The Manananggal of Capiz
Philippines (the Western Visayas, the Iloilo-Antique-Capiz corridor on Panay) · Spanish colonial through twentieth-century fieldwork
The corridor was Iloilo, Antique, and Capiz. The island was Panay. The documented epicentre of the tradition, since the Spanish colonial period, was the province of Capiz, where the priests of the early friars recorded what the babaylan of the older religion had been, and what the women of certain households were still said to be.
The case below is composite, drawn from the corpus that Ramos consolidated in 1969 from fieldwork across the corridor. The structure of the encounter, however, is constant. The records of the manananggal agree on the order in which the body comes apart.
The setting is the nipa house, raised on stilts above the soft ground. The night is the night before a birth. The pregnant woman sleeps on a mat on the bamboo floor. Beneath the house, in the wet earth between the stilts, the chickens have gone quiet.
Behind the house, in the banana grove, the witch has begun.
On the segmenting
She rubs the coconut oil along her waist.
The records are consistent. The oil is the catalyst. The skin parts at the waist in a clean ring, a horizontal seam from spine to navel and around again, and the upper half of the body lifts free of the lower. The lower half remains standing. The legs do not fall. The legs stand upright in the soil of the grove, balanced on their own, the cut surface dark and wet, the white of the spine visible at the centre.
From the shoulder blades of the upper half, the wings push out. The texts describe them as bat-wings: leathery, ribbed, wet at the joints where they have only just emerged. The wings open. The arms of the upper half hang. The hair hangs. The intestines, severed clean at the waist by the same parting that severed the skin, hang in a knot beneath the ribs and do not bleed. The records are explicit on this: there is no blood at the cut. The blood is for elsewhere.
She rises through the canopy of the banana grove.
On the lying-in room
She lowers herself onto the gable of the nipa house.
The wings fold against her sides. The records describe the weight as imperceptible to the woman sleeping below; the manananggal does not press through the roof, she lays herself across it. From this position the tongue extends. The accounts differ on the length. The shorter accounts give a forearm. The longer accounts give a fathom and more. The tongue is described as hair-thin, black, dry, and prehensile. It does not enter through any opening visible by day. It threads between two bamboo slats of the floor of the lying-in room and finds, in the dark, the navel of the pregnant woman beneath.
What the tongue draws is the foetus.
Ramos’s informants in the Iloilo barrios were specific on this. The manananggal did not take the mother’s blood. The manananggal took the unborn child, in liquid form, through the navel, by suction. The mother in the morning was pale, was weak, was found to have lost the pregnancy in the night without the usual signs. The child, the witch was said to consume before dawn.
On the rite of the bawang
The counter-rite was not performed at the house. The counter-rite was performed in the banana grove.
The legs were the part that could be killed.
The husband, or the father of the household, or in some accounts the albularyo called for the season, went out into the grove before first light. He looked for the standing lower half. The standing lower half, the records say, was the vulnerability the witch could not protect; she could not look behind her once airborne, and she could not return to her body until the upper half was reunited with the lower at the same cut surface.
The cut surface was packed with rock salt. Above the salt was packed garlic ash, the residue of the bawang burned in a clay pot the evening before. Above the ash was packed crushed raw bawang, the cloves split and pressed against the open spine. The records insist on the order. Salt, ash, raw. The combination was said to seal the cut against any further joining.
At sunrise the upper half returned. The records say she circled the grove. She could not descend, because she could not land, because the cut surfaces of the upper and the lower no longer matched. By the time the village was awake she was visible above the canopy, the wings dark against the lightening sky, the intestines hanging in the open. The villagers identified her by the face. The face was named. The face had been a woman of the next barrio.
The archive holds no position on whether the witch survived the daylight. The archive observes only that the legs were found standing in the grove at dawn, that the salt and the bawang had been packed at the cut, and that the records of Capiz, into the present generation, do not give the name of the family from which the witch had come.
- Ramos, Maximo D. "The Aswang Syncrasy in Philippine Folklore." Western Folklore 28, no. 4 (1969): 238 to 248. The standard taxonomic essay separating the *manananggal* from the wider *aswang* class.
- Plasencia, Juan de. Relación de las Costumbres de los Tagalos. 1589. The earliest Spanish ethnographic record of the witch class that would become the *aswang* and *manananggal* of later fieldwork.