‘Lechon’

Pre-Hispanic civilized Filipinos never told the Spanish colonialists their name for the succulent “lechon,” the icon of Filipino celebrations, including the festive Christmas table.

And perhaps we shall never know, leaving us no recourse but to content ourselves with the Spanish word for suckling pig.

There’s no doubt pre-Hispanic Filipinos didn’t abhor the pig unlike those swayed by Judaic and Muslim cultures. Archaeological work done by the National Museum conclusively proves Filipinos ate pork 7,000 years ago. And early Filipinos definitely roasted the pig.

“During Lapu-Lapu’s lifetime there was roasting. (Antonio) Pigafetta proves this when he wrote in 1521 that he ate roast pork and fish,” writes food historian Felice Prudente Sta. Maria, referencing the Italian chronicler of Ferdinand Magellan’s ill-fated Philippine sojourn.

“But he (Pigafetta) didn’t reveal if the roasting was done on a spit, using something like a barbecue stick or skewer, or laid on a grill that might have been made of wood,” says Sta. Maria, referring to the firewood or coal roasting of the “lechon.”

While we probably won’t learn our original word for “lechon,” Pigafetta managed to record a ritual performed by the “babaylanes,” Visayan female shamans or spirit mediums, detailing the ancient way to properly sacrifice the pig while paying homage to the sun.

Summing up Pigafetta’s evocative vignette, on the beach by the Cebu Strait at dawn, two flute-playing “babaylanes” danced frenziedly around a bound hog while exchanging chants praising the sun and imbibing wine.

At the end of the trance-inducing swirls and just as the sun burst on the scene, a sharp spear was handed to the high “babaylan,” Pigafetta writes, then she makes “motions four or five times of thrusting the lance through the heart of the hog, (and) with a sudden and quick stroke, thrusts it through from one side to the other.”

Here, we can say Pigafetta is a reliable witness of an echoing pagan culture defining itself at sunrise, which is why, a favorite poet of mine says, “it is good to make ritual of sunrise.”

What came next, however, upsets the proto-colonialists. With the sacrificial pig dead, Pigafetta then writes a “babaylan” dipped a bamboo flute in the pig’s spilled blood and went “around marking with blood on her finger first the foreheads of their husbands, and then the others; but she never came to us.”

A priestess deliberately disparaging a colonialist foretold the consequent violent persecution of the “babaylanes” by Spanish missionaries.

Opposing Christianizing zeal, “Babaylanes” mutilated Christian images and burned down chapels. But the “babaylanes,” one of the pillars of Filipino native society, eventually succumbed to the Spanish colonialists.

Still, the “babaylanes” ritual of slaughtering the pig has survived, especially among indigenous Filipinos.

Cebuano sociology professor Jobers Reynes Bersales, for example, recently recalls witnessing in Butuan in Mindanao “the way the baylan or balyan, as the Manobo call their ritual practitioners, danced in a trance before slaughtering the pig, (to) almost approximate Pigafetta’s detailed description of what he witnessed. Only the bamboo flute played by (the) babaylan was missing.”

Nonetheless, the “babaylanes” pig-killing ritual didn’t endure in other locales despite the colonized Filipino’s manifest love for neo-feudal chimeras.

But the “babaylanes” way perhaps isn’t completely gone. Invisible though is the ritual in our imagined national memories, there are instances its spirit probably remains in the making of today’s “lechon.”

Intriguingly evocative of the “babaylanes” spirit, for example, is the fact that most of the weekend “lechon” stalls in Talisay City, Cebu are either owned or managed by women.

Many consider Talisay’s “lechon” the finest variety of the celebrated herbs-suffused, sauce-less Cebu “lechon.” Are today’s Talisay “lechoneras” perhaps direct descendants of the invisible “babaylanes?”

Whimsy aside, ancient Talisay of pristine beaches and redolent sunrises in historical memory punctuates Magellan’s fateful encounter with Rajah Humabon’s substantial Chinese porcelain-using Sugbu Rajahnate.

Anyway, somewhere in Talisay is perhaps where Pigafetta beheld the “babaylanes” ritual pig sacrifice that left its indelible mark on today’s “lechon” feast.