From ‘aswang’ to EJK

Last week, I stayed in the 432-year-old Hotel zum Ritter St. Georg in Heidelberg. I chose the hotel for its age and the fact that its façade is one of the tourist attractions Rizal saw during his stay in 1886.

However, the big disappointment was the absence of historic ghosts to write home about. Encountering one or two ghosts would have made for a good Halloween column. Come to think of it, why is it that when Filipinos think of Halloween or “things that go bump in the night,” they conjure Western types drawn from 19th-century literature like Dracula and Frankenstein to more recent film characters like Chucky the murderous doll, Sadako, or flesh-eating zombies. With the notable exception of the 1988 film “Tiyanak,” Filipino Halloween décor and trick-or-treat costumes draw heavily on Western films like “Friday the 13th,” “Halloween,” “The Exorcist,” “The Omen,” “The Conjuring,” etc. instead of drawing from Philippine folklore. Where are the tikbalang, aswang, manananggal, and mangkukulam?

I guess the aswang faded or became extinct following postwar urbanization. The aswang’s natural rural habitat is gone, the darkness where it dwelled is lit by electric light. Blood or viscera-sucking types fed on unsuspecting folk who lived in “bahay kubo” with nipa or thatch roofs and bamboo slat flooring. Contemporary GI sheet roofs, concrete floors, electric lights, and CCTV cameras made aswang feeding more difficult. One cannot imagine aswang in Forbes Park or the upscale condos of BGC and Rockwell, they can’t even survive high-density shantytowns. Flying aswang would get caught in the maze of TV antennas and electric wires that dot the landscape.

The last time aswang made the news was when then Sen. Mar Roxas, who once represented Capiz, the aswang capital of the Philippines, delivered a speech with a garland of garlic. The stunt was supposed to allude to the anti-aswang properties of garlic, but the press labeled him “Boy Bawang,” a popular brand of “chichirya.”

During the postwar counterinsurgency operations in the Philippines, CIA operatives used the aswang or fear of the aswang to root out rebels in the barrios. First, rumors were spread about an aswang in town, making anyone new or unknown to the community suspect. An insurgent was caught, drained of blood, and the corpse was left to be discovered by townspeople, who would see the telltale pair of holes on the victim’s neck and blame the aswang. It’s uncanny that from that postwar psychological warfare we have come to the terror of Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs. Thus, the aswang moved from folklore to contemporary politics to the extrajudicial killings that littered nighttime streets and alleys with corpses of drug pushers, drug users, and people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

All these reflections led me to the late Gilda Cordero-Fernando’s illustrated retelling of an academic inquiry into the aswang in Bicol by the anthropologists Fr. Frank Lynch, SJ, and Fr. Richard Arens, SVD. From the ethnography, Fernando published a short book on everything we need to know about the aswang. There are two types: one that walks, another that flies. Both need an ointment or unguent to transform themselves from human to aswang form. Main ingredients of this foul-smelling ointment are chicken dung and human flesh, all mixed in coconut oil. A recipe for anti-aswang oil is included in the book:

“Select a coconut tree … [Pick] the coconut at twilight, and when it is wet gloomy and lonely. The breeze should be chilly and the moon a perfect ball. Grate the coconut and squeeze out the juice. Boil until it becomes oil using firewood from the mountain. Recite secret prayers. Throw all waste products in the ocean so that the aswang cannot trace who made the oil.” When an aswang approaches, the oil in the bottle will boil.

Another repellent is to “put anything that is scratchy in a small bottle of oil—thorny plants, rough leaves, dry bark, sack cloth, etc. Put the small bottle in a cloth bag and wear it on the neck to ward off aswang.” A simpler repellent is calamansi or garlic. To kill an aswang, one needs a bolo rather than a gun. Weapon of choice is the tail of a stingray if you can find one. To trap an aswang, one needs to scatter rice, corn, mustard, or the seeds of the trumpet flower. When the aswang comes to the spot, it will have an uncontrollable urge to pick up all the scattered seeds. This will give humans time to catch it.

As a boy, I read an illustrated book by Maximo D. Ramos, “The Creatures of Midnight,” that provided a catalog of all the different types of aswang and mangkukulam. It was an aswang survival guide that provided detailed instructions on how to detect, catch, and neutralize aswang. He also published “The Aswang Syncrasy in Philippine Folklore” (1969). The material in these books should be reprinted in a more contemporary form, illustrated by our talented komiks artists if only to trace how the aswang has morphed from folklore into extrajudicial killings.

Happy Halloween!

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Comments are welcome at aocampo@ateneo.edu