BENEDICT, BAGOBO CEREMONIAL, MAGIC AXD MYTH 275 



by hearing them sung in their sailing, in their work, in their 

 amusements, and in their festivals, and, better yet, when they 

 bewail their dead. In those barbarous songs, they recount the 

 fabulous genealogies and deeds of their gods ..." 520 A record to a 

 like effect was made by a Recollect Father in Zambales, on the 

 west coast of Luzon. "Besides that adoration which they give to 

 the devil, they revered several false gods — one, in especial, called 

 baihala mey capal, whose false genealogies and fabulous deeds they 

 celebrated in certain tunes and verses like hymns. Their whole 

 religion was based on those songs, and they were passed on from 

 generation to generation, and were sung in their feasts and most 

 solemn assemblies." 52T 



The failure of the Filipino to preserve in written form their 

 mythical epics and ceremonial recitations, coupled with the almost 

 complete extermination of the songs and stories that had passed 

 by word of mouth down through a great number of generations, r,2s 

 leaves us no means of drawing a comparison between the religious 

 literature of the Tas;al and that of the Bagobo. We do not know 

 but that the vanished romantic myths of the Tagal, and of the 

 Yisayan too, were characterized by the same literary quality as 

 the ulit and the ogan 520 that are sung or recited by the mountain 

 Bao-obo of to-dav. 



If the wild tribes and the Filipino received the fundamentals 

 common to them all from the Indian archipelago, with which area 

 they share so many cultural traits, both material and religious, some 

 infiltration of Hindu elements into their rites and myths would 

 naturally be looked for, in view of the long occupancy of the 

 southern Malay islands by people from the mainland of India. 



The more or less mythical chronology of the Javanese dates the 

 introduction of the Hindu religion into Java as far back as 14DA.D., 

 or even earlier, since the first Indian prince is reputed to have 

 arrived at Java in the 75 th - year of our era. 530 Crawfurd regards 

 these dates as presumably fabulous, and suggests the sixth century 

 as the earliest period to which, with any high degree of proba- 



D2G Blaik and Robektson : The Philippine Islands, vol. 29, pp. 282—283. 1905. 

 ** 7 Ibid., vol. 21, pp. 137—138. 1905. 

 528 See, however, footnote 477, on the Xegros manuscript. 



513 The ulit is an epic, or long mythical romance; while the or/an is a short song, 

 often accompanied by the guitar. 



030 Cf. T. S. Raffles: History of Java, vol. 2, p. 67. 1817. 



