BENEDICT, BAGOBO CEREMONIAL, MACK: AND MYTH 71 



employed when it is desired to emphasize the youth and the chastity 



of a girl. Jt is true that, in a broad sense, any unmarried woman 

 is daraga, Kur in poetical use daraga has the connotation of a pure 

 maid, a virgin. In the text of the song-, she is almost invariably 

 referred to by some metaphorical word or phraf s^ sited by 

 oatural phenomena. She is called a point of very high land that 

 the birds cannot fly up to. that even the winds may not reach. 

 though they are crying for her: again, she is figured as the trunk 

 of ;i Bturdy tree that the north wind is not able to break: or she 

 i- a waterfall, dropping over steep terraces, around which the 

 snakes make futile attempt- to curl themseh The bird, the 



wind, the snake — each of these represents the lover, foiled in 

 every attempt at approach to the girl. Here is a part of the Ogan 

 Daraga, or -Song of a Virtuous Woman." One young girl says 

 to another: "Friend, friend, listen to the song of the kalisawa 

 bird as it Hie- over the sea and is calling fifty drops of rain. It 

 i- well, my friend: we take shelter; the bulla leaf spread over 

 our heads protects us from rain from the north and rain from the 

 south." In the same manner, practically all of the little poems 

 that at first sight seem to be nature songs are purely allegorical 

 in character. 



In those ancient days, metamorphosis 14 ' was an ordinary event. 

 Many persons were turned into trees and stones and rocks, some- 

 time- as a swift judgment upon them for presumptuous under- 

 takings. Wari, a brother of Lumabat's, was transformed into n 

 screech-owl for his disregard of the commands of a god. ,4S That 

 the tree-hornbill used to be a man. is a well-known fact; and the 

 proof i-. that if you look at the body of a hornbill, under the 

 feathers, at some point between the neck and the wing, you will 

 see that its skin is like the skin of man. On the other hand, the 

 kingfisher, 140 as we learn from a myth, once turned into a beau- 

 tiful woman. Transformations of monkeys to buso, l5 ° of a squirrel 



has been noted that I and r are constantly interchangeable. Cf. Blair and Robertson: 

 op. cit., vol. 16\ p. 129. 1904. 



1 * ' l'or the episodes describing these transformations, see Jour. Am. Folk-lore, vol. 26, 

 pp. 21, 51. 1913. Cf. II. 0. Beyer: op. cit. The Philippine Jour. Sci., vol. 8, pp. 

 89—90. 1913. 



li8 Cf. Jour. Am. Folk-lore, vol. 26, p. 23. 1913. 



1 " 9 Cf. ibid., p. 54. 



''" Cf. ibid., p. 47. 



