The Protean Tale of the Tiyanak
I recently got my copy of the Dictionary of Philippine Mythology by Ferdinand Blumentritt, a new translated edition of the 1895 Spanish original that until recently was very hard to find and access. This edition is comprehensive, containing illustrations and citations to other sources, and I found myself devouring each entry. I learned about many parts of our folklore that I had never heard of before, and found some familiar ones, including a personal fave, the fearsome tiyanak.
The tiyanak is, essentially, a vampiric baby. It presents initially as a lone infant, abandoned and crying for succor. The wailing is its siren’s call, and when someone unwittingly approaches to help, the creature morphs into its true form: its angelic face hardens and becomes demonic, its eyes bulge and turn red, its nails grow into long claws, and it gains sharp teeth with which it bites before sucking the blood of its victim. Oh, and it moves fast too: it scrambles and leaps, almost flying into the air. You can’t just drop the baby and run, it will give chase. It’s usually found in forests at night, and it is said that the only way to resist the pull of the tiyanak’s cries is to turn your clothes inside out before venturing into the woods.
It’s serious nightmare stuff, and not just because of the aesthetics; the scare factor is elevated by the dissonance between a hapless, innocent babe and the monster that it then becomes. There’s the sense of fear and revulsion, plus the shock at the deception. Those emotions also feel so much more primal because it’s a baby—it’s hard to resist a cute baby, or ignore the sound of a baby’s cry.
The tiyanak is so ingrained in the Filipino imagination not just from folkloric tradition but also mass media. There have been many movies about the tiyanak, and though there are variations on how they look and act, there are common threads. The fangs, the claws, the grotesquerie of it all. Think Gollum from the LOTR films, but nonverbal. There are some variations though, like in the Netflix show Trese, where the tiyanak has long limbs and can climb walls like a spider.
Probably the creature’s most popular modern depiction is from the 1988 film Tiyanak.
It’s not unusual for there to be variations in stories about creatures from Filipino mythology. It is after all a country of 7,000 islands, with a lot of different languages and traditions, so regional variability can be expected. In some areas, the baby is only one of the forms that the tiyanak can take; it can also be a wild dog or pig. In some, the tiyanak is a dual creature: a monstrous woman woman and her dead fetus. This variation is closer to the pontianak, a creature from the folklore of neighboring Indonesia and Malaysia.
And of course there are similar stories all over the world, each culture influencing the other through the ages and through media, like Rosemary’s Baby, or The Changeling. A malevolent baby definitely elicits a visceral response no matter what culture someone’s brought up in, because it speaks to very basic human anxieties about childbirth. This is one of the reasons why I used the tiyanak in one section of my last WIP, Generations. There’s so much horror and tragedy that can be mined from the legend of the tiyanak.
One of the many interesting things I’ve found during my writing research is that the origin story of the tiyanak seems as changeable as the creature itself. Some sources say that a tiyanak comes to be when an infant is stillborn, or dies during or soon after birth. Some say that it’s when a baby dies before it is named. These theories ring true to me, given the power that storytelling has in processing such tragedies.
Yet some sources also say that a tiyanak is created when a baby dies unbaptized. Indeed, in Blumentritt’s Dictionary, this is offered as one of the origin tales. Yet another says that a tiyanak is created when an unbaptized child is buried in a Catholic cemetery. It’s not hard to see that this is where the Spanish influence comes in; the tiyanak has been part of Filipino folklore since before the colonization, and as far as I can tell, Spain does not have similar demon baby creatures in their mythology. (Even its name shows that it isn’t Spanish in origin). Indeed, a turn-of-the-century academic found that the tiyanak has also been compared to a goblin or the Spanish duende (elf), and that “[t]he whole subject is confused and needs further elucidation. It is likely that a more detailed study would find the fundamental idea overlaid with a mass of local tradition.”
More recent representations of the tiyanak say that they originate from aborted fetuses. Again, this shows how the genesis of a tiyanak has transformed, from a tale about the anxieties of pregnancy and childbirth, to a means of religious or moral control--baptize your baby or else it will become a vampiric monster. This is not new to folklore; tales have always been used to teach a lesson or discourage certain behavior. Some provide a justification for cruel behavior, and stories about demon babies likely have been used to justify the abandonment of infants born with traits deemed unusual or undesirable.
I don’t feel the need to pin down the one true version of any legend; I think it’s interesting to see many different takes on the same thing, and to see how these stories change with time, with each passing. But I think it’s also important to see how they change, and to understand what forces cause the change. How does time change our folklore? How does media, or imperialism? What gets added, lost or transformed when other cultures record your own?
Selected sources: Eugenio, Damiana (2007), Philippine Folk Literature: An Anthology, Volume 1; Gardner, Fletcher (1906), Philippine (Tagalog) Superstitions, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 19, No. 74; Isidro, Maria Caridad (1978), Death in Baras, Philippine Studies, Vol. 26, No. 4
Image credits: black and white thumbnail photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash; pages of Diccionario Mitologico de Filipinas, from my phone; still from the film Tiyanak, (c) 1988, Regal Films; campfire photo by Joris Voeten on Unsplash