My lost religions haunt me. There is a world, perhaps similar to this one, where Spain’s leather boots never dropped off their boats, never left footprints in the sand of the Philippines. There is a world where anitism, the indigenous religion of the Philippines, was never taken into the hands of the colonizing man, picked and prodded at, taken and torn, with Catholicism pushed into its place. There is a world where I believe in a religion that was born on the shores of my mother’s country, where I was raised believing in anito, where the trinity I was raised with was instead a constellation of deities and spirits. That world is not this one, and this absence of a possibility remains a thorn in the folds of my mind.
“We’ll never get them back,” a Filipina friend once said to me. “All those religions, what could have been. The Philippines had indigenous religions. I think it’s easy to forget. Imagine that? We’ll never get them back.”
Before Islam, Christianity, and the other vastly dominating religions arrived to the Philippines on boats, there was anitism. It was a polytheistic belief system, with a multitude of deities with different levels of power. The deities of anitism were gods that had personalities, flaws. There was a hierarchy of power, with the Naga serpent, considered the most powerful deity, at the top. The Naga serpent was the central god, around which the rest of the gods orbited. Anitism gods could influence fortune and fate, and it was important to perform rituals or sacrifices to avoid a god’s curses. Gods could also work on the physical plane and cure illnesses or dispel curses if a spiritual leader or healer worked on their behalf. Another core part of anitism were the anito — what souls became in the afterlife. Those on earth could make sacrifices or give offerings to the anito, typically the anito of their ancestors, who could intercede on behalf of the living relatives. Nature, too, had power, such as with water spirits and forest spirits. Believers would often perform rituals to ask other anito to speak and commune with the nature spirits for them. Nature spirits were the ones who controlled the seasons and, therefore, the bountifulness of the land, so it was important to appease them. All nature, and all land, had a spirit.
This was the religion that existed before colonizers sailed in from across the ocean. In particular, it was Ferdinand Magellan’s arrival in the Philippines in the 1520s that brought with it the beginning of a tidal wave of colonization. It was the first instance, in what became a series of instances, in which men from far-off lands carried on their backs stories and threats, carried a new religion that would soon come to dominate many of the islands. “It was a miracle,” a man once told me. He was older, white and married to a Filipina. “They were told of Christianity and immediately believed, all of them. It’s a beautiful story.”
He was referring to the story of Christianity in Cebu. It’s a famous tale for Catholic Filipinos: Magellan arrived in the Philippine province of Cebu and held a Catholic mass for the first time on its soil. Cebu’s rulers immediately bowed to the new religion, and hundreds of Filipinos were baptized.
The sentiment of his reference grated on me — why was this beautiful? Evangelizing, erasing, replacing one culture with a distant other. Where was the beauty in this loss, of what was taken from us? There’s a pain that lies in the inevitability of it, too, the knowledge that had it not been Cebu, it would likely have been another province. This unavoidable event was the beginning of an unspoken promise, that the Philippines would forever be prevented from returning to its original identity. An entire erasure of custom, of memory.
But this isn’t the full story. Anitism is not gone, not completely. It has survived under a mask.
After researching to learn about the fate of anitism, I found that when Catholicism arrived in the Philippines, it was adopted, but not perfectly. It was a game of putting shapes into not-quite-right spots, looking for something that was close to a fit. This is when Folk Catholicism was born. For example, Catholicism’s one true God and its many saints were not dissimilar from anitism’s Naga serpent which existed in tandem with smaller, less powerful deities. The idea of baptism’s cleansing of sins was also perceived as similar to various healing rituals in anitism which were used to cure illnesses. This, too, was more easily integrated into Folk Catholicism.
This process, fitting one religion into another as a result of colonization, is called religious syncretism. Folk Catholicism in the Philippines is not the sole example. One can see this in Mexico, too, as a result of their similar colonization by Spain. The initial religions themselves may be gone, or twisted beyond recognition. But their memory, their choices, live on under different names, practiced in different ways. Lost, but not entirely.
My interest in this religious loss haunted me, but the truth is that it was derived from my own personal fears. I am half-Filipino and was raised to fit in with American culture, to assimilate. Being more American was safer and meant I was protected by a society that claimed diversity but rewarded only a select few molds of people. My culture, therefore, has often felt distant for me. I was never taught the language, Tagalog, out of the belief that understanding of any other language would be a detriment to my English, which was deemed most important. I grew up isolated from the Filipino community that my family abandoned back in Chicago. Our new town in Michigan was white, all Christian and English speakers. This is what I grew up with and all I was able to know. My options from the beginning were limited, but not by my own choice.
It had never occurred to me until then that the life I had was not the only life that could have been. That the options laid out before me when I was born were never the complete set, and were never going to be. Certain choices were burned in a fire before I existed, before I had the chance to speak, to fight, to say no.
The older I got, the more curious I became, my hands reaching and praying they’d find previously unknown strings that I could attach to myself. I met more Filipinos, learned more about cultural practices that I had never been taught. For example, when I was young, my mother told me that when she turned 18, she had had an impressive party, which was unusual for her family. They couldn’t afford presents on Christmas, but something about this birthday had warranted an incredible celebration. But the story was never emphasized further, so its importance was lost upon me. It wasn’t until I was older that I attended my first debut, for one of my few Filipina friends. There, I learned that this story I’d been told, this type of 18th birthday celebration, was a deeply ingrained part of Filipino culture.
I never learned the names of many of the foods that had been set before me all of my life, either. I remember describing one food, a fried milkfish, to a Filipina friend.
She’d laughed. “It’s called daing na banguus,” she said. “Did you not know that? Didn’t anyone ever tell you what you were eating?”
My mother had always called it by the simple name of “crunchy fish” with me. It was a simplified name, one that I loved and had found funny as a child. But the simplicity, suddenly, hurt. Why hadn’t I known its true name? Why did that history and culture never reach me?
It was like filling out a paint-by-number artwork, like fitting mosaic glasses into a wire frame. The identity that I’d carved out for myself, that I’d understood, was missing hundreds of chunks that I’d never thought to question. The empty spaces between the lines were not voids, but pockets, meant to be filled by the culture of my mother and my mother’s mother.
The more I searched and spoke with other Filipinos, the more frustrated I became that my culture seemed to have been set on the highest shelf for most of my life, too far for me to reach. When I was young, I didn’t know what I was missing, and certainly couldn’t see it in the people who lived around me. The older I get, the more connections I make with others in my community, the more I grieve for something that I was never given.
Colonization will keep taking and keep destroying as long as its machinery is allowed to run. But in the pieces left behind, there is not nothing. There is memory, weak as it may be, and there are threads that can never be severed.
The strings still encircle the Philippines to this day. Just recently in May, there was the yearly Obando Fertility Dance, which is an adaptation of the Anitist dance kasilonawan, which was held by spiritual leaders in honor of the Filipino nature spirits and gods. It’s a beautiful feast day and is considered to be a Catholic celebration now, but its foundation was laid centuries ago at the feet of different deities and beliefs, a step back into a culture that the world had fought to erase. Albularyos are healers who are said to work through the intercession of spirits and anito. Even to this day, they are consulted for curing illnesses and are sought out for their remedies for sickness and curses. There is also the Ilocano tradition of atang, which are food offerings that are left out for a family’s ancestral anito. Its compatibility with Catholicism is perhaps what allowed it to survive, but its roots are not a secret.
Belief in anito lives on in pieces, but it lives. Despite every attempt to smother it, to rip it from its homeland and replace it; despite every attempt to “domesticate” a culture that colonizers never understood, a culture that they tried to bleach the color from. It lives on, despite the centuries that have passed, languages that have faded, the memories and people who have gone from this Earth with no writings left to repeat their words and names. But this distance between me and my ancestors, the ones who knew an entirely different, beautiful world, is finite. It is crossable. There is still something between us, and no matter how small it may be, it is there, and it always will be.
I remain still with grievances from my youth: the distance from my culture, the words that I never knew could fit in my mouth, the traditions I didn’t know I could dip my hands into.
It may not have been my choice then. But it’s become my choice now.
What is here now exists only because of what came before it. What is created comes directly from what is lost — that is to say, the lines can be traced back. The tools may not have been placed in our hands by those before us, the paths may not have been clearly carved. But we are here, and we are able, and who can that responsibility fall upon if not us?
MiC Columnist Danielle Shave can be reached at dshave@umich.edu.
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