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Before the Cross and the Crescent: Indigenous Spirituality in the Pre-Colonial Philippines

Prehistoric to contact period (pre-1565) Archipelago-wide

The Animated World

Before the cross arrived with Magellan in 1521 and Islam spread through the southern archipelago from the 14th century onward, the peoples of the Philippines lived within a religious system that the Spanish would dismiss as “paganism” and “devil worship.” It was neither. It was a coherent spiritual framework — animist, ancestor-centered, and ecologically grounded — that organized the relationship between human communities and the nonhuman world.

The vocabulary of this framework persists in Philippine languages to this day: anito, diwata, bathala, babaylan. These are not fossil words. They are the residue of a living tradition that took centuries of colonial suppression to marginalize, and that has never fully disappeared.

The Manunggul Jar

The oldest material evidence of Philippine spiritual practice comes from Tabon Cave in Palawan, where in 1964 the National Museum archaeologist Robert Fox excavated a secondary burial jar of extraordinary beauty.

The Manunggul Jar — dated to approximately 890–710 BCE — is a lidded burial vessel. On its lid sit two figures in a boat: one paddling, the other with arms crossed in a posture of stillness. The standard interpretation, following Fox and subsequent scholars, is that this depicts the journey of the soul to the afterworld — the dead, accompanied by a spirit guide, crossing the water to the realm beyond.

This is not casual decoration. It is theology in clay — a statement about the nature of death, the existence of an afterlife, and the necessity of ritual to ensure safe passage. The Manunggul Jar predates Christianity by nearly a millennium and predates Islam in the Philippines by over two thousand years.

It is now a National Cultural Treasure of the Philippines.

Anito and Diwata

The core concept of pre-colonial Philippine religion was the anito — a term that encompasses ancestral spirits, nature spirits, and guardian beings. The anito were not abstract gods but immanent presences inhabiting specific places: a particular tree, a boulder, a river bend, a mountain peak.

Miguel de Loarca, writing in 1582 (recorded in Blair & Robertson, Volume V), described the Visayan belief system:

“They worship what they call diwata, which are spirits they believe reside in large trees, rocks, and promontories. Before cutting a tree or passing a notable place, they offer food and ask permission.”

The diwata — a term derived from the Sanskrit devata (deity) — were not worshipped in the Christian sense but propitiated. The relationship was transactional: humans offered food, betel nut, wine, or animal sacrifice, and the diwata in return ensured safe passage, good harvests, successful fishing, or recovery from illness.

This was ecological religion. The anito and diwata mapped the sacred geography of the landscape — identifying which places demanded respect, which resources could be taken and which must be left, which seasons were appropriate for planting or fishing. As environmental historians have noted, animist systems function as de facto conservation regimes, limiting resource extraction by embedding it in a framework of spiritual obligation.

The Babaylan

The ritual specialist of pre-colonial Philippine society was the babaylan (also catalonan in Tagalog, baylan in Visayan, balian in other languages) — a figure who combined the roles of priestess, healer, medium, and community counselor.

The babaylan was overwhelmingly female, though male babaylan who dressed and lived as women — the asog or bayog — are documented in multiple early Spanish sources. Alcina, writing of the Visayas, described the asog as “men who dressed as women and performed the rituals of women” and who were “held in great esteem.” This has been analyzed by scholars including J. Neil Garcia and Zeus Salazar as evidence of an accepted category of gender variance in pre-colonial Philippine society.

The babaylan’s functions included:

  • Spirit mediation — communicating with anito on behalf of the community, often through trance or possession states
  • Healing — using herbal knowledge combined with ritual to treat illness, which was often understood as a consequence of spiritual imbalance
  • Divination — reading omens, interpreting dreams, and advising the datu on propitious times for planting, warfare, or travel
  • Death ritual — guiding the spirits of the deceased to the afterworld through elaborate mortuary ceremonies
  • Conflict resolution — mediating disputes through spiritual authority

The babaylan’s authority was parallel to, and sometimes exceeded, that of the datu. Plasencia’s Customs of the Tagalogs notes that the catalonan was consulted on all important community decisions. In some cases, the babaylan was the leader — spiritual and political authority vested in the same person.

The Boxer Codex

The Boxer Codex (c. 1590), an anonymous manuscript containing some of the earliest illustrations of Filipino peoples, includes depictions of religious practices:

  • Offerings placed at the base of large trees
  • Ritual feasting with food laid out for the spirits as well as the living
  • Elaborate dress and ornamentation associated with ritual functionaries
  • Burial practices including secondary burial in jars

The codex provides visual evidence of a material culture of religion — objects, spaces, and practices that were already being suppressed by the time the images were painted.

The Mortuary Complex

Pre-colonial Philippine societies maintained elaborate mortuary traditions that varied by region and social status:

  • Jar burial — the Manunggul Jar tradition. The deceased was first exposed or buried until the flesh decayed, then the bones were collected and placed in a decorated jar. This practice is documented archaeologically from Palawan to the Visayas.

  • Boat burial — in some communities, the dead were placed in boat-shaped coffins, reflecting the belief that the journey to the afterworld was a sea voyage. Archaeological examples have been found in the Visayas and Mindanao.

  • Cave burial — natural caves and rock shelters served as burial sites, particularly in Palawan, Samar, and the Cordillera region. The Kabayan mummies of Benguet — fire-dried and smoked remains dated from as early as 1200 CE — represent a highland tradition of corpse preservation that is unique in Southeast Asia.

  • Grave goods — the dead were buried with objects for use in the afterlife: trade ceramics, gold ornaments, weapons, food. The richness of grave goods correlated with social status, providing archaeologists with evidence of social stratification.

The Pantheon

While Philippine religion was primarily local and nature-centered, some broader divine figures appear across multiple ethnolinguistic groups:

  • Bathala — the Tagalog supreme deity, creator of the world. The word likely derives from the Sanskrit bhattara (lord), suggesting Indianized cultural influence.
  • Sitan — ruler of the underworld in Tagalog tradition, with a retinue of lesser beings who tested the dead
  • Sidapa — the Visayan deity of death, who measured the lifespan of each person by marking a tree
  • Apolaki — the Tagalog/Pangasinan god of war and the sun
  • Mayari — goddess of the moon, associated with beauty and combat

These figures were not organized into a systematic theology. Each community maintained its own set of narratives, its own sacred sites, and its own ritual calendar. The result was not a single religion but a family of related practices — a religious ecology as diverse as the islands themselves.

The Suppression and the Survival

The Spanish colonial campaign against indigenous religion was systematic. Missionaries destroyed ritual objects (larao, carved wooden figures used in anito veneration), burned offerings, and publicly humiliated babaylan. The Synod of Manila (1582) explicitly ordered the destruction of all “idols” and the suppression of “pagan” ceremonies.

Yet the old practices survived — in the mountain communities of the Cordillera, in the Mangyan communities of Mindoro, in the rituals of Muslim Mindanao, and in the folk Catholicism of the lowlands, where the anito were quietly mapped onto Catholic saints and the babaylan’s healing traditions persisted under new names.

The atang (food offering to the dead) is still practiced in many Philippine communities. The pag-aanito ritual persists in attenuated form. The concept of kaluluwa (soul) retains its pre-colonial structure even within Catholic parishes. The old religion did not die. It went underground — and from there, it continues to surface.

Primary sources: Miguel de Loarca, “Relación de las Islas Filipinas” (1582), in Blair & Robertson, Vol. V; Juan de Plasencia, “Customs of the Tagalogs” (1589), in B&R Vol. VII; Francisco Alcina, Historia de las islas e indios de Bisayas (1668); The Boxer Codex (c. 1590). Secondary: Robert Fox, The Tabon Caves (1970); William Henry Scott, Barangay (1994); F. Landa Jocano, Philippine Mythology (1969); Zeus Salazar, “Faith Healing and Spirit Mediumship,” Asian Folklore Studies (1992); J. Neil Garcia, Philippine Gay Culture (1996).