Aswang

The aswang is the most famous and most feared creature of Filipino folklore, and the term in fact covers several kinds of monstrous being (corpse-eaters, witches, vampires and shapeshifters), associated above all with the Visayan islands and Mindanao, with the province of Capiz as its proverbial territory. The attestation is early: in 1589 the Franciscan Juan de Plasencia, listing the classes of sorcerer in the islands, describes the osuang as one whom they say they have seen fly, and who killed men and ate their flesh, specifying that this occurred among the Visayans and not among the Tagalogs. In its shapeshifting-witch aspect it is conceived as a woman who by day lives as an ordinary villager and by night takes on monstrous forms to hunt. Tradition holds that the condition is transmitted, often through the female line: an elderly aswang must pass her power to a successor before dying, for otherwise she cannot expire, and the handing over is described through images such as the giving of a breath, of saliva, or of a black offspring that passes from one mouth to another.

The aswang is a shapeshifter able to take the form of animals such as the dog, the pig or, above all, a great nocturnal bird. Its most characteristic feature is a long, thin, tubular tongue with which, perched on the roof of a house, it reaches its victims to suck their blood; it is held especially dangerous to pregnant women and newborns, whose blood or whose foetus it is said to crave. Tradition credits it with a supernatural sense of smell for detecting expectant mothers at a distance and with great swiftness in flight. Among its vulnerabilities folklore names salt, vinegar, garlic, holy water and various apotropaic objects and plants, among them the buyo leaf blessed by a priest; and also a recurring detail, that its reflection or its shadow may betray its true nature when the rest of its appearance does not. Iron was likewise used against it, along with stingray tail and the smoke of certain herbs burnt beneath the floor of a house where a woman was about to give birth.

By day the aswang is indistinguishable from an ordinary person, and there lies the core of the fear it inspires: any neighbour might be one. Folklore assigns it, as a telltale sign, bloodshot eyes and, above all, a concrete test anyone could apply, that of looking into its pupils and seeing oneself reflected upside down. On transforming it takes on bestial, shadowy forms, with the features of a bird or a dog, and walks hunched. The belief remains very much alive across wide rural areas of the Philippines, where it structures much of the imagery of nocturnal fear, and it has been amply documented by folklorists such as Damiana Eugenio and Francisco Demetrio. It is worth adding what that belief cost: the accusation of being an aswang fell historically on women who lived at the margins of the ordinary peasant household, midwives, healers, widows and outsiders, by the same social mechanism that in Europe fed the witch hunts. As a category rather than a single creature, the aswang forms the core of Filipino supernatural folklore and one of its most original contributions to the world catalogue of monsters.