and temples because they
had been raised to other gods than their own, slew the defenders of
the temples, and broke up the old civilization, passing from island
to island, and continuing their waste and murder. It was a raid of
Goths and Vandals, and the effect of it was lasting. In Ponape it is
said that the great structures they overthrew are haunted, and people
thereabout will not eat a certain fresh-water fish of a blue color,
because the king, Chauteleur, flying before Icho-Kalakal, fell into
Chapalap River and was changed by the gods into one of these fish.

Old Beliefs of the Filipinos

Respecting their myths the Filipinos differ in little from other human
families whose civilization is incomplete. They had in former times
the same tendency to create gods and spirits for particular hills,
woods, seas, and lakes, to endow the brutes with human qualities,
to symbolize in the deeds of men and animals the phenomena of the
heavens. Even now the Monteses tell of a tree that folds its limbs
around the trunk of another and hugs it to death, the tree thus
killed rotting and leaving a tube of tightly laced branches in which
are creatures that bleed through the bark at a sword-thrust or an
ax-cut. These creatures are mischievously alleged to be Spaniards. The
Tagalogs believe in Tic-Balan, an evil spirit who inhabits fig-trees,
but is kept off by wearing a certain herb, and in a female spirit
of the woods, Azuan, who is kept away from the house in times of
domestic anxiety by the husband, who mounts to the roof and keeps up
a disturbance for some hours.

In their feasts and ceremonies the natives have hymns and prayers
to the rain-spirit, the sea, the star-god, the good birds, and the
winds. Little has been done toward the preservation of their myths,
for the Spaniards, during their centuries of control, suppressed
learning, except as it pertained to religious studies, and tolerated
but scant liberty of opinion. The friars, against whom the people
nursed so strong a hate, stood for all that was harsh, narrow,
tyrannical, and unprogressive. In order to gain money and maintain
their political ascendency they engaged in commerce, became owners
of real estate and buildings, including saloons and dance-houses,
debased their churchly functions, discouraged attempts at progress,
practically forbade the printing of secular books and papers, making
illiteracy, with its attendant vice, poverty, and superstition,
univers