Babaylan

The gender question attaches to the office because of who was allowed to hold it. Effeminate men, called asog in the Visayas and bayog or bayok in Luzon, could be shamans and adopted women's dress and women's roles in doing so, and they were always fewer than the women. That connection is why the word turns up in gender vocabularies at all, and why it is so often reported as though babaylan were itself a third gender.

Where the word babaylan comes from

Two derivations compete and neither has displaced the other. The Austronesian account traces babaylan, balian and baylan to Proto-Western-Malayo-Polynesian balian, meaning shaman or medium, with cognates across the region: bobolian and bobohizan in Kadazan-Dusun, belian in Iban and Malay, walen in Old Javanese, balian in Balinese and in Ngaju, balieng in Makassar. Alfred McCoy took the same route in 1982, from the classical Malay belian, balian or waylan of Java, Bali, Borneo and Halmahera, and pointed out that the rituals and the social roles match as well as the root does.

The Visayan account keeps the word at home. Maria Milagros Geremia-Lachica notes that Hiligaynon babayi, woman, sits close to babaylan, and that Kinaray-a, still spoken in Antique and the interior towns of Iloilo, has bayi and bay/an, with bayi also used for a female grand elder. On that reading the word carries the femaleness of the office inside it.

One further theory has been rejected in print. Otto Dempwolff derived balian from Proto-Austronesian bali, to escort or accompany, with the suffix -an, giving one who escorts a soul to the other world. Robert Blust and Stephen Trussel found no evidence that balian is a suffixed form at all and consider the reading incorrect.

The word did not survive Christianisation evenly. Terms from that root largely disappeared among lowland Filipinos, though Bikol kept its own and added the Spanish feminine ending to make balyana, and Maranao kept walian with the sense shifted after Islamisation. Merriam-Webster carries babaylan as English, with the variants babailan, babalyan and babalian and the plural babaylanes, and defines it flatly as a pagan priest, priestess or medium in the central and southern Philippines.

How a person becomes babaylan

Most babaylan inherit the office. An older babaylan, usually a relative, takes on an apprentice, and among the Isneg the elder may choose from the eligible young women of the village. The alternative route is not chosen at all. A shamanic initiatory crisis, sometimes called shamanic illness, arrives as serious or chronic sickness, a near-death experience, seizures and trembling, depression, strange behaviour including climbing balete trees or vanishing for days with no memory of it, or as visions and dreams. These are read as encounters with the spirits, and in such a case the understanding is that the spirit chose the person.

Initiation follows either route, and is meant to gain or transfer the patronage of a spirit. The Visayan rite is the tupad or tupadan. Where a candidate arrived through shamanic illness, initiation is itself the cure: health or sanity returns when the person concedes to the wishes of the spirits.

Geremia-Lachica describes the same calling in Panay terms, manifested through dreams, visions, a lingering illness or strange events, and sets out what the office is for. The babaylan bargains with ancestral and environmental spirits for a person's dungan, a Panay concept meaning roughly a soul or a double. A person is healthy when the dungan is nurtured and strong, and falls sick when spirits capture or toy with it.

Why the gender of the babaylan is disputed

Three things about the gender of the babaylan are documented, and they do not agree with each other. The Aswang Project sets them out and refuses to choose: the role belonged to women, the role was held by people a modern reader would call transgender women, and the folk healers and babaylan of Panay today are mostly men. Any reasonable researcher, its editors write, would conclude that all of it is true, because each region of the islands went through its own history.

The explanation usually offered for the middle of that sequence is that the trans babaylan were convincing enough for the Spanish chroniclers to take them for women. Geremia-Lachica's 1996 paper Panay's Babaylan: The Male Takeover, given in The Review of Women's Studies, argues something harder and better dated: that the office moved from women to men, in Panay specifically, over the centuries of colonial rule and the uprisings that ran through them. The Aswang Project's editors call the convincing-transvestite theory non-academically accepted and its timeline troubling, and prefer hers.

What the babaylan did against Spanish rule

The babaylan was mediator between the gods and the people, healer of body and spirit, and close adviser to the datu on religion, medicine and natural events, which made the office political before the Spanish arrived and dangerous to them afterwards. Fray Diego Aduarte records babaylanes punished and their idols confiscated and burned.

From the closing decades of the sixteenth century to the early 1900s, Panay was disturbed by uprisings led by babaylanes against the missionaries, with friars poisoned or speared. Fray Juan Fernandez named Lambunao and Tubungan in Iloilo, and the province of Antique, as the strongholds. When Muslims invaded Panay between 1580 and 1590, the babaylanes Dupinagay, Monica Gapon and Augustina Hiticon used the opening to rally people back to the old faith and failed. At the close of the eighteenth century a hundred and eighty women, called diabolical in the report, gathered to preach the native religion and unsettled the town of Sibalom.

The best-remembered figure is later and is a woman. Estrella Bangotbanwa, in the second half of the nineteenth century, was called Tagsagod kang Kalibutan, Caretaker of the World, and drew a following as the officiant who could secure weather for a harvest. Her most dramatic act was a ritual that ended a three-year drought in the towns of Miagao and San Joaquin in Iloilo, and babaylanes still invoke her name.

Who calls themselves babaylan now

Philippine Indigenous communities still recognise a woman, or a man, as babaylan: someone who mediates with the spirit world, has spirit guides, and holds gifts of healing, foretelling and insight, and who works as ritualist, chanter and diviner, sometimes with knowledge of the therapies called hilot and arbularyo. The office carries different names in different languages, among them mumbaki, dawac, balian, katalonan, ma-aram and mambunong, and the Center for Babaylan Studies uses the local word for a specific person, region or community wherever it can.

The name has also travelled into the cities and the diaspora, where it is used by people drawn to what the founding organisers call the spirit in which the primary babaylans worked: resistance to colonisation, a belief in wholeness, and service to their communities. Those organisers describe themselves as babaylan-inspired rather than as babaylan, out of respect for the land-based babaylan of the Indigenous communities.

The line into the modern gender vocabulary runs through the same office. The Filipino anthropologist Martin F. Manalansan gives babaylan as one of two possible derivations for Bakla, the other being a portmanteau of babae and lalaki, and the Bakla entry carries what became of the asog after the office was suppressed.