Tiyanak

The first time the name is set down in writing it designates no baby at all. In 1589 the Franciscan Juan de Plasencia relates that the Tagalogs believed that if a woman died in childbirth, she and the child were punished, and that at night she could be heard lamenting: that, he says, was what they called patianac. That is, in the earliest attestation the patianac is the mother dead in childbirth together with her child, and what defines it is a nocturnal lament. The Tagalog dictionary of Noceda and Sanlúcar, in the mid-eighteenth century, records it simply as «goblin or sprite», gives tianac and tumanor as synonyms, and cross-refers to the entry for the tigbalang, with which it shares a slot. The name also belongs to a much wider family: Blumentritt, in 1895, pairs it with the pontianak and puntianak of the Malay peninsula and the Dutch islands, the Sundanese kuntianak, the hantu-baranak of southeastern Borneo and the mino-kokanak of the Sarawak Dayaks, all of them spirits born of death in childbirth. What should not be repeated is the parsing of the word as «child-killer», which is folk etymology and is rejected by modern lexicography.

What the sources describe is not a baby but a cry. The chapter Mariano Ponce devoted to it in 1890 says so in plain words: it appears sometimes in the form of a newborn, at others in that of a dog, a pig or a piece of wood, and in one form or another it is known by a wailing like a newborn's. Blumentritt repeats the same list five years later. That is: the constant is not the body, which changes, but the sound. And what it does with it is not what is told first today either: it is found in empty and solitary places, says Ponce, where it leads astray the travellers who pass, so that if a walker fails to reach his destination there is no doubt it is by the influence of the tianak. Ponce himself tells of a servant overtaken by night half a league from the village, who heard a child's lament, went to look for it and found only a piece of wood shrieking. Before that, in 1731, Tomás Ortiz credited it with two things: the ill outcome of births, for which it hid in a tree beside the labouring woman's house and sang in the manner of men rowing, and the losing of travellers' way.

The best-documented ground is the Tagalog one, that is Luzon: from there come Plasencia in 1589, the eighteenth-century dictionary and the notices Retana was still giving in 1894 about Batangas, where the belief remained alive among country people. Further south, among the Súbanos of Mindanao, Blumentritt records the variant patianay, of which he says that taken in the arms it is a beautiful child and set down it turns into a worm, from which pregnant women must greatly guard themselves. And in Bicol the local word, patiyanak, makes it the offspring of an aswang: this is a well-attested regional version, not the general explanation of the being, and it is worth saying so. As for defences, tradition records several and none is the one this entry carried. The oldest is Ortiz's in 1731, and it is disconcerting: to find the road again, travellers stripped and bared themselves, because then the patianac was afraid of them and could no longer lead them off the way. The other, gathered in the same 1890 collection that devotes a chapter to it, is to put one's shirt on inside out, and that remedy is his and not the tigbalang's, though today it is more often cited for the latter.

The image that defines the tiyanak today — the abandoned newborn that cries so a compassionate traveller will take it in his arms, and that then shows teeth and claws and attacks — is a late stage of the tradition, and it should be dated rather than taken for ancient. None of the public-domain sources carries it. In 1589 the patianac is the mother dead in childbirth; in 1731 it hinders births and leads astray; in 1763 Mozo likens it to a pygmy and pairs it with the tigbalang; in 1803 Martínez de Zúñiga cites it beside the asuang as enemies of childbirth and of children; in 1890 and 1895 it is a sprite that cries like a newborn and leads astray; and in 1921 Dean Fansler, in his footnote, still defines it so, as a mischievous birth-spirit that lives in woods and fields and leads travellers astray at night. More than that: in the tale where they appear, the patianac are benevolent and give food and shelter to a blind man. The one gesture of picking it up recorded by the early sources is not Tagalog but Súbano, in Mindanao, and it ends not in an attack but in a worm. Telling this takes nothing from the being: it adds four centuries to it. And for the same reason two kinships must be withdrawn from this entry that had been attributed to it without support, with the Chinese jiangshi and with the Japanese kosodate-yūrei. The first is a stiff corpse that hops and has no connection whatever with childbirth; the second is a dead mother who comes back to buy sweets for her child, that is, the opposite of a lure. The real kinship, and Blumentritt says so in 1895, is with the Malay pontianak.