Pedro Chirino’s Account of Philippine Anito and Babaylan Traditions

Record summary

Pedro Chirino’s Relación de las Islas Filipinas, published in 1604, discusses indigenous religious practices, anito-related beliefs, ritual specialists, offerings, omens, and conversion efforts. The work is a specific early modern source for comparing Philippine spirit traditions with European demonological categories and with wider Pacific accounts of mediation between humans and ancestral powers. Its descriptions are valuable but adversarial, since Chirino wrote as a Jesuit missionary seeking to explain and replace local religion. Philippine historians should guide interpretation of terms and regional differences.