amuletsAnting-antinganting-anting

said AN-ting AN-ting

also: agimat · anting · virtud · galing · gayuma · mutya · orasyon

amuletIsland Southeast AsiaPhilippinesconfidence mediumneeds checking

Most often a flat pendant on a necklace — round, triangular or cross-shaped, in gold-coloured metal, its face crowded with figures and Latin words. But the class is wider than the pendant. An anting-anting can be a stone said to have come out of the sky, or a fulgurite fang left where lightning struck, pangil ng kidlat, or a mutya, a drop of liquid taken from the heart of a banana tree at midnight, which is swallowed rather than worn. It can be a garment with words written on it. It usually comes with a small book of incantations, orasyon, which has to be read on Good Friday or another set date for the thing to work at full strength.

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Tagalog anting-anting, from Javanese anting-anting, 'ear-hanging ornament'; the wider family includes Indonesian and Malay gantung, 'hanging'. Agimat is the other Filipino word for the same thing, with virtud (virtue) and galing (prowess) as general terms
The ornament sense carries the claim with it: in the polytheistic mythology the word comes out of, such ornaments were worn by gods in the ear hook or the earlobe, where they were held to be strongest. cited

When

from the early Spanish colonial period, 1565 onward still carried cited

Period	Spanish colonial period to the present
How the date is known	textual — a dated text describes it
Note	The source says the earliest reports come from Spanish priests in the early colonial period and gives no year. 1565 is the year Legazpi established the first Spanish settlement in the Philippines, cited to s:web-wp-spanish-east-indies, and is used as the earliest that phrase can reach. The practice itself is older than its first European report.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

Form	Medal
Made of	Copper and bronze · Brass · Gold · Paper · Cloth · Wood
Goes	At the neck · Sewn into clothing · Swallowed or drunk · In a pocket or a bag
Made by	amulet dealers, who set up near churches — the Quiapo district in Manila is the best known
It says	Latin words and figures on most examples; the esoteric symbols of Freemasonry on some (Latin)
Retired	no — it is kept
Note	Described as typically a cross, or a flat round or triangular golden pendant on a necklace. Other forms named: a sky-stone, a fulgurite fang, a swallowed mutya, an inscribed garment, and consumable enchanted mud, putik. No published measurement was read.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

Blades and bullets — invulnerability charms; reported, never recommended citedsaid by Filipino fighters against Spain and the United States; Macario Sakay wore a vest of religious images and Latin phrases against bullets, and the subtypes kabal and tagaliwas are named for cuts and for turning a bullet aside
A curse already laid citedsaid by the Philippine occult tradition, in which the most frequent kind of agimat removes hexes
Ghosts and hungry spirits citedsaid by the same tradition: the other frequent kind drives out evil spirits
Attracting custom, luck or love — the charm that pulls rather than blocks citedsaid by owners of a gayuma, the love charm that makes its owner more attractive
Bad luck, unspecified citedsaid by Trinidad Pardo de Tavera, who defined it as an amulet of supernatural power that saves lives
amuleto que salva la vida, da poder sobre natural

The story

The Philippine occult tradition matches an agimat to a department of life. The commonest kinds remove hexes and drive out spirits. A gayuma is the love charm, which makes its owner more attractive. Most of the amulets carry Latin inscriptions, and most of the dealers set up near a church — in the courtyard or in the market beside it — of which the Quiapo district in Manila is the example everyone names.

The written record starts with the colonisers. The earliest reports of anting-anting come from Spanish priests in the early colonial period, which in the Philippines begins with Miguel López de Legazpi's settlement of 1565. Trinidad Pardo de Tavera defined the thing in Spanish: amuleto que salva la vida, da poder sobre natural — an amulet of supernatural power that saves lives. As Christianity took hold, the anting-anting took on the new religion's forms, and later took in the esoteric symbols of Freemasonry as well. An Islamic version exists in the southern Muslim islands.

The charm has a political history, which is unusual in this atlas. Filipino fighters wore anting-anting against the Spanish and then against the Americans. Macario Sakay wore a vest carrying religious images and Latin phrases, to stop bullets. Ferdinand Marcos claimed that Gregorio Aglipay had given him an anting-anting — a sliver of wood inserted into his back before the Bataan campaign in 1942 — that could make him invisible. Whose claim that was, and what it was for, is left standing here as his.

The subtypes are named by what they do. Kabal, also kunat, makes the skin proof against cuts and sword slashes. Pamako nails an entity in place so it cannot move. Tagabulag turns the wearer invisible to an enemy, or blinds them. Tagaliwas turns a bullet aside.

Filipino cinema took all of it and went further: on screen the wearer gains strength, invisibility, healing, flight, telekinesis, the power to stop a bullet in the air. Ramon Revilla Sr., playing Nardong Putik, carried one that made him invulnerable. The 1939 film The Real Glory shows Moro characters saying theirs will stop bullets and knives. Screen and street are not the same object and this record keeps them apart.

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How it is made and carried

Cast or cut, then charged by reading: the orasyon that comes with the amulet has to be recited on Good Friday, or on another appointed date, for the piece to reach full power. Other routes to getting one are described and are not gentle — taking the liquid drained from an exhumed body, or setting out food and drink for the spirits in a cemetery at midnight on Holy Wednesday or Holy Thursday. A mutya is swallowed. Bought at a stall by a church, most often.

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Now

Still sold from stalls around Quiapo Church in Manila and at markets beside other churches, as of the accounts this project has read. Quiapo is a major Catholic shrine, which is the point: the trade stands in the churchyard rather than away from it.

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