Bakunawa

Seven moons

The sky used to have seven moons. The supreme god made them, and the Bakunawa — a serpent living in the sea, or in the sky, or in the underworld depending on the telling — ate six. That is why there is one left, and why the god became its enemy. A second version is quieter and stranger: the creature had a human lover, her home was burned, and it set out to devour all the moons in grief.

Eclipses are the story's continuation. The serpent is taking the last moon. In one variant it is not predation at all but homesickness — it is trying to get back where it came from.

And then the detail that makes this myth different from most: the marks on the moon. In the West Visayan version recorded by Fernando Buyser in 1913, Bathala planted bamboo on the last moon to protect it, and the dark patches on the lunar surface are those plants. The myth explains something its audience could verify by looking up on any clear night. It is not a story about a distant time; it is an account of the evidence in the sky.

A note on dates, because they are usually elided. Buyser's Mga Sugilanong Karaan (1913) is the first documented version of the seven-moons narrative. The earliest notice we have been able to confirm of the belief itself is Fr. Tomas Ortiz's description of the eclipse rites in 1731. Argensola's Conquista de las Islas Malucas (Madrid, 1609) is often cited as an earlier mention, but we have not found the passage and do not repeat the claim. It is a Cebuano literary record of an oral tradition, not a colonial-era text, and the distinction matters when citing it.

What people did during an eclipse

They went outside and made noise. Pots, drums, bells, anything metal, struck as hard and as long as the eclipse lasted, to make the Bakunawa let go. Children sang; there is a Hiligaynon eclipse song. Some accounts invert the method and have music played gently to put the creature to sleep instead.

Fr. Tomas Ortiz recorded the practice in 1731, in the account that reaches us through Zúñiga's 1893 compilation. His version is interesting for a reason beyond the ritual: he reports the moon-eater as being identified variously as a dragon, a tiger or a crocodile. Eighteen years after the first European notice of the Bakunawa, a friar observing the rite finds no agreement among his informants about what was eating the moon — only about what to do.

That ordering tells you what the belief was for. The practice is stable; the creature is negotiable.

A calendar, not only a monster

The Bakunawa had a job. Its movements were read as a geomantic calendar, and formed part of the divination performed by the babaylan, the Visayan priestesses. Mansueto Porras's Signosan (1919) records the system; McCoy's Baylan (1982) is the scholarly treatment.

This reframes the figure substantially. A serpent that eats the moon is a myth. A serpent whose position through the year tells you when to plant, when to travel and when to avoid an undertaking is an instrument — closer in function to a zodiac than to a bogeyman. The eclipse story is the dramatic part of a system that was mostly used for ordinary scheduling.

It also explains why the figure survived the conversion of the islands better than most. A monster can be denounced. A calendar is harder to replace.

Not one creature

The moon-eater is archipelago-wide and it is not the same animal twice. Alongside the Visayan Bakunawa there is the Tagalog Laho, the Kapampangan Láwû, the Hiligaynon Bawa and Olimaw, the Mandaya and Manobo Tambanakua, the Bagobo Minokawa — a giant bird — and the Maranao Arimaonga, a lion.

A serpent in one language group, a bird in another, a lion in a third, all doing the same thing to the same moon. What is shared is the explanation of eclipses and the response to them; the creature is the local variable. This is a good corrective to the habit of treating "Philippine mythology" as one system, and it is why this page is titled Bakunawa rather than something generic.

What it looks like

What the iconography gives. A serpent or dragon with a looped tail and a single horn on the snout. It is described as a sea serpent at least as often as a dragon, and placed in the sky or the underworld. Comparison with the Nāga and with Asian dragon traditions is standard in the literature and is plausible on the trade-contact evidence, though this page does not take a position on descent.

What later illustration added. Scale and menace. The modern Bakunawa is typically drawn vast, dark and jawed wide at the moon, which is a reasonable reading of the eclipse scene but puts all the emphasis on the predation and none on the calendar.

Origin and sources

Buyser (1913) for the narrative, Porras (1919) and McCoy's Baylan (1982) for the calendar, Ortiz (1731, via Zúñiga 1893) for the earliest confirmed notice. The regional variants are catalogued in Demetrio and Cordero-Fernando's The Soul Book (1991) and in Apostol (2012). Damiana Eugenio's 2001 reinterpretation of the seven-moons story is the standard modern scholarly reading.

• Fernando Buyser, Mga Sugilanong Karaan (1913)
• Mansueto Porras, Signosan (1919)
• Alfred W. McCoy, Baylan: Animist Religion and Philippine Peasant Ideology (1982). Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 10 (3), pp. 141–194