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Filipino superstitions and taboos

Modern education aside, Filipinos may still attend grueling rituals or hire people with magic powers as guides to cure a range of ills.

Philippine folk superstitions reveal a sense of fatalism and fear of the unknown, and the sometimes macabre rituals permeate through to the everyday culture of the islands. 

Childbirth

Some believe that a pregnant woman should shun soft drinks as they might overly increase the size of the fetus and that she should not stand by doors, which could cause a difficult labor. When the baby is due, a spiritual doctor may recite prayers to keep spirits away during labor and ensure the child’s obedience. After birth, the expelled placenta may be buried along with pen and paper to make the baby smart. And the baby’s first feces should be massaged onto its infant gums like toothpaste to ensure strong teeth. The litany of Filipino childbirth superstitions goes on and on.

While modern Filipinos may not admit belief in them, most are inclined to follow some as a safety measure.

The subok

It could be any Good Friday in the lush hills of lakeside Tanay town in Rizal Province. A gathering of men, hollow-eyed from fasting and overnight meditation, shuffle their feet around the courtyard of an old church. Creaking and groaning, a flower-decked carroza float emerges from the dim interiors, carrying the Santo Sepulcro, a wooden statue of the dead Christ. There is a rush toward it, then a scramble to insert objects in the folds of the robes, under the feet, in the hands.

The image – now loaded with handkerchiefs, bronze medals, pieces of paper inscribed with Latin phrases, and images of Christ and the Virgin Mary, pebbles, bones, prayer books, crucifixes, catfish eyes – is encircled by a chain of linked hands.

A man, in his forties, walks forward. He sharpens a long bolo knife in deliberate motions. Then he suddenly starts hacking away at his stretched left arm. Neither cuts nor blood appear. Then weapons are passed around – horse-hair whips, revolvers, more bolo. Throughout the rest of Good Friday afternoon and Holy Saturday, each person will test the efficacy of his own talisman – asking to be shot at, whipped or stabbed. Some get hurt. Others leave the subok unscathed, exuding a profound solemnity.

The magbabarang

On the island of Siquijor the magbabarang or sorcerer collects special bees, beetles, and centipedes (collectively called barang), chosen because they all have an extra leg. They’re moved into a bamboo tube for Fridays, when the magbabarang performs a ritual from which his name derives. He takes a list of names and addresses of supposed wrong-doers, writes them on separate pieces of paper, and puts them in the bamboo tube. If the papers have been torn to shreds when he opens the tube, it means the insects are willing to attack the owners of the names.

The magbabarang proceeds to tie a white string on the extra legs of his assistants. He then lets them loose, with instructions to lodge themselves inside the victim’s body, bite his internal organs and wreak havoc in his system until he dies. Then they go back to their master. If the strings are red with blood, the hex was successful. If clean, the victim was innocent after all and thus was able to resist the magic.

The bolo-bolo

Bolo-bolo magic healers in Siquijor swallow water, gargle, and spit it out a window. Then they open their mouths wide to show that they’re empty. After praying in a low murmur, they dip one end of a bamboo tube into the glass, stick a reed into their mouths and blow. Soon the water darkens and worms wriggle in the glass. The three-minute ritual is claimed to cure illnesses, and bolo-bolos believe it’s sacrilegious to accept pay for service.

Psychic surgery

Most of what is known in the West today, both good and bad, about the gray areas of the occult in the Philippines stems from the discovery of Pangasinan psychic surgery in the late 1940s by a few Americans. The first major healer encountered by the Americans was Eleuterio Terte. His method was a simple laying on of hands, similar to the practice of any number of spiritual healers in Brazil, Hawaii, England, and the southern United States.

Shortly after World War II, Terte is said to have noticed bodies opening spontaneously under his hands. By the mid-1960s, when Harold Sherman, an American researcher, came to document psychic surgery, Terte had already trained 14 of the 30 surgeons now known the world over as Filipino faith healers.

Diagnosis follows meditation and before an operation. During surgery, with short, cavalier slashes of the finger 50cm (18ins) away from the diseased part, bodies appear to open up without a single knife stroke. Then after a few gropes, turns, pulls, and twists, the healer pulls out a supposed organ, or an eyeball, quickly dabs alcohol-soaked cotton on blood-drenched areas and finally closes the cut.

The body parts may be deposited in bottles of alcohol, which then become the much-prized booty of visiting scientists and the scientific minded. Laboratory examinations show the contents either to be genuine, diseased human tissue, or to be animal parts. Some may have vanished through evaporation, theft, or chemical breakdown.

A recent theory purports that Filipino faith healers are descendants of the kahuna, the ancient healers of old Tahiti and Hawaii. The kahuna disappeared with the coming of Christianity to Polynesia.

Psychic healers have fallen out of favor in the past couple of decades as Western education, including textbook science and religion, cast glaring doubt on their practices. Desperately afflicted Filipinos less and less often travel to Pangasinan, once well-noted for its concentration of celebrated faith healers. The phenomenon that peaked in the 1970s also fails to draw large number of foreigners as it once did.

For a casual tourist, finding a psychic or sorcerer could be a problem, as these healers live in low-key, out-of-the-way places. But around Easter every year, the magically inclined on Siquijor island hold their Witches Festival. During the open event, potions are brewed and spells are cast under the watch of shamans.