Aswang and tlahuelpuchi — the neighbour who takes blood

The danger is a person you know

Most folk creatures are somewhere else: in the forest, the water, the field, the night road. You deal with them by not being there.

These two are in the village.

The aswang complex of the Philippines and the tlahuelpuchi belief of rural Tlaxcala both say that the thing taking the children is an ordinary member of the community — someone with a name, a house and relatives — and that the problem is therefore not where to avoid but who to suspect.

Same shape

The parallels are close enough to be worth listing plainly.

Infants are the target. Both beliefs centre on the deaths of small children, which in both societies were frequent and often unexplained.

The defence is domestic. Garlic, metal, mirrors and arrangements of the sleeping space in Tlaxcala; garlic, salt, iron and the detection tests in the Philippines. In both, the protections are cheap and applied by the household itself. They were also prescribed for every night and often skipped: in the Tlaxcalan cases Nutini and Roberts collected, fewer than half the infants had any protection in place.

The sign is a light or a shape at night. A light moving over the fields in Tlaxcala; a sound in the ceiling, a bird, a dog in the Philippines.

The accusation attaches to people. And in both societies, with consequences.

One difference that changes everything

Then there is the difference, and it is not a detail.

The tlahuelpuchi is born. The condition arrives at a certain age, cannot be given up, and compels her to feed at intervals. She did not choose it and cannot escape it. Her family is understood to know, and to live with it.

The aswang, in most of the material, simply is one — and the moral weight falls accordingly. The detection lore is not interested in whether the accused can help it; it is interested in identifying her.

So the Tlaxcalan belief leaves room for an emotion the Philippine one largely does not: pity. The accused is afflicted rather than wicked. It is a more humane theory of the same accusation.

It did not make the accusation idle. The suspicion still settled on a particular woman in the village, and the forty-seven infant deaths Nutini and Roberts collected were real deaths in real households, each of them wanting someone to have caused it.

What both beliefs are for

Set the two side by side and the function is hard to miss.

In both societies, infants died suddenly and often. The medical cause was invisible, the grief was total, and the parents were present in the house when it happened.

Both beliefs do three things at once. They name a cause. They put the cause outside the household, which removes the question of parental fault. And they supply an action — garlic at the crib, a lamp kept burning, a barred door — which can be performed every night for as long as the fear lasts.

That is an enormous amount of work for a story to do, and it explains why these beliefs are so tenacious and so detailed. They are not entertainment. They are the local theory of infant death.

Why there is no connection

The Manila galleon ran between Acapulco and Manila for two and a half centuries, and it carried people, goods and stories in both directions. So the question of contact is reasonable.

The answer, as far as the material shows, is no: the two beliefs share structure but not vocabulary, not detail, not method, and not the central distinction about whether the condition is inherited.

What they share is the situation. Two agricultural societies with high infant mortality, close-knit villages, and no way to explain a child found dead in the morning arrived independently at the same answer — that it was someone in the village — and then differed, in a way that reflects each tradition's own temperament, about what that person deserved.

• Hugo G. Nutini and John M. Roberts, Bloodsucking Witchcraft: An Epistemological Study of Anthropomorphic Supernaturalism in Rural Tlaxcala (1993). University of Arizona PressThe whole Tlaxcalan side of the comparison: the condition a person is born with, the age at which it is said to declare itself, the compulsion to feed at intervals, the household protections and the forty-seven infant deaths the belief was used to account for. It is also why the tlahuelpuchi is the better documented of the two.
• Maximo D. Ramos, The Aswang Syncrasy in Philippine Folklore (1969). Western Folklore 28 (4), pp. 238–248. doi:10.2307/1499218The five-type classification behind the aswang side, and the reason the term is treated here as a category rather than as a single creature.
• Maximo D. Ramos, Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology (1971). University of the Philippines PressThe standard reference for the Philippine protective practice — garlic, salt, iron and the tests used on a suspect.
• Raul Pertierra, Viscera-Suckers and Female Sociality: The Philippine Asuang (1983). Philippine Studies 31 (3). doi:10.13185/2244-1638.1613The scholarly treatment of the asuang accusation as a feature of village social relations, and of relations between women in particular. It is the ground for locating the danger inside the community rather than out in the landscape.
• William Lytle Schurz, The Manila Galleon (1939). E. P. DuttonThe standard account of the Acapulco–Manila trade, which ran from 1565 to 1815 — the two and a half centuries that make the question of contact between the two beliefs worth raising at all.