Why the Tagalog Record Is the Fullest

The unevenness of the Philippine religious record is a matter of colonial geography. Spain took Manila in 1571 and made it the capital of the archipelago, so the religious orders concentrated there first and wrote about what they found in the surrounding Tagalog country. Plasencia's account of 1589 is a description of Tagalog belief that has often been read since as a description of Philippine belief in general. It is not.

The Visayas, the Cordillera, the Cagayan valley and Mindanao each had their own high beings, their own specialists and their own names for the spirits, and several of those regions were reached later, or never fully. Using Tagalog material as the archipelago's baseline flattens that variety, and modern scholarship is careful to keep the language groups distinct. What the concentration does give is depth in one place. For Tagalog practice there are named categories of spirit, named classes of specialist, a described sequence of offering, and a vocabulary recorded while it was still in ordinary use. The atlas holds the Tagalog as a culture in their own right for that reason, so that what is genuinely Tagalog can be attributed to the Tagalog rather than to the Philippines as a whole, and so that the gaps for other peoples stay visible as gaps.