เครื่องรางอันติง-อันติง (เครื่องรางฟิลิปปินส์)Anting-antinganting-anting

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.

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.

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.