What the Sky Remembers
New Filipino Fairy Tales, Mythology and Folktales podcast episode!
The Philippines has a very long human history.
Archaeologists believe early humans may have lived in the islands more than 700,000 years ago. But when we talk about Philippine astronomy, the way people understood the Sun, the Moon, the stars, and the sky, most of what we know comes from much later, after Homo sapiens arrived in the islands around 67,000 years ago.
A lot of this knowledge comes to us through stories.
Myths. Legends. Folktales. Oral traditions carried from one generation to the next.
These stories were ways of understanding the world. They explained the seasons, the heavens, spirits, creation, and our place in the universe. They helped people look at the natural world and make meaning from it. They helped people remember.
For this new season of Filipino Fairy Tales, Mythology, and Folklore, I wanted to begin with sky stories: tales that speak to the Sun, the Moon, the stars, the sea, and the deep human longing to understand where we come from.
One of the sources I returned to was Philippine Folk Tales, collected by Mabel Cook Cole and published in 1916. Cole and her husband, anthropologist Fay-Cooper Cole, spent time in the Philippines in the early 1900s, documenting stories from different communities, including the Tinguian, Igorot, Tagalog, Bilaan, Bukidnon, Mandaya, Moro, and Visayan peoples.
I want to name, too, that Cole and her husband were white scholars and I acknowledge the lasting and current impacts of colonization in the Philippines. I think it is important to sit with that. So much of what has been preserved about us has passed through the hands of people who were not us. And yet, when I read these stories, I try to listen past the collector’s voice. I try to hear the ancestors who told them.
One passage that stayed with me described evenings around a bonfire, where stories were shared after dark. Someone would begin telling or chanting a tale, while others listened, laughed, worked, smoked, or simply sat together beneath the night sky.
I keep thinking about that image.
People gathered in the dark. A fire burning. The sky open above them. A story moving from one voice to another. I long for that kind of storytelling, a gathering and remembrance as a way of being together.
The first story in this new season is “The Creation of the Earth,” a folktale about a world that begins with only ocean and sky. A kite bird flies endlessly, unable to find a place to rest. In her exhaustion, she starts a fight between the sea and the sky. The sea rises. The sky responds by scattering islands across the water, giving the bird somewhere to land. Then comes the bamboo.
The land breeze and the sea breeze have a child, and that child is bamboo. It floats across the water and strikes the feet of the kite bird. Irritated, the bird pecks it open, and from inside emerge the first man and woman, Maganda and Malakas.
In Way of the Ancient Healer: Sacred Teachings from the Philippine Ancestral Traditions, Virgil Mayor Apostol offers an interpretation that stayed with me: sailors may have once used kite birds to navigate and locate land during storms. The fight between the sea and sky could be a storm. The bamboo could be a boat carrying our ancestors across the water.
I love the idea that a folktale can hold both wonder and observation. That myth can be poetic and practical at the same time. That our ancestors may have looked at birds, storms, boats, islands, and the dangerous beauty of the sea, and turned what they knew into story.
For this episode, I wanted to bring “The Creation of the Earth” back into Tagalog.
I’m deeply grateful to K.S. Villoso for translating the text, and especially thankful for Mikhail, who performs the Tagalog reading in the episode. There is something powerful about hearing the story spoken aloud. It feels different from reading it silently. It has breath again.
This is something I hope to do more of.
In the next few episodes, I’ll be sharing more folk tales that speak to the Sun, the Moon, and the stars, in both English and Tagalog. At the heart of this season is a conversation about sky stories: how people looked up, made meaning, and carried that meaning forward through myth.
If you’d like to listen, the new episode of Filipino Fairy Tales, Mythology, and Folklore is out now.
And if you would like to share or read a fairy tale, myth, or folktale in your native tongue for a future episode, please email me at pilipinxpages@gmail.com. I would love for this podcast to become a place where our stories can be heard in the languages that hold them.
Listen to the episode, sit with the story, and look up at the sky tonight.