden figures placed in rice granaries as guardians — are not mere decoration but spiritually charged presences that require offerings and ceremony. The hudhud (chanted epic narratives, a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage) are performed during harvest and funerary occasions by women chanters. The Ifugao system is a working religious tradition, not a relic.

The Lumad peoples of Mindanao — an umbrella term for the non-Muslim, non-Christian indigenous peoples of the island — face perhaps the most severe existential pressure of any indigenous community in the Philippines. The T'boli of South Cotabato, the Manobo of the Agusan-Surigao region, the Subanen of the Zamboanga Peninsula — these communities maintain ceremonial traditions, oral epics (the T'boli Tudbulul, the Manobo Ulahingan), and babaylan lineages, but they are under siege from multiple directions: mining companies seeking access to ancestral domains, military operations against insurgent groups that use indigenous territory, and evangelical missionaries. The Lumad school closures and the deaths of Lumad leaders represent an ongoing crisis that is inseparable from the spiritual traditions at stake — the land being contested is not merely territory but the site of ceremonies, the home of spirits, the place where the community's relationship with the invisible world is maintained.

The Mangyan of Mindoro maintain the ambahan — poetic verses carved on bamboo in the Hanunuo script, one of the very few pre-colonial Philippine scripts still in active use. The ambahan tradition is simultaneously literary and spiritual — the poems address themes of love, mortality, and social ethics, and the act of carving them on bamboo is a ritual as well as an artistic practice.

These highland traditions are not frozen in time. They are living, changing, adapting. The Ifugao who performs baki ceremonies may also attend Catholic Mass on Sunday. The T'boli dreamweaver who receives t'nalak patterns from Fu Dalu may sell her textiles to Manila galleries. The distinction between "traditional" and "modern" is a colonial imposition; what exists is a complex, ongoing negotiation between inherited practice and contemporary reality.

IX. The Contemporary — Revival, Resistance, and the Babaylan Movement

The most remarkable development in Philippine indigenous religion in the twenty-first century is the babaylan revival — a movement that began in academic and activist circles and has grown into a significant cultural phenomenon, especially in the Filipino diaspora.

The movement draws on multiple streams. The academic stream includes scholars like Virgilio Enriquez (the founder of Sikolohiyang Pilipino, Filipino Psychology) and Zeus Salazar (the proponent of Pantayong Pananaw, a "from us, for us" approach to Philippine studies) who argued that the indigenous knowledge systems of the Philippines were systematically devalued by colonial education and that genuine intellectual decolonization required recovering them. The artistic stream includes Grace Nono, a singer and scholar who has spent decades documenting and performing indigenous Philippine music, and whose work explicitly frames the recovery of indigenous spiritual practice as a creative and political act. The activist stream connects to the broader indigenous peoples' rights movement, especially the struggle for ancestral domain rights under the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA) of 1997.

In the Filipino-American diaspora — approximately four million people — the babaylan revival takes particular urgency. Displaced from the land where the anito dwell, diaspora Filipinos who seek indigenous spiritual practice face the question of what can travel. The anito are tied to specific places — a mountain, a river, a particular tree. The ceremonies are tied to specific landscapes. What survives the crossing? The babaylan revival's answer, tentatively, is that what travels is the practice of attending — the discipline of listening for the spirits, of maintaining reciprocal relationships with the seen and unseen, of remembering that the world is populated and responsive. Whether this constitutes a genuine continuation of the tradition or a sympathetic reconstruction is honestly debated within the movement itself.

The Indigenous Peoples Rights Act (IPRA, Republic Act 8371, 1997) is the most significant legal recognition of indigenous rights in Philippine history. It recognizes ancestral domain, mandates free prior and informed consent for development projects on indigenous land, and protects the right to cultural integrity, including spiritual practices. In practice, enforcement is uneven — mining companies continue to encroach on ancestral domains, and the administrative process for ancestral domain claims is slow. But the law exists, and its existence marks a shift: the Philippine state, at least in principle, recognizes that indigenous spiritual traditions are not folklore to be preserved in museums but living practices attached to living communities attached to specific land.

The tension between revival and romanticization is real. The urban Filipino who gets a Baybayin tattoo and calls herself a "modern babaylan" is not the same as the Palawan babaylan who performs pagdiwata for her community. The babaylan revival's most honest practitioners acknowledge this gap and sit with it rather than closing it prematurely. The tradition was wounded. The wound is real. The healing is incomplete and may always be.

X. The Aquarian Question

Philippine indigenous religion is pre-Aquarian in origin — its roots are Austronesian, predating the Western esoteric revival by millennia. But its contemporary expression exists squarely within the Aquarian frame: a tradition that was suppressed by colonialism, survived through synthesis and resistance, and is now being consciously recovered and reimagined by communities seeking spiritual alternatives to the imposed religion of their colonizers.

The global indigenous resurgence — from Aboriginal Australian land rights to Native American water protectors to Maori cultural revival — provides the context. The Philippine babaylan revival is part of this wave: a movement that says the old ways were not superstition but knowledge, that the babaylan was not a witch but a healer, that the anito were not demons but ancestors.

What distinguishes the Philippine case is the depth of the synthesis. Four centuries of Catholicism did not replace indigenous religion — they wove into it, producing a folk Catholicism so thorough that untangling the strands is nearly impossible and may not even be desirable. The grandmother who says the rosary and leaves rice for the anito at the foot of the old balete tree is not confused. She is practicing the tradition as it actually exists — a tradition that has been both Catholic and Austronesian for centuries, and whose integrity lies not in purity but in persistence.

The survival medium is the babaylan — the human body trained to mediate between worlds. Without the babaylan, the spirits still exist but the conversation goes silent. The tradition survives in the person of the healer, the chanter, the dreamer, the one who listens. This is the sixteenth survival medium in the archive's typology: not text, not institution, not law, not land, but the intermediary — the trained human body that carries the practice. When the babaylan dies and no apprentice has been trained, the tradition dies with her. When the babaylan trains an apprentice, the tradition lives. The vulnerability and the resilience are the same thing.

XI. The Scholars

F. Landa Jocano (1930–2013), the most influential Filipino anthropologist of the twentieth century, documented lowland Philippine mythology and argued for a genuine pre-colonial concept of a supreme being. His Philippine Mythology (1969) and Folk Medicine in a Philippine Municipality (1973) remain essential.

William Henry Scott (1921–1993), an American-born historian who became a Filipino citizen, devoted decades to reconstructing pre-colonial Philippine society from Spanish-era documents. His Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society (1994) is the definitive work on pre-colonial social and spiritual structures.

Zeus Salazar (b. 1936), the founder of the Pantayong Pananaw school, coined the term "Anitism" and argued for a systematic understanding of indigenous Philippine religion as a coherent religious tradition rather than a collection of superstitions.

Carolyn Brewer's Shamanism, Catholicism and Gender Relations in Colonial Philippines, 1521-1685 (2004) is the most detailed study of the babaylan's encounter with Spanish colonialism, with particular attention to the asog and the gender dynamics of conversion.

Grace Nono is simultaneously a performer, scholar, and activist whose decades of fieldwork documenting indigenous Philippine music and spiritual practice have made her the most prominent voice of the babaylan revival.

Prospero Covar (1934–2015) studied the babaylan tradition and its contemporary survivals, arguing that the albularyo is the direct descendant of the pre-colonial spiritual specialist.

Francisco Demetrio (1928–2007), a Jesuit anthropologist, compiled the most comprehensive collection of Philippine myths and legends in his Encyclopedia of Philippine Folk Beliefs and Customs (1991).

Among indigenous scholars and practitioners: Datu Migketay Victorino Saway (Talaandig, Bukidnon) has documented his own community's ceremonial traditions from within; Leny Mendoza Strobel has written extensively on decolonization and Filipino identity from the diaspora, including A Book of Her Own: Words and Images to Honor the Babaylan (2010).

The study of Philippine indigenous religion is itself a decolonial act. For centuries, the primary sources were the friars' accounts — written to document the enemy. The recovery of indigenous perspectives — through oral history, indigenous scholarship, and community-based documentation — is ongoing and incomplete. The archive honors what has been recovered and acknowledges what remains beyond reach.

Colophon

This profile was written by Isang, the eighth Living Traditions Researcher of the New Tianmu Anglican Church, in March 2026, drawing on the scholarly work of Jocano, Scott, Salazar, Brewer, Nono, Covar, Demetrio, Strobel, and the accumulated field research of Filipino and international anthropologists. It is a scholarly introduction to publicly available knowledge about Philippine indigenous religious traditions. The most important aspects of these traditions — the specific ceremonies, the restricted knowledge, the sacred songs, and the community-specific practices — belong to their communities and are not reproduced here.

The babaylan's survival is the tradition's survival. The intermediary carries what the archive cannot.

Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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