
RELIGION 193 
way at point after point. Yet the continuity of native 
life as a whole being undisturbed by any great shock, 
the lower civilization of the islands remained the 
recipient organism, as it were, which received and 
assimilated and worked over the more exalted literary 
plots and religious concepts that came into it piece- 
meal. 
Heroic Romances. The Philippine nationality 
whose mythology is best known is the Tinggian, a 
people never wholly out of contact with the coast and 
yet maintaining their ancient paganism to the present. 
The longest and finest of their tales can only be de- 
scribed as romances of battle, love, magic, hidden births, 
intrigue, and other adventure cast in the heroic mould. 
The actors are Aponi-tolau, the great warrior, and 
Aponi-bolinayen, whom he marries; his sister Aponi- 
gawant and Aponi-bolinayen’s brother, A poni-balagan, 
between whom a second love story is spun; their parents 
and sons; and innumerable monsters, mythical beings, 
and enemies. The chief personages appear under a 
great variety of names, but are always identified as the 
same. Each narrator recounts his tale differently, so 
that the stories frequently overlap in incidents, and yet 
possess a total variety sufficient to have made possible 
their combination into a great coherent cycle. This 
unification into one great epic the Tinggian however 
never accomplished. This failure would be enough, 
even if other indications were lacking, to suggest that he 
had never come into direct contact with the Hindu; 
since the latter at an ancient time developed the faculty 
of combining vast numbers of episodes into a long 
plot. On the other hand, the primary motives of these 
Tinggian romances are love and fighting, and suggest 
very strongly that these tales are not the uninfluenced 
product of a naively primitive culture; since really un- 
