When the Virgin Sails, Somewhere a Serpent Wails (Pomp and Pageanty in September)

This coming Friday, the Virgin will be taken out of her Shrine and brought to the center of the city. If we follow the chronicles of old, and by metaphor of geography, She will be coming from Naga - the old settlement across the river - and to the Nueva Caceres, the colonial capital. When she sails back to her home the Sunday after of the land procession, somewhere the magical Serpent believed treasured by the ancestors of those that carry her on their shoulder at present will be wailing and forgotten.

By next year, the entire region (and the nation of Catholics) will be celebrating some three hundred years of devotion to the Lady of Peñafrancia. The years can account also for the conversion of a place, the change in the belief system, and the banishing/vanishing of other faiths.

These three hundred years of being with a new faith, if we are to reckon the life span of cultures, are not really long enough to dispel the older traditions. There is the difference between the banishing and the vanishing. A force may have banished something but for us to expect that element to vanish is another matter.

It was not long ago, when Naga, the serpent, the dragon, the male/female cosmic force ruled this region. Or at least was believed in by communities. Where did this belief go? Where did those images go?

There are no more artifacts around to attest readily to the belief in the naga in Naga. In other parts of Southeast Asia, where the Catholic religion did not make significant inroads, the belief remains. There are shrines to this deity and there are arches honoring it. Its manifestations are also splendid and varied, and even conflicting. Some accounts point to a powerful being that rules the intermediate space between the Sky and the Underground. There are narratives that place the deity's water location.

In other Southeast Asian communities, the naga is depicted as a serpent or a dragon-like animal with a crown on its head. This is interesting because in the Calendariong Bikol and other books like Prognostico as well as those pamphlets used by Paratapat and Pollador, one can find this drawing of a mythical being, its fat body curled to a short "S", its head mighty with a crown on it. In Bicol geomancy - the art or practice of finding meanings in the things we do on earth as they are related to the forces that rumble beneath the ground - the secret to achieving harmony is finding the orientation of the head of the serpent, or if you wish, the naga. Perhaps, we can correct the word "harmony" and say that the way to control the universe is to find a way to control the head that wears the crown.

This serpent-like creature on the pages of pamphlets not read anymore by many is not called naga. It is now called the Bakunawa. Again, like the Naga, the Bakunawa cannot explain current events and other matters anymore, the way it was able to hundreds of years ago. In Pre-Spanish communities, the Bakunawa was a powerful force, and with its mouth as wide as a river or lake, it was a tremendous force in the universe. No wonder the Bakunawa could swallow the moon. It was the deity linked to eclipses and darkness.

I go back to those years of the Naga and Bakunawa. I imagine how things happened. I do an Eric Wolf who examined the Virgin of Guadalupe as a Mexican national symbol. In that magnificent analysis, the anthropologist talked about the belief in the Catholic Virgin Mother as held by the power of metaphor. The Lady of Guadalupe had her shrine built right on the hill of Tepeyec where the [Our Lady of] Tonantzin was once the object of Aztec pilgrimages. The moon was both shared by the Catholic Virgin Mother and the Tonantzin. Both were Mother images.

The Bakunawa was no mother image. But the Bakunawa ruled the waters that in a riverine settlement like Naga most likely figured dramatically in the life of its inhabitants. Metaphor for metaphor, the vitality of a river can represent the grand and the maternal. Now comes this image that most likely tamed the people across the waters. And stole the thunder from the moon and the festivities built around its waxing and waning.

For the believers and even the non-believers, around that tiny face and the crown with so many stars rests a formidable power. In September, we recognize the disappearance of some creatures and honor (some of us sublimely in supplication) the Mother (and a power) who took their place.