Engkanto and diwata

Diwata and engkanto are spirits of Philippine belief. Colonial writers recorded the word divate in 1573, and people interviewed by GMA News in 2013 still described diwata as real and dangerous.

The earliest written record in these sources is Diego de Artieda's relation of 1573. He wrote that the people all called their god divate, adding their own village's name as his surname, and that they also had gods of the sea and of the rivers. They offered pigs to these gods, raising very large, fat ones for the purpose and preferring reddish animals. Their priests, the bailanes, were believed to talk with the gods.

Pedro Chirino wrote in 1604 that among these islanders Divata meant God, the one people in Manila called Bathala or Anito. He reported that they turned to an image in times of need and called it the Castilians' Divata. Both writers were outsiders: Artieda came with the colonisers and Chirino was a missionary.

The word engkanto names a second kind of spirit. Paul-François Tremlett, writing in DISKUS in 2007, describes engkanto as spirits whose speciality is to seduce a person and then possess them, until the person can hardly be recognised. In the belief as he records it, the signs include talking with unseen others, going stiff or into a trance, wandering lost in forests, turning violent toward family and friends, and losing memory. Wikipedia reports that Francisco Demetrio studied 87 folk stories about engkanto from the Visayas and Mindanao and argued that the figure was modelled on early European friars.

In a 2013 episode of GMA's I Juander, people told the programme that diwata exist outside film and television, keep their distance from humans and dislike having their homes disturbed. If a diwata is angered, they said, the price is a life.