Tikbalang

The name is documented very early; the shape is not. In 1589 the Franciscan Juan de Plasencia lists what the Tagalogs feared and writes a single bare line: there were ghosts they called vibit, and phantoms they called tigbalaang. Nothing more. No head, no legs, no stature. A century and a half later the Vocabulario de la lengua tagala of Noceda and Sanlúcar still defines it in two words, «goblin or sprite», and cross-refers from its entry to that of the patianac, with which it shares a slot. That is the documentary base of the being: a dweller of the empty places who is named but not described, and of whom the first thing said is not what he looks like but what he does to whoever passes. The colonial spellings fluctuate (tigbalang, tigbalag, tigbalaan), and the modern form tikbalang appears in no chronicle: it is later.

The chronicles let one follow the process almost decade by decade. Around 1630 the Augustinian Casimiro Díaz records what he was told by those who claimed to have seen it in Ogtón, Panay and Taal, and the portrait has nothing equine about it: a face like a cat's, a head flattened on top, a thick beard, the whole body covered in long hair, and legs so disproportionate that when it squats its knees stand a yard above its head; it also runs faster than any four-footed animal. A century later Tomás Ortiz describes it as a shape-changer: it appears in the figure of a black man, of an old man, of a horse or of a monster. The horse is one of its possible shapes, not its shape. One has to reach 1763, with Fray Antonio Mozo, to read at last the formula that defines the being today: the body of a giant and the legs of a horse. As to what it does, the chronicles agree on two things, and neither is what is credited to it first today. One is the bargain: Ortiz relates that those who meet it end up making friends with it and hand over their rosaries in exchange for hairs, herbs and stones with which to obtain what they seek. The other is the disappearance: Casimiro Díaz reports that some go off with these beings and are lost for a long time, returning terrified and faint. The motif of making the traveller circle back to the same spot, today its best-known trait, appears in no early source: it is oral tradition recorded in the twentieth century.

The folklore collection Isabelo de los Reyes directed in 1890 preserves the whole procedure, and it is not a gesture but an ordeal. The tigbalang is sought in the hills, squatting at the foot of the largest trees; you must come up unseen, throw yourself upon it, bring it down and bind it with a cord of the blessed Girdle that you must carry ready, then mount it and hold on while it flies with you on its back until exhaustion breaks it. Only then does it confess itself beaten and offer whatever is asked. What is demanded of it is one of the three thickest quills of its head, and the middle one is the best; it will refuse at first, for parting with that one is its greatest sacrifice. That quill is kept as an anting-anting, the amulet of Filipino tradition, and it is what gives power over the creature. The right name is worth stating, because this entry once called it something else: there are no yantras in Filipino magic; there are anting-anting, and that is the term the source itself uses. And note that neither there nor in any other early source does iron appear: what binds the tigbalang is a blessed cord, that is, a Catholic sacramental, and not the cold metal of European fairies.

It is worth saying plainly, because this entry once claimed the opposite: the tikbalang is of pre-Hispanic root as a spirit, not as a horse-headed being. There were no horses in the archipelago before the Spaniards brought them from 1565 onward, so no earlier figure could have had one. And the sources confirm it on their own, without needing to be reasoned out: in 1589 it is not described, around 1630 it has a cat's face, around 1731 the horse is one of four possible shapes, and in 1763 it appears at last fixed as a giant's body with equine legs. What changed was not the creature but the stable its image was drawn from. Of the same order is an equivalence that circulates in modern lists and that this entry came to repeat: the pairing of the tikbalang with the fox spirits of East Asia. The thread that was pulled is real, but it is meteorological, not genealogical: when it rains in sunshine, in the Philippines they say a tikbalang is getting married, and in Japan that it is the fox's wedding. That idiom exists across half the world and in each place is hung on whatever trickster is at hand. Sharing a saying about the rain does not make two creatures one.