Tuesday, October 30, 2007 Tantingco: Halloween in Pampanga By Robby Tantingco Peanut Gallery
THE world that our ancestors lived in was a dark and dangerous world, populated by ghosts and ghouls and a whole gallery of evil spirits -- aswang, duende, capre, ticbalang, magcucutud, patianac, maglalague, maglilili, magcucusinu, culariut. Every stranger they met was suspected to be a witch, every illness interpreted as a spell, and every change in weather pattern considered an omen.
Pythons and crocodiles lurked in swamps and rivers; headhunters waited in ambush just around the corner. After darkness fell, our ancestors made sure all windows were shut tight because huge swarms of mosquitoes usually attacked after midnight. One Spanish friar wrote how shocked he was after witnessing giant mosquitoes attack and killed a chicken. (As recently as five years ago, I interviewed a family of farmers in Lubao who told me that waves of mosquitoes still come at night, causing their hut to shake violently.)
Halloween, to our ancestors, was not just October 31; Halloween, to them, was everyday -- which is why they developed all sorts of rituals and practices to ward off all these creatures of the night, real or imagined. (An elaborate description of these Kapampangan beliefs circa 1900 can be found in accounts compiled by ethnographer H. Otley Beyer, in an unpublished volume lent to the HAU Center for Kapampangan Studies by Beyer’s family.)
For example, we still assign people to stay awake all night and watch over the dead lying in state. This originated from our ancestors’ belief in the magcucutud (root word cutud, “to cut”), which is the Kapampangan version of the mananaggal. The magcucutud’s upper torso detached itself from the rest of the body, flying all night in search of cadavers. Once a cadaver was spotted, the magcucutud “would poison the air, steal the corpse and with a magic potion bring the dead body back to life, after which she would slice the flesh and cook it in the victim’s own blood.”
The magcucutud laid eggs like hens do, and people who took these eggs to the kitchen by mistake would get the shock of their lives when they found a nose, fingers, eyeballs and other human body parts in them.
It was usually the young people who were assigned the task of watching over the coffin all night. To kill time, they played a verbal joust called talubangan (or bulaclacan) where the boys, in the role of talubang (old Kapampangan for “butterfly”) carried a bugtung (riddle) and flitted from one bulaclac (“flower”) to another (played by the girls) until they found someone who could solve the riddle. The butterfly and the flower were then paired off. Thus, our prudish ancestors always looked forward to someone dying in the village because the wake was the only opportunity for them to meet and match. That was how love blossomed among our ancestors -- beside the coffin, in the dead of night and while their old folks slept and snored.
While today’s teenagers are hardly home, our ancestors had an effective way of keeping them within arm’s reach: they invented a creature called manguang anac. This evil spirit usually swooped upon an unsuspecting village, kidnapping two or three children at a time, and then bleeding them to death. People believed that the manguang anac were originally real people, criminals hired by smugglers to collect blood for minting coins, because old folks thought dipping coins in blood was part of the minting process and coins did taste like blood when put in the mouth.
A variation of the manguang anac is the binangunan (obviously a Tagalog word), who also kidnapped children but instead of bleeding them, sucked their blood like vampires do. Children who were pale and thin (due to anemia, quite prevalent in those days) were often suspected of having been victimized by this creature.
A really mean creature was the magcucusinu, the Kapampangan version of the magkukulam, only much more evil. The magcucusinu had the power to cause pain on any person even from a great distance, either to avenge himself or a friend, or for sheer pleasure. The magcucusinu could magically put poison, a metal object or even a live chicken inside the victim’s body, causing extreme suffering.
There, of course, was the capre, who was “10 to 15 feet tall, very black and wearing a long black coat, had long arms, long beard, a long cane which he used to knock the heads of people, and always had a long cigar in his mouth. He appeared at night during a slight drizzle, staying under a large tree or squatting on its branches or sometimes dangling his legs.” The capre imagery probably originated from black Africans who worked as slaves for Spaniards; Bergaño referred to these tall, dark-skilled slaves as cafre in his 1732 dictionary (from Muslim derogatory term kafir, or heathen).
Other creatures that populated the dreams and nightmares of ancient Kapampangans were the maglalague, or spirit of the dead who would not leave until his murder was avenged or his hidden wealth found; the maglilili, who cast spells on travelers who would spend hours, even days, trying to find their way home; the patianac, said to be the souls of unbaptized children, who tormented women during childbirth and harassed immoral people (like unchaste priests and unfaithful husbands); and lastly, the culariut, or dwarf who lived in bamboo thickets or termite mounds, which children often avoided by saying Itábi po, puera nunu! (“Please go away, I hope there is no old dwarf here!”) In Malaysia there’s a vampirish creature which Malaysians call potianac, which is quite similar to the Kapampangan patianac.
Tonight and tomorrow night, which is Halloween, some Kapampangans will still do pamangaladua (root word kaladua, soul), also called pamanggosu (root word gosu, a song in honor of a saint). Groups of singers go from house to house with a lantern on a stick (similar to what carolers do), which is their way of asking saints’ intercession for the departed relatives of the household. The household is supposed to give them money at the end of the song; if they don’t, the singers throw stones at the house or steal their hen before they proceed to the next house (the Kapampangan trick-or-treat).
As you can see, unlike us city dwellers who have forgotten the significance of the next three days, our common folk know exactly what Halloween (Oct. 31), All Saints’ Day (Nov. 1) and All Souls’ Day (Nov. 2) are all about. We’re supposed to celebrate religious feast days on their eve (night before), not the day itself, like Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve, which is why the feast day of all saints is celebrated the night before (Halloween is abbreviation for All Hallows Eve, hallows meaning holy people, or saints), and the feast day of all souls is celebrated the night before (the reason we troop to the cemetery on November 1, not 2).
The extent of our modern society’s disconnect from its past can be seen in the celebration of Halloween, which is supposed to be the eve of the feast of all saints in heaven, not the ghosts and vampires and all the evil spirits from hell!
