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Old Belief
← Minokawa
Full moon in total eclipse over a dark sea, the whole disc dim copper-red with a brighter rim at one edge, faint red light on the water below. The lunar eclipse the Bagobo explain as the Minokawa swallowing the moon.

the moon swallowed

The event is the same everywhere: the moon going dark and copper-red, visible to everyone at once, over in an hour.

Basis: The lunar eclipse as the occasion for the belief · AI-generated

About the Minokawa

A bird large enough to swallow the moon, from the Bagobo of Mindanao: the same eclipse the Visayas explain with a serpent.

  • Laura Watson Benedict, Bagobo myths (in Journal of American Folklore) (1913)Early twentieth-century collection of Bagobo narrative from Mindanao, the standard early source for this material. Collected by an outsider, with the limitations that implies.
  • Maximo D. Ramos, Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology (1971)The standard classification, which sets the regional eclipse-eaters beside one another and makes the pattern visible.
  • Damiana L. Eugenio, Philippine Folk Literature: The Myths (1993)Collected myth texts from across the islands, including the regional eclipse narratives.

Read the full Minokawa entry →

More of this creature

Enormous dark bird perched on a sea headland, its grey metal beak longer than the fishing canoe below it, where two Filipino fishermen stand hauling nets. The Minokawa of Bagobo belief, the bird said to swallow the moon.steel beak and blade feathers →Three bossed brass gongs of different sizes propped against a plank wall with a small laced drum in front of them and padded mallets lying ready on the floor. Gongs and a drum, the response to the Minokawa taking the moon.the noise makers →Open sea running in low green swells to a hazy horizon under a pale overcast sky, a break of yellow light where the two meet, no land anywhere. The eastern horizon where the Minokawa is said to wait for the moon.the eastern horizon →

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