BENEDICT, BAGOBO CEBEMONIAL, MAGIC AND MYTH 43 



food. It is said that all asuang have oil in their bodies for lubri- 

 cating their wings, so that flight is easy. A human asuang is 

 ordinarily a person of tall stature, extremely thin, with a shiny 

 skin, and with eye-balls slightly protruding. However other bodily 

 characters may differ, there is one sure mark of an asuang to be 

 found in the pupil of the eye. Suppose that some neighbor is 

 suspected of being an asuang. One must examine his eyes, and if 

 in the pupil there is detected the figure of a boy upside down, 

 that person is unmistakably an asuang. 



Among the Visayan on the coast of Davao gulf, it is said that 

 the asuang systematically propagates the baliti by making use 

 of rotten tree trunks as a suitable soil. An old tree of which the 

 native name is ononang was shown me by Manuel, a clever Yisayan 

 boy, who assured me that that was an asuang-haunted tree. It 

 had a hollow trunk, into the decaying texture of which an adven- 

 titious shoot of a baliti had intruded, aud had pressed its way 

 upward through the soft material, its roots intertwined within the 

 trunk, its glossy, sharp-pointed leaves growing out through nume- 

 rous crevices in the bark. "Nobody but an asuang," explained 

 Manuel, "can make the trunk of any tree hollow. You see, the 

 asuang works himself through some small hole in the bark and, 

 with his long nails, scoops out the trunk and claws away until 

 only a hollow shell remains. That done, he plants a seed or root 

 of baliti to grow there, and then he goes off to work at another tree." 05 



INTERPRETATION OF PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT 



Natural objects or natural phenomena, as such, a Bagobo rarely 

 worships; but the larger processes of the physical universe, that 

 take shape in air and sky and earth and sea, are associated in his 

 mental processes with spirits, and these spirits are made the objects 

 of varied cults, some in the capacity of gods, some in that of 

 demons. The functions of nature spirits are rather sharply distin- 

 guished one from another, for the underlying concepts of the Bagobo 

 would not lend themselves readily to expression in terms of a 

 pantheistic religion. So far from conceiving of one common vital 

 principle as pervading nature and unifying it, he puts different 



95 For other asuang myths, cf. Jour. Am. Folk-lore, vol. 19, pp. 205 — 211, 1906; vol. 

 26, pp. 25—28, 31—32, 42—53, 57. 1913. 



