Snake talk

I don’t think Filipinos understand that once upon a time we were independent kingdoms that existed near each other. Then one day Magellan found this cluster of islands. He sailed around them and declared us one country, Las Islas Felipinas, named after King Felipe of Spain. We didn’t become a country. A foreigner declared us a country.

 We had our own system of beliefs, which the colonizers called pagan. Someone showed the statue of the Sto. Nino to Princess Urduja who found it cute. She wanted it. The friar said she would have to be baptized. She agreed because she really wanted the statue. It looked like a lovely doll to her.

They came, they baptized, they conquered and stayed around 300 years. The Spanish friars ruled our country badly, impregnating our women, giving us our good looks, and very slowly but surely changing our system of beliefs. For one thing they forced our babaylan to go into hiding.

The babaylan were our women leaders and also healers. They were on equal footing with the men and every tribe had one. But the babaylan were profoundly and naturally schooled in natural science. They could go into the forest and gather the leaves they would need for healing and curing.

Rose Yenko, one of the leaders of the Jung seminars and conferences we attend, was telling me about her dream. She wants to do a documentary on the few living babaylan and put it on our website to share with the curious. “You met Jay?” she asked me. “His grandmother was a babaylan. He told me a lovely story.”

This babaylan could communicate with snakes. Whenever anyone was bitten by a snake, she would summon all the snakes and talk to them. I could just imagine a little white-haired woman standing at the foot of her bahay kubo, arms akimbo, looking at all the snakes writhing at her feet and asking, “Sino sa inyo ang tumuklaw kay Ka Pedro?” Who bit Pedro? Or maybe she hissed at them. Ssssssssssssssss! Sssssso sssssscary!

The snakes would put up their heads and stare back at her, eye-to-eye. But one snake would keep his or her head down. That was the guilty snake, the one who bit. “Classsssss dismisssssssed!” she must have said. “Except for you, the one who couldn’t hold his head up high, the one who couldn’t look me in the eye. You ssssstay.”

Then she would do her rituals with the snake. I don’t know what those rituals are. Rose said she touches the snake, communicates with it and extracts the antidote for the bite. Then she administers the antidote on the patient and he survives. He is saved.

“Isn’t that a lovely story?” Rose asked me.

“It sounds like a fairy tale. I love it,” I said. “It’s magical. But that is the art of healing, having the ability to talk to the culprits, make them see the light, make them reveal the antidote, that which will cure. It reminds me of another snake story. When you kill a snake, you have to mash its eyes in, did you know that?”

Rose gave me a strange look. “Why?” she asked.

Because if the snake doesn’t return home his mate will come looking for him. She will find his dead body and look into his eyes. There she will see the picture of the person who killed her mate snake. She will look for him and kill him. I learned that from the caretaker of our farm when I was young. My stepfather killed a snake and the caretaker mashed his eyes and took his body far from the house so his mate would not hunt down my stepfather. I never forgot that.

“I just remembered this snake story when I read about the Chinese chef who decapitated a cobra and cooked its body. Then when he reached in to throw the head away it bit him. He screamed and died instantly,” Rose said.

“How awful,” I said. “Maybe the cobra said, ‘You cooked my body. You’re going to die with me. We will go to hell together. Maybe there we will eat our bodies.’”

I remember in the late ‘80s acting as an emcee at some advertising event where there was a costume contest and one of the gay guys came festooned with snakes — in his hair, around his arms and waist. I almost screamed. I am terrified of snakes. I learned then that they have an earthy smell, something that reminds you of the underground, where they live, and they have no eyelids but have very active forked black tongues. Many of them are not poisonous. Nevertheless I am scared to death of snakes.

But I am taken by the stories of the babaylan and their ability to talk to snakes. That to me is enviable. That is magical. I hope we can bring our old talents back.

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