Currents · by Frater Custos · 24-minute read

The anting-anting

Philippine amulets are a documented historical formation, with one specimen dated to 1884 and a doctrine that can be read. That the great eskrima masters owned them is another matter. And the explanation that comes to mind first — the old deities renamed after saints — is contradicted by a documented act pointing the other way.

An anting-anting is, in its commonest form, an engraved metal medal worn round the neck or sewn into the shirt. On it are figures and words: an eye within a rayed triangle, a Trinity with three identical faces, a five-petalled flower, and rows of letters that look at first sight like Latin and on closer examination are not quite. The wearer holds that it confers birtud — power — and in certain versions that it makes him impervious to blades or bullets.

On this object there are museums, catalogues, academic studies and judicial records. There is also a second account, circulating above all in martial circles: that the great escrimadores of the 20th century — Ilustrisimo, Villabrille, Bacon — owned them, and that their capacities were due to this. The two things have completely different evidential weight, and the reason this entry exists is to keep them apart.

The words, which are not synonyms

The lexicon is already a document, because each term comes from a different linguistic layer and together they recount five centuries of contact.

The anthropologist Prospero R. Covar formalises the pair that holds the whole system together: potensiya, the latent power inherent in natural entities, persons and sacred words, and bisa, activated efficacy. The anting-anting is what stands between them.

What is written on it, and where it comes from

I begin with the object, because it is the fixed point of the whole entry. The Musée du quai Branly — Jacques Chirac in Paris holds under inventory number 71.1902.1.99 an anting-anting: an oval copper medal, 3.5 × 3 centimetres, 15 grams, a central chalice motif, a radiant circular emblem, letters engraved along the edge and now in part worn away. It is dated to the 19th century and collected in the field in Luzon in 1884, during Alfred Marche's expeditions funded by the French ministry of education. It passed to the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1902, then to the Musée de l’Homme, then to the quai Branly.

Why it matters so much: it shows that the engraved metal medal was circulating in Luzon before 1884, that is before the Katipunan, and therefore before all the events by which it is usually explained.

The inscriptions fall into three registers, and the distinction is useful. There is recognisable but corrupt liturgical Latin — the formula «Credo de la Sanctisima Trinidad» is not Latin, it is a hybrid: Credo Latin, de la Spanish, Sanctisima hispanised. It is exactly what one expects from a chain of copyists who do not know Latin. There is devotional Spanish. And there are untranslatable strings, which Covar records without translating them: «Lihis, taguitac, sagranatac paparonatac».

How Catholic it is

Very, and demonstrably so. The language is Spanish and Latin. The divine personnel is the Trinity, the Virgin, the archangels, the saints. The supports are scapulars, crucifixes, European devotional medals. The calendar is Good Friday. The anthropologist Michael L. Tan has observed that at Quiapo, in front of the basilica, there is sold alongside the amulets the medal of St Benedict as well, which is a Catholic sacramental approved by Benedict XIV in 1742: at the level of the object, the boundary between authorised sacramental and popular amulet cannot be drawn.

On the eye in the triangle one often reads that it is Masonic, and the Katipunan — founded on 7 July 1892 — did indeed have a structure, initiation rites and grades on a Masonic model. But the Eye of Providence in a rayed triangle is current Catholic iconography from at least the 17th century, independent of Freemasonry, and the 1884 specimen predates the Katipunan. Masonic derivation is a reasonable hypothesis, not a documented fact: I have found no study that establishes the filiation with evidence.

Syncretism, and how it is put to the test

At this point the explanation offers itself, and it is worth confronting because it is by far the most widespread: that beneath Catholicism lies the old religion, and that the precolonial figures were simply renamed after saints. It is a reasonable thesis, it has famous cases in its support elsewhere in the world, and for the Philippines it does not hold in the form in which it is told. But the way to see this is not to argue it in the abstract: it is to distinguish three things that the word «syncretism» holds together and that have utterly different evidential weight.

In the first box, for the anting-anting, there is very little — and that little is interesting. The repression is documented: a report of 1625 tells of ritual instruments burnt, of the chief shamaness flogged and the others exposed to public shame. And a substitution of personnel is documented: the functions of the baylan and the catalonan, the ritual specialists whom the 16th-century sources describe as ordinarily women and of rank, were largely taken over by the Catholic priests, and the therapeutic functions passed to the sacraments and to the intercession of the saints. But this is the substitution of a social role, not the renaming of figures: no source pairs an anito with a saint, and I know of no single Philippine case in which a precolonial deity appears renamed in a document.

In the second box there is healing, and here continuity is defensible: the need for a healer outside the clergy never lapsed, and 20th-century ethnography documents it. But what is usually passed over in silence must be said: the word itself is Spanish. The albularyo is the herbolario, and his repertoire is made of Latin prayers and blessed objects. Between the baylan of the 16th century and the albularyo of the 20th there is no documentary chain: there is continuity of need, probably of technique, not of institution.

Into the third box falls almost all the rest — including the finest and most quoted assertion, that Bathala is hidden within the Infinito Dios. It must be said precisely: there exists no source, of any period, in which anting-anting wearers identify the Infinito Dios with Bathala. The identification is the scholars'. The tale of the god who hides inside the stone and of whom Jesus baptises only the thumb is 20th-century orality, collected in the field from a member of a samahan, and the allegorical reading of it made by the title of the book by Nenita Pambid, University of the Philippines Press, 2000, is hers — entirely citable, provided it is attributed to her and dated to 2000.

There are then two elements that push actively in the opposite direction. The first: the apparatus of the Infinito Dios in the codification of 1955 contains kabbalistic material — the Ainsoph appears in it, the light that dwells in the height of the infinite — that is, European Christian esotericism arrived by way of books, not pre-Hispanic cosmology. The second, and it cuts at the root: pre-Hispanic Philippine religions almost always lack a Mother Goddess figure. Which removes the basis from the hypothesis that the divinisation of the Virgin, which is central in the anting-anting, derives from an indigenous precedent: there was no precedent.

That syncretism exists is not in question, and elsewhere the evidence is overwhelming: in Cuban santería the correspondence between orisha and saints need not be inferred, because it is inscribed in the cabildos de nación, registered confraternities with statutes and a Catholic patron, that is, in legal bodies with archives; contemporary lists produced by the practitioners exist; it is known which Yoruba tradition, from where and when; and an African liturgical language survives which the practitioners themselves call African. In the Philippine case all four requirements are missing: no colonial institution pairing anito and saints, no contemporary list, a precolonial religion known only through the filter of those who were destroying it, no indigenous liturgical language surviving in the Catholic cults of the lowlands.

A final clarification, because the error is frequent and concerns the author most cited on this subject. Ileto does not hold that beneath Catholicism lies paganism. He holds the contrary: that it is Catholicism — the language of the pasyon, the passion of Christ sung — that supplies the grammar with which the revolts thought and spoke themselves. It is a thesis about the productivity of Christianity, and it is regularly cited in support of the opposite thesis.

How it is charged

The object does not work on its own: it must be activated. Reynaldo Ileto documents that anting-anting were obtained and charged during Holy Week, by procedures that included cemetery rites, and that fragments of Lenten candles were incorporated into them. A report in the Philippine Daily Inquirer from Mlang, North Cotabato, describes the same procedure in our own day: a volunteer searches the cemetery, on Good Friday, for the kneecaps of the dead reputed to have been formidable fighters, and recites over the object the required Latin prayer.

The second great device is the mountain. The ascent of Mount Banahaw serves to actualise the bisa of one's own amulet, or to acquire it there. Vitaliano R. Gorospe S.J., in «Mount Banahaw: The Power Mountain from Ritualism to Spirituality», Philippine Studies 40/2, 1992, pp. 204-218, distinguishes three classes: natural talismans; activated medallions; and amulets implanted in the body. And he adds the datum that matters most: efficacy is held to depend on the spiritual consciousness of the bearer, not on the object.

Finally there is ingestion. General Artemio Ricarte, in his memoirs printed at Yokohama in 1927, relates that Eusebio Di-Mabunggo distributed to the soldiers sheets bearing crosses and Latin inscriptions, and that the soldiers swallowed them. I have not opened Ricarte's text: the report comes by way of Ileto, at pp. 53-54.

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The history, and a silence worth a page

The anting-anting appears in Philippine history concentrated in a span of seventy years, from 1840 to 1910, and always attached to movements that end badly.

1832-1841, the Cofradía de San José. Apolinario de la Cruz, known as Hermano Pule, born at Lucban on 22 July 1815, founded in December 1832 a confraternity that reached five thousand members. On 1 November 1841, at Alitao, the colonial army annihilated it: three to five hundred dead. Pule was shot on 4 November 1841, aged twenty-six, and his body quartered and the parts displayed about the province. Ileto opens from here.

1896-1897, the Katipunan. Here the documentation exists, but it is narrower than is believed. Ileto, at pp. 51-54, reports a description of February 1897 according to which Aguinaldo's army wore scapulars, crucifixes and a red cotton sash with an anting-anting inside it, and the bearers of power stood close to the commanders. His thesis is not that the object protects: it is that it is the visible knot of a system binding inner cultivation — the loób — to the concentration of power. But the counterpoint must be reported as well: Emilio Aguinaldo published a denial of ever having used anting-anting, in the Philippines Free Press of 25 September 1929.

1902-1911, the Pulahan. In Samar and Leyte the pulahan movements fought the Americans in red shirts and with amulets. At the battle of the Dolores river, 12 December 1904, over a thousand pulahanes attacked forty men of the Philippine Constabulary: about three hundred dead among the attackers, some forty among the constabulary. In Samar alone about seven thousand pulahan dead are counted by 1911. The standard study is George Emmanuel R. Borrinaga, «Seven Churches: The Pulahan Movement in Leyte, 1902-1907», Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 43/1-2, 2015, which has a section devoted precisely to red uniforms and anting-anting.

21 May 1967, the Lapiang Malaya. It is the best documented case of all, and the only one in which the efficacy of the amulets was put to the test in public, dated circumstances and before the press. Over five hundred followers of Valentin de los Santos, in uniform, armed with bolo and furnished with anting-anting, marched on Malacañang demanding Marcos's resignation. The Constabulary stopped them with M-16s, on Taft Avenue in Pasay. Thirty-three dead, thirty-two of them members of the movement. The Manila Times coined the expression Bloody Sunday. De los Santos ended up committed to the National Center for Mental Health.

And the escrimadores?

Here the answer is blunt, and it must be given before the nuances. There is not a single independent academic, archival or journalistic source documenting the possession of an anting-anting by an eskrima master identified by name. Everything in circulation goes back to testimony internal to the martial community, almost always to a single author and a single informant.

Antonio «Tatang» Ilustrisimo (1904-1997, Bantayan island, Cebu) is the principal case. The community's standard sources do not mention it: neither the encyclopaedia entries on him and on Kalis Ilustrisimo, nor the manual of the system. Even Mark V. Wiley, Filipino Martial Culture, Tuttle, 1997 — the most cited book in the field, which devotes a chapter to him — treats the anting-anting only in general terms and does not attribute one to individual masters.

The only circumstantial assertion goes back to two articles by the same author, the journalist and practitioner Perry Gil S. Mallari: on FMA Pulse on 14 August 2009 and in the Manila Times on 26 March 2013. They recount the tagaliwas, the power to deflect bullets, demonstrated on Good Friday by firing at sheets inscribed with oraciones. In the 2013 version the episode is attributed to a witness named in full, Romeo Macapagal, a senior student, who states: «My two eldest sons and I are competent shots, but at five metres we hit only around that 8×11-inch sheet».

It is the best testimony that exists on the subject — dated, named, circumstantial — and it must be said that it nonetheless has three limits that cannot be got round: a single author, a single witness, and publication between twelve and sixteen years after the subject's death, in a trade column. It is to be cited as testimony. Never as fact.

Floro Villabrille (18 February 1912 – 1992) carries the second most widespread account: training with a blind princess of Gandara, in Samar, able to sense the angles of attack, and a series of death matches in the arenas. The story is attributed to an article by Jim Coleman in Black Belt in 1990 — an issue I have not been able to verify: I note its existence, I do not quote its text.

There is, however, one verifiable detail, and it does not add up. It is asserted that after the match of 4 July 1933 the governor-general Frank Murphy presented him with a certificate naming him grand master of the Philippine martial arts. Murphy took office on 15 July 1933, eleven days later. This is not a refutation — the certificate may be later — but the sequence as narrated does not hold as it is told, and of that certificate no independent attestation exists. Of the death matches, moreover, not a single document has ever been produced: no sporting register, no police record, no contemporary report.

On the other names the picture is simpler: for Venancio «Anciong» Bacon, Remy Presas and Leo Gaje the sources consulted contain no mention of anting-anting.

The «kali» question

Adjacent and equally controversial. I report the two positions with names, because both have arguments.

The fact nobody disputes. The colonial sources attest calis / kalis, not kali: Pigafetta in the Visayas between 1519 and 1522, and above all fray Pedro de San Buenaventura, Vocabulario de la lengua Tagala, 1613, the first Tagalog-Spanish dictionary, under the entry calis, with martial senses. Kalis is cognate with the Malay kris.

Those who say that «kali» is a 20th-century construction. Wiley, in 1997, writes that no historical or anthropological evidence exists for an Islamic martial art of that name in South-East Asia. Ned R. Nepangue and Celestino C. Macachor, in Cebuano Eskrima: Beyond the Myth, 2007, are blunter: the term did not exist before it appeared in the preface to the first printed book on arnis. That book is Mga Karunungan sa Larong Arnis by Placido Yambao and Buenaventura Mirafuente, University of the Philippines Press, 1957, and it has no bibliography — which is the structural reason for the entire debate. The worldwide diffusion of the term is later and American: it comes by way of Dan Inosanto, 1980.

Those who say it is authentic. Mallari holds that kali derives from kalis by contraction, a normal process in Tagalog, and adduces as parallels Bathala → bahala and taga-ilog → Tagalog. Remy Presas proposed the inverse hypothesis, of an s dropped in modern times. The anthropologist Felipe «Bot» Jocano Jr. of the University of the Philippines is the only academic voice in the debate: I have not managed to open his text, and I note its existence without citing it.

What can be said honestly. That kalis is attested from 1613, and this is fact. That the form kali as the name of the art is not attested in any source earlier than the 20th century found by either of the two sides — not even the supporters of authenticity produce an attestation: they produce a phonological argument. That the contraction is possible but not documented. And that the first certain written attestation of the term as the name of the art is of 1957, in a book without apparatus. None of this says that the art is recent: it says that the name is. These are two different assertions, and they are confused continually — in both directions. The Philippine national law, moreover, uses arnis: Republic Act 9850, signed on 11 December 2009.

What circulates without a source

«Unbroken precolonial tradition.» It does not hold. The concept of a potent object is ancient, and mutya is a precolonial word recorded by Pigafetta. But every element of the documented system is later than 1565: the language, the figures, the supports, the calendar — and even the word agimat, which is an Arabism whose sense of «amulet» is attested around 1860. The first provenanced specimen is of 1884; the Vocabulario de la lengua tagala in the edition of 1860 defines anting-anting as «a superstitious thing with which they believe they will receive no harm from enemies», and it is the oldest dated lexicographical attestation I have found; the doctrinal corpus Covar works on is a book of 1955.

«It is indigenous magic.» It is the most widespread assertion and the least sustainable, for the reasons given above. The subtlest reading is the one Nenita Pambid puts in the very title of her book — why Bathala hides inside the stone — that is, concealment and not mere varnishing. But it remains an interpretative thesis of 2000, not a datum: for why it does not hold as is believed, see above.

«The SATOR square appears in anting-anting.» I have not found a single documented attestation of it: not in the quai Branly record, not in Covar, not in the exhibition catalogues. The association appears only by generic thematic juxtaposition. It is an a priori plausible hypothesis — Spain knew the square — but plausibility is not proof.

«The Spanish banned the martial arts, which survived disguised as dance.» The current version attributes the ban to a decree of Simón de Anda y Salazar between 1762 and 1764. The objections are robust: 1762 is the year of the British invasion of Manila, when the Spanish needed Filipino fighters and a general disarmament would have been illogical; enforcement across seven thousand islands was materially impossible; and the preference for the stick is better explained by the abundance of rattan than by a ban.

«The Doce Pares of the anting-anting prove a link with the eskrima of Cebu.» No. The Doce Pares are the twelve peers of Charlemagne, a topos of the corridos and of the moro-moro theatre, available to anyone. The coincidence with the Cebu club founded in 1932 is the homonymy of a shared topos, not filiation.

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