Tagalog

Bathala is the supreme being of the Tagalog account, and the working religion is conducted with the anito rather than with him. The pattern is the familiar one of a creator who is acknowledged and not administered to, with an order of nearer powers who are.

The anito are ancestral and local at once. The spirits of the dead of a family remain concerned with it and are represented, addressed and fed; alongside them are the spirits of places, of the fields, of the sea and of specific features of the landscape. The distinction between an ancestor and a spirit of place is not sharply drawn, and the same word covers both.

There is no assembly, no divine kingship contested between generations, and no fixed roster. Deities named in the early Spanish accounts vary between regions, and the Tagalog set is not the Visayan set.

The specialists were the katalonan, who conducted the ceremonies through which the anito were addressed, and the office was frequently held by women.

What happened to this tradition is part of its shape. Spanish missionaries identified the anito with the demonic and worked systematically to suppress the practice, and much of what survived did so inside Catholic forms. Contemporary revival movements have reconstructed from the colonial record, which is a different thing from continuous transmission, and the atlas records that distinction.

Almost everything recorded about pre-colonial Tagalog religion was written by the people suppressing it, within a century of their arrival, and there is no indigenous written account to set beside it.

The Boxer Codex, an illustrated manuscript from around 1590, is the earliest substantial description, and it is exceptional for its coloured illustrations of Philippine peoples. Juan de Plasencia's account of Tagalog customs and religion, written for administrative purposes in the 1580s, is the single most quoted source for the deities and the offices, and Pedro Chirino added another early description. These are the foundation of the entire subject.

They were written to enable conversion and colonial government, they describe practices their authors regarded as devil worship, and they are the work of men who did not stay long and who worked through interpreters. They are also, in places, careful, and they preserve names and functions that would otherwise be entirely lost.

The pre-colonial script, baybayin, was in use at contact, but it was written on perishable materials and no pre-colonial religious text survives in it.

Later folklore collection, from the nineteenth century onward, gathered material that had continued under Catholic cover, and it is not straightforward to distinguish survival from later reconstruction within it.

Modern revival draws on the same colonial documents any scholar would use, which is worth stating plainly.