Manananggal

The name is an instruction

Manananggal comes from the Tagalog tanggál — to remove, to detach, to separate — and the name means something close to "the one who separates herself". Among the creatures on this site that is unusual. Most are named for where they live or what they are: the forest one, the water one, the old woman. This one is named for a single action, performed on her own body.

The action is the whole figure. By day she is an ordinary woman in the village. After dark she divides at the waist, leaving the lower half standing upright where she separated, and the upper half grows large bat-like wings and flies. She hunts sleeping pregnant women, reaching a fetus with a long proboscis-like tongue; the lore also attaches her to newborns, to newlyweds and to lovers. It has been read, plausibly, as an explanation for sudden miscarriage in a place and time that had no other.

In Maximo Ramos's classification of the aswang she is the viscera-sucker, the second of five types. She is not a separate kind of being from the aswang — she is one of its forms, and the clearest case of why the English habit of treating "aswang" as a single monster falls apart.

The lower half

Everything practical about her concerns the part she leaves behind.

The standing lower torso does not move and does not defend itself. It waits. Anyone who finds it can end her by treating the exposed flesh — salt, ash, garlic, or fire — so that the two halves cannot rejoin. If she fails to recombine before sunrise she dies.

This produces a very particular kind of monster. She cannot be fought, because whatever is flying has no stake in a fight; but she can be defeated by someone who never sees her at all, simply by walking through a banana grove at the right hour and noticing a pair of legs. The danger runs entirely one way and the counter runs entirely the other. Her power and her vulnerability are the same act.

It is also, structurally, a story about a woman whose secret is physically findable. The detection problem that organises the whole aswang complex — how do you know what your neighbour is — has here a literal answer lying in the undergrowth.

Tik-tik: the sound that lies

She has a second name taken from a sound: tik-tik, after the noise she is said to make in flight. And the lore attaches a rule to it that is worth stating on its own, because it is doing something clever.

The fainter the tik-tik, the closer she is. A loud one means she is far off.

Whether this began as an observation about a real animal's call or as a deliberate twist, the effect is to make the one piece of warning information untrustworthy. You cannot relax at a quiet night. The same inversion appears elsewhere in Philippine folklore — the tiyanak's cry follows the same rule in the Batangas version — which suggests it is a regional convention rather than a one-off.

Repulsion by garlic, salt and holy water she shares with the rest of the aswang category.

What it looks like

What the record describes. A woman, ordinary, until she divides. Then: an upper torso with the entrails exposed at the separation, large bat-like wings, fangs, and the long tongue used for feeding. The lower half is described only as standing and motionless.

The earliest colonial notice is Plasencia's letter of 1589, under the older name magtatangal. He calls it a fable while recording that people said it existed, and his description differs from the later one in a way worth noting: his magtatangal goes about at night without its head and entrails, and puts the head back before morning. The separation at the waist is not yet there. Better evidence of what the word meant to its speakers comes from a dictionary: Domingo de los Santos's Vocabulario de la lengua Tagala (Tayabas, 1703) defines it as a witch who flies and eats human flesh while carrying only half of her body. A lexicographer has no stake in whether it is true; he only has to say what people mean.

What horror cinema added. The Philippine film industry has fixed her silhouette — wings spread, viscera trailing, mid-air, usually lit from below — and has made the flying half the image of her. The folklore's emphasis is the opposite way round: the interesting half is the one on the ground.

Origin and sources

Ramos (1971) is the reference work, and his 1969 classification is what situates her. Eugenio's Philippine Folk Literature volumes carry the collected texts. The two colonial sources — Plasencia 1589 and de los Santos's Vocabulario — are valuable for different reasons: the first for date, the second for meaning.

A note on the comparative material. A related figure is recorded right across island Southeast Asia — the Malay penanggalan, the Balinese leyak, the Dayak kuyang, the Minangkabau palasik, the Thai krasue, the Cambodian ap — and the resemblance is close enough to be worth stating. But the regional figure separates at the neck: it is a flying head with the organs hanging beneath it, not an upper body parting at the waist.

That makes Plasencia's 1589 notice more interesting than it first appears. His magtatangal also went about without its head. The waist-separation that defines the manananggal today is the later and more local development; the earliest Philippine description sits with the regional head-type.

The frequently repeated comparison to Balkan vampire lore, by contrast, appears without support and should not be carried forward.

• Maximo D. Ramos, Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology (1971)
• Fray Juan de Plasencia, Customs of the Tagalogs (letter dated Nagcarlán, 21 October 1589). English translation in Blair & Robertson, The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, vol. VII (1903) (1589)
• Fray Domingo de los Santos, Vocabulario de la lengua Tagala (1703). First edition printed at Tayabas, eight years after the author's death. Reprinted Sampaloc 1794; third edition Manila 1835.