80 ANNALS NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



brownish in color, and extremely rich and sweet, having a flavor 

 suggestive of molasses mingled with old rum. It is a pleasant 

 tasting and refreshing beverage, and its intoxicating properties are 

 not excessive. At the moment of offering to the spirits this sacred 

 drink, the priest stirs it with a spray of fragrant manangid, and 

 with a spoon made by twisting to the proper shape a fragment of 

 bulla leaf. A liquor very similar to balabba, if not identical with 

 it. functioned as the ceremonial drink of the Tagal people, in their 

 pagan days. Bishop Aduarte makes interesting references to this use. " ;t 



Betel Ritual. No ceremony is complete without an offering of 

 hotel to one. or to all, of the three classes of supernatural beings — 

 the gods, the huso and the spirits of the dead. When the occasion 

 is one of a high ceremony, performed before a main altar, the 

 areca-nuts 1CS are sliced into lengthwise sections, just as in the 

 customary manner for chewing, and each section is laid on a betel- 

 leaf (buyo) 160 placed in a set position. A ceremonial sifting over 

 the nuts and leaves of lime from a hamhoo tube follows, the lime 

 having been made by the usual process of calcining certain shells 

 to a fine powder. The areca, betel and lime are afterward chewed 

 by old people at the altar. 



Another common form of making a betel offering is that in use 

 at a hut-shrine, when a certain numher of entire (that is, unsliced) 

 areca-nuts are placed within the shrine with an appropriate ritual, 

 hut are never afterward taken away for chewing. There are other 

 ceremonies when entire nuts are placed in leaf-dishes (Jdntidok) 



4 While working in the province of Pangasinan, in west-central Luzon, he wrote, in 

 1640, that ''there were given up an infinite number of pieces of earthenware and a great 

 <leal of very old wine — for this is regarded as the thing consecrated to the devil ; and 

 no one dares touch or go near it except at the time of the sacrifice, and then only the 

 minister who perforins it..." Aduarte: "Historia." Blair and Roukktson: op. cit., 

 vol. .'511, p. 186, 1905. A few pages further on, the kind of wine is specified : "These 

 chiefs were the very lirst to cause to be brought the vessels of Qnila (this is a wine 

 which they make of sugar cane, and when it hns aged for some years it has the color 

 of our amber wine). This they esteem very highly and keep with great care, using it at 

 their feasts in honor of their idols." Ibid., vol. 3(1, p. 243. 



16; ' Areca catechu — known among foreigners as the betel-nut palm. The nuts, shaped 

 much like olives, grow in clusters just below the leaves at the top of bnre, light-colored 

 trunks thai reach a height of 40 or 50 feet. The Bagobo call the tree mdmddn and a 

 single nut, mama. 



"" Buyo — the Visayan name for the climbing plant, Piper betel, the leaves of which 

 arc used everywhere in the Islands for chewing with areca-nuts. The Bagobo call it 

 monika. The plant is trained on sticks and _ r n>w.- to a height of several feet. 



