Birth of the Manananggal

Written by Elsa Valmidiano

Invaders clad in metal armor with pale skin and hairy faces, who smelled of ash and sour sweat, came upon Ináng-bayan like brutal ghosts in human flesh. The people of Ináng-bayan had irreverently coined these invaders the “kili kili mumu.” The kili kili mumu had claimed Ináng-bayan on behalf of their queen who had lived in a faraway kingdom. They sought to plunder Ináng-bayan which had been rich in gold and jasmine. The people had never heard of this queen and wondered if she was just as smelly, hairy, and pale-faced as her men. The kili kili mumu swept across the land with their new order.

Those who first spotted the arrival of the invaders on the beach indicated how they smelled the kili kili mumu’s presence before they actually saw them. Their hair and beards were greasy and severely matted. They had dirty fingernails, which they chewed off into jagged edges with their yellowed teeth or which they allowed to grow long and cracked. There was nothing friendly in their manner of speaking. They stomped instead of walked as if each footstep demanded surrender and subjugation.

Before the kili kili mumu invaded, Ináng-bayan had been a harmonious island where everyone contributed to the thriving of community. While squabbles among tribes, communities, and families had naturally existed, there had never been a complete annihilation of a people until the kili kili mumu arrived.

An infamous coven of witches—the mangkukulam of Ináng-bayan—had thrived and lived happily among the people for millennia. The mangkukulam had always been valued for their supernatural powers—a potion for healing the sick; a potion for a woman trying to conceive; a potion for a woman trying to end a pregnancy; an obedience spell; a protection spell; an exorcism; an aphrodisiac.

Since the arrival of the kili kili mumu, the mangkukulam had been ordered as the first to be extinguished.

The kili kili mumu leered at the women of Ináng-bayan, particularly the female mangkukulam who possessed an ethereal sensuousness in the way their dresses flowed like calm ocean waves billowing down from their shoulders to their hem that would settle like water at the shore. They had long onyx hair, wide piercing eyes, and the hue of their skin was as deep and rich as the earth itself.

A mangkukulam’s gift of polyglot wasn’t necessary in translating that the kili kili mumu spoke with vulgarity. The kili kili mumu spat on the men of Ináng-bayan as if they were little boys needing discipline and punishment. They were particularly flummoxed and exasperated by mangkukulam who neither identified as male or female.

When a kili kili mumu tried to kidnap and overpower a female mangkukulam, she simply used her telekinetic powers to send him flying across a field as if he were a little ball she kicked, and if she were feeling further inclined, transformed him into swine. He would spend the rest of his days squealing and running for his life. Sadly, a mangkukulam’s telekinetic power was no match for a dozen armored men. Once the kili kili mumu learned of this weakness, they realized they could bring down an entire coven. With their armored numbers and weaponry, the kili kili mumu ambushed Ináng-bayan’s Mangkukulam Queen. Without their queen’s magical orb that secured the safety of each mangkukulam, they now stood defenseless as a collective stronghold. The mangkukulam would have to rely on the citizens of Ináng-bayan for protection. Though covens were powerful, they were also a special community and relatively small in number.

Despite the kili kili mumu’s attempts to conquer Ináng-bayan, they couldn’t crush its resilient citizens. They decided to use a different tactic, and that was to turn the people against their most valuable resource—the mangkukulam. It was then the kili kili mumu began their campaign to paint the mangkukulam as instruments of evil.

In order to win the people’s favor, the kili kili mumu first had to make themselves presentable, which meant brushing their teeth; bathing; washing, combing, and clipping unkempt hair; shaving their beards; wearing fresh clothes; trimming and cleaning their fingernails. It was no secret that the people of Ináng-bayan valued cleanliness. No individual who was dirty and smelly could ever be trusted.

With their fresh new look, the kili kili mumu eventually manipulated Ináng-bayan’s most respected elders whom they convinced that the mangkukulam were nothing but malevolent, man-eating, and blood-sucking nocturnal creatures disguised as beautiful and gentle citizens during the day. The kili kili mumu had placed special emphasis on the female mangkukulam. They were enraged that they couldn’t take them as wives and so the kili kili mumu became intent on destroying anything they couldn’t possess.

The mangkukulam felt that the kili kili mumu’s ghastly depiction of them was nothing but an obvious projection of the kili kili mumu’s own insecurity and self-loathing. This depiction, however, eventually poisoned Ináng-bayan minds until all mangkukulam bore the blame. The kili kili mumu sentenced them to being flogged or drowned. The mangkukulam had always been angels of a special kind. All of the unique names ascribed to their expertise—shaman, priestess, and healer—were suddenly stripped from them. Now they were simply reduced to “witch” as if the very word were the origin of everything ugly and evil in this world.

And as such, everything ugly and evil became the ill fate of a particular mangkukulam.

Witches far and wide always spoke sadly but with compassion over what had happened to one of their witch sisters in Ináng-bayan. The incident was never a reflection of their mangkukulam sisters or themselves as a whole, but it was no secret what the most desperate of their witch sisters had done.

In defiance of the kili kili mumu’s new order, a small coven of mangkukulam had led a resistance, thereby intensifying the kili kili mumu’s further persecution.

One such mangkukulam, named Ligaya, had been their leader. In Tagalog, her name meant “Joy.” Her husband had been killed earlier in a skirmish against the kili kili mumu. As a result, she had taken up the helm to lead the resistance. She had also been pregnant. While her pregnancy had made her magically unstoppable, her great mangkukulam powers had suddenly waned after childbirth. She would need a year to regain all her strength and magic back. She and her coven believed that she had been hidden deep enough in the jungle. At her coven’s insistence, two mangkukulam sisters were assigned as guardians to stay with Ligaya.

It had not even been a month when the kili kili mumu ambushed a vulnerable Ligaya in the middle of the night. Employing a skilled tracker, the kili kili mumu’s dozen armored men overpowered and killed the two mangkukulam guardian sisters, and kidnapped Ligaya and her infant daughter.

Day after day, Ligaya had suffered unspeakable atrocities. She had become a physical resource to her captors’ depraved appetites.  They wanted to make her pay for organizing a resistance against them. It did not matter that she had an infant daughter. They knew she was defenseless. She could not telepathically call out to her coven and tell them where she was being held captive. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months. Her coven believed she had perished as they could no longer sense her.

The kili kili mumu ultimately pushed Ligaya into an inescapable corner. She had been without energy and milk to feed her daughter. Ligaya would’ve rather suffered alone than watch her child starve. She knew death was near for both of them. She could only imagine the depravity that the kili kili mumu would do to her precious baby. She would make a decision that only made sense to her. It had calmly put her at ease in knowing her child would be safe, but more importantly, her child would always be a part of her.

Just as a desperate feline would’ve eaten her own kittens when in extreme distress against the threat of predators, Ligaya had one goal in mind, and that was to save her daughter from further harm at the hands of the kili kili mumu. Ligaya ate her child. The ingestion of her child’s magical flesh suddenly transformed Ligaya into an exceptional beast. She broke free from her captors, but not before slaughtering them with an inexorable rage only felt by the most forsaken of mothers. Those who were able to escape lived to tell what they had seen, though they conveniently failed to mention the dehumanizing torture they had inflicted on Ligaya that ultimately drove her to the madness she had become.

Ligaya knew full well she could never be a mother again. It became a vicious cycle of her wanting to be a mother by sniffing out the unborn. Her rage, grief, and despair ultimately filled her with an insatiable hunger for innocent human flesh. The Manananggal was thus born.

The lower half of Ligaya’s torso and legs would remain human while her upper half would dislodge at her waist. Huge bat-like wings would sprout from her spine, and she would fly with her intestines draping from the bottom of her severed torso. She would fly to the roof of her victim’s home and look for any openings where she could insert her long, thin, proboscis-like tongue and pierce a pregnant woman’s belly to feed on the unborn.

The Manananggal became a fraught symbol of reclamation but also defeat, not just for the mangkukulam in Ináng-bayan, but all witches far and wide. If the kili kili mumu painted the mangkukulam as frightening, then there would be no words to describe the terror that the Manananggal now embodied.

When Ligaya was not a vampiric beast, her intoxicating beauty would lure a kili kili mumu wandering in the jungle, only to bring him back to her hut where she would take him apart, tiny part by tiny part, first plucking his fingernails, then knuckles, then toenails, then toes. She was meticulous and liked to work little by little, slowly disemboweling, while pulling him apart by hand and foot, and then limb by limb. She would leave his eyes, ears, and nose for last, hoping he would live long enough to see, hear, and smell his own pain. She would never eat these men as she wouldn’t dare mingle their flesh with her own, but she gained great satisfaction in watching them suffer as she too had once suffered. This grave satisfaction would trigger her unusual hunger, reminding her of that old rage after eating her child, and then she would transform and dislodge at the waist.

Strangely to the advantage of Ináng-bayan’s women, the Manananggal became an unexpected dark angel as she didn’t sniff out every unborn indiscriminately, but she sniffed out the unviable and unwanted, reminiscent of her own infant daughter who had faced no chance of survival at the hands of her depraved captors. Prayers from desperate women who were willing to surrender their pregnancies to the Manananggal would likewise call out to her like distress signals in the middle of the night, where she would happily visit and sate her appetite, and she would transform back into a beautiful woman, forgetting and forgetting until grief and rage would trigger her hunger, repeating the cycle over and over again.  

In the morning, the wailing of a woman would echo throughout the village. She would either be unaware that something had been wrong with her pregnancy to warrant the Manananggal’s visit, or she would be relieved that she was no longer pregnant as the Manananggal had answered her prayers.

The Manananggal would resonate among the most desperate of witches worldwide under the direst of circumstances. In other parts of the world, the Manananggal would have sisters she could relate to—Katikatiā, Churail, or Ol’Higue. Whatever the name, they were beautiful young seductresses or kind old women to unsuspecting men by day, while at night, they were hideous shape-shifters who fed off babies and children.

During every solstice and thirteenth moon, all covens far and wide would gather in a secret part of the forest. There they would celebrate their survival with dance, wild drumbeat, song, shrieks of joy, and reckless abandon. They would drink their own special witches’ brew and smoke their special euphoric herbs. They sighed at the absurdity of the rumors that the invaders had spread about them throughout the lands—ranging from tales that they sucked the blood of babies; killed their victims with lightning; cast hexes with personal objects like a locket of hair, fingernails, or article of clothing; or gave poisonous fruit to naïve princesses. As evidenced by the Manananggal, witches weren’t incapable of committing such heinous magic, but to say all of them did would’ve been the equivalent of reducing all ordinary humans to killers and cannibals.

As much as the kili kili mumu wanted the citizens of Ináng-bayan to entirely turn against the mangkukulam, the mangkukulam were still secretly revered for their great power but continued to exist in a covert way. Surreptitiously, the mangkukulam preserved their craft by mingling their ancient magical rites with the rituals of their invaders. Their magic once practiced openly for millennia, now had been disguised as they interwove mangkukulam secrets with kili kili mumu beliefs, beliefs they found absurd, but they salvaged what magical rites they could at the risk of losing their craft, their sanity, and their existence altogether.

More invaders would eventually come to Ináng-bayan from different parts of the world, all with pale skin, and the mangkukulam would quietly resist over time, hiding themselves further until they blended among the people completely, their magic kept secret only from those who refused to see. One thing remained, however. With each pregnancy loss across the land, it was never a woman’s fault. The Manananggal was always to blame. Witches far and wide continued to embrace Ligaya, never forgetting why she resorted to the most egregious of actions.