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CHAPTER 5 Childless Mothers and Blighted Virgins Female Ghosts and Their Victims MANILA, Philippines (AP)—Filipinos will choose a new president and thousands of elected officials next week. But in the squalid barrios of the capital, the big news is there's a vampire on the loose. For weeks, the slums of Manila's Tondo district have been abuzz with rumors a "manananggal," a supernatural creature, has been terrorizing the area. According to Filipino folklore, a manananggal appears as a woman who can cut her body in two. The top half flies around at night searching for babies to devour. The top half must return before daybreak to rejoin the lower half. On Wednesday, about a dozen young men,accompanied by a television crew, barged into the home of Teresita Beronqui to investigate rumors that she was the manananggal. ABS-CBN television showed a terrified elderly woman trying to explain that she was not the manananggal. To resolve the mystery, the reporter, Cesar Soriano, produced a dried tail of a stingray and asked the woman to touch it on camera. Manananggals, or so the experts say,are repulsed by stingray's tails. The woman touched it to the satisfaction of all concerned. Excerpted from a story that ran in U.S.newspapers in May, 1992 Students of folklore will recognize the manananggal as the Filipino version of a very common supernatural creature, the ghost or demon who specializes in killing babies.1 This type is represented in ancient MediterI am grateful to the Associated Press for permission to reprint this excerpt. i. Portions of this chapter were published in a somewhat different and shorter form, but with a fuller discussion of ancient methods of averting the ghosts described herein, as Johnston 1995b. 161 162, Restless Dead ranean cultures by such creatures as the Semitic Lilith and her antecedents , the Mesopotamian lilitu and the Babylonian Lamashtu. She is alive and well even today, as the Associated Press story and reports of folklorists throughout the world attest. The prevalence of belief in such a creature does not seem hard to explain: all over the world, particularly in cultures where modern medical techniques are unavailable, infants and young children are apt to die suddenly, inexplicably, to the grief of their parents. Belief in creatures such as the Filipino manananggal or the Mesopotamian lilitu not only provides an explanation for such deaths, it also, indirectly, provides some feeling of control. Once the cause has been isolated and described, a stingray tail or some other aversion technique can be employed against it. Parents are able to reassure themselves that they have done everything possible to protect their child. Ancient Greeks feared such creatures, too. Although the Filipino manananggal was identified with an old woman in the neighborhood where the deaths were occurring, in ancient Greece and many other cultures such creatures were understood as a special type of restless dead: the unhappy souls of women who had died prematurely. Thus, study of this phenomenon will add to our knowledge of Greek beliefs concerning the dead and enrich our understanding of how they can affect the living . In particular, as we shall see, it will demonstrate the ways in which beliefs about the dead could reinforce societal mores and prevent or defuse societal tensions among the living. There is no single, all-inclusive term that folklorists and anthropologists use to refer to such creatures. When possible, they adopt a culture's own term (e.g., lilitu or manananggal}. This will not work for us, however , because the Greeks had no such term. In such a case, scholars frequently use the phrase "child-killing demon," but I want to avoid this for two reasons. The first is that the Greek variety killed not only children but also women, either just before they were married and began their careers as mothers, during pregnancy, during labor, or during the postpartum period; thus the term "child-killing" is too circumscribed. My second objection leads us into a more complex issue. The word "demon" has different connotations in different contexts, scholarly and popular, and is therefore liable to be misleading in some circumstances and completely inappropriate in others. It is an especially problematic term to use in connection with Greek beliefs because for the Greeks, daimon , the root of our word "demon," could mean a divine being of any kind. Zeus could be called a daimon, and so could any number of far [3.129.70.157] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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