Priests and Shamans

1. Catolonan – the head priest who communicated with spirits and led their ceremonies. They may
either be male or female.
2. Mangagauay – witches who pretended to heal the sick. They are believed to possess the power to
produce maladies capable of causing death if they wished to do so.
3. Manyisalat – applied remedies which were believed to cause lovers to abandon and despise each
other.
4. Mancocolam – had the ability to emit an inextinguishable fire at least once per month which
caused sickness and death.
5. Hocloban – a greater version of the mangangauay who had the ability to cause death with the
raise of their hand. They may also heal those who they have given an illness.
6. Silagan – kills anyone who is clothes in white by tearing out their liver and eating it.
7. Magtatangal – shows himself at night without his head or his entrails. This was believed to be a
fable, but some locals say that they have witnessed him.
8. Osuang – a sorcerer who can fly and ate the flesh of men.
9. Mangangayoma – a witch who deceived people to fall in love.
10. Sonat – a preacher who assisted people to die in at which time they predicted.
11. Pangatahojan – a soothsayer who predicted the future.
12. Bayoguin – a man whose true nature inclined toward that of a woman.

Burial and Death

o The deceased are buried beside their house.

o In the death of a datu, the people would mourn him for four days and four nights. Afterwards,
they would lay him on a boat, which served as his coffin while a slave kept guard over him.
Animals of the same species and opposite sex would be placed at the end of each oar.
o In the death of a warrior, a living slave would be tied beneath his living body until they died.

o The Aetas or Negritos would have an alternative way of burying the dead. They dug a hole where
the dead would be placed perpendicularly to the ground, while their head remained unburied.
They would then cover the head with coconut to serve as a shield. They would then kill an Indian
in retribution while wearing a token on their necks.

Afterlife
o Maca – their version of heaven and is considered a place of rest. Bathala governed Maca and
only those who are just, valiant, lived without doing harm and those who possessed other moral
virtues would go to this place after death.
 o Casanaan – their version of hell, a place of anguish. Sitan, a demon dwelt this place and those
who did wrong would be punished in this place after death.

So far, there were two authorial contexts have been established:

 firstly, Juan de Plasencia reflected Spanish colonialist interests of evangelizing and, via
evangelism, subjugating the natives;
 and, secondly, he gravely erred in faithfully representing the Tagalog people, due to the unreliable
nature of his methods and the prejudice that had seeped into his writing.
(The following are the statements from the document contain a bias)
(read the slides)
The desire to use Christianity as a weapon, Plasencia would have still perceived the faith and culture of
the Tagalogs as mere "superstitions" that ought to be "banished".
While Plasencia continued to enumerate the witches - as he called them - he failed to notice that he
himself admitted that these catolonan were often "nobles" or at least "authority figures" around their
community.
In considering Plasencia in the most charitable light, it becomes evident that the catolonan - this Tagalog
high priest - exerted such social control and influence that a conceptually disorganized barangay can
come together and perform customs and rites. This evidenced that some level of cultural organization
existed within the indigenous Tagalog faith system.
Politically, Plasencia was a colonizer, who sought to evangelize the natives of the islands under King
Philip II. Personally, he had no direct access to the Tagalog experience and yet he grossly intervened in
the data he had gathered. Doctrinally, as a Franciscan Catholic, he saw himself as superior to the natives,
coloring his bias.