Bathala is the supreme being of the Tagalog account, and the working religion is conducted with the anito rather than with him. The pattern is the familiar one of a creator who is acknowledged and not administered to, with an order of nearer powers who are.
The anito are ancestral and local at once. The spirits of the dead of a family remain concerned with it and are represented, addressed and fed; alongside them are the spirits of places, of the fields, of the sea and of specific features of the landscape. The distinction between an ancestor and a spirit of place is not sharply drawn, and the same word covers both.
There is no assembly, no divine kingship contested between generations, and no fixed roster. Deities named in the early Spanish accounts vary between regions, and the Tagalog set is not the Visayan set.
The specialists were the katalonan, who conducted the ceremonies through which the anito were addressed, and the office was frequently held by women.
What happened to this tradition is part of its shape. Spanish missionaries identified the anito with the demonic and worked systematically to suppress the practice, and much of what survived did so inside Catholic forms. Contemporary revival movements have reconstructed from the colonial record, which is a different thing from continuous transmission, and the atlas records that distinction.