Category Archives: Protection

The Manananggal

Tags: Myth, Mythical Creature, Philippines, Pregnant Woman, Cautionary Tale

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In the Philippines there’s this myth about the Manananggal. She’s this old ratchet girl that lives in a province and she’s addicted to pregnant women. Basically what happens is at night, when you least expect it and you’re pregnant, she can smell you and you’ll find her on your ceiling when you go to bed. Then she’ll pull out this long thing that she sticks in your mouth and eats up the baby inside of you.

Informant Info

Race/Ethnicity: Filipino

Age: 21

Occupation: College Student

Residence: California, USA

Date of Performance: March 2024

Primary Language: English

Other Language(s): Tagalog

Relationship: Friend

Context

KM, the informant, is of Filipino descent.

Analysis

This myth is popular in Filipino culture, serving as a warning to women, especially pregnant women, to not walk alone at night. Filipino elders are notorious for using fear as a tool to incentivize the youth and vulnerable to be safe and good.

Origins of the Osage People

Tags: Myth, Origin Story, Osage Tribe, Indigenous Peoples, Northwest Arkansas

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In the Ozarks, there’s an indigenous tribe of people known as the Osage. When they came to Earth, nothing existed except mud. And then, a great elk came and rolled around in the mud, blessing the indigenous people with grass.

Informant Info

Race/Ethnicity: Indian

Age: 22

Occupation: College Student

Residence: Northwest Arkansas, USA

Date of Performance: March 2024

Primary Language: English

Other Language(s): N/A

Relationship: Friend

Context

AH, the informant, was born and raised in Northwest Arkansas (NWA). NWA exists in a region known as the Ozarks.

Analysis

The Ozarks is home to many indigenous groups, each with their own origin stories. Upon some more research on the origins of the Osage people, I found that the story was more complex than the informant had explained. According to the Arkansas Archaeological Survey[1], they were initially “spirit beings” and came from the sky. In their humility, they called themselves the “Little Ones” and came down to Earth to become people. When they arrived, they found the Earth submerged in water and asked their messenger, the Radiant Star, for help. The Radiant Star sent them a sacred person known as the Great Elk. The Great Elk rolled in the water and lowered it. He then blessed the Osage people with more gifts of grass and landforms.

While the informant AH’s recounting of the origin story of the Osage people contained different details about what medium the Great Elk rolled in, the one similarity was that there existed a Great Elk. In indigenous cultures, a lot of traditions and customs surrounded their spiritual connection with animal figures. The elk, for instance, is often personified as protectors in indigenous cultures. In the origin story of the Osages, this was exemplified through the Osage’s reverence for the sacred Great Elk and the blessings that he brought.

Sources
[1] “Creation of the Work (Osage).” Osage Creation Story, Arkansas Archeological Survey, 3 Feb. 2017, archeology.uark.edu/indiansofarkansas/index.html?pageName=Creation+of+the+World+%28Osage%29.

Karma Points

Text:

Karma Points

Minor Genre:

Superstition; Ritual

Context:

“I believe in karma. Even if someone is justified in stealing or doing horrible stuff, I could never do it because I am superstitious of the idea of karma. Even though I see so much cruelty in how people act, whether that’s on the news or politically or whatever, I still can’t bring myself to do anything horrible on purpose because I believe in it coming back to me in some sense.

“As part of my belief in karma, I believe also in ‘karma points.’ Every time I see a piece of trash I pick it up now. I got used to feeling like it’s bad karma if I lock eyes with a piece of trash on the floor and don’t pick it up and just walk by it. Every time I look at one and register it in my mind as a piece of trash, I have to go grab it and throw it away in the trash can, which gives me a positive karma point. This superstition started in the beginning of 2024. I don’t know exactly why it happened, I just picked up the trash and it transformed into the superstition it is now.”

Analysis:

It is interesting to consider how the larger concept of karma translates into every-day actions in the informant’s life, and what that says about the idea of karma as a whole. If, for example, a person convicted of murder was considered to have a low level of karma, by the informant’s logic, they could work to restore their karma by picking up pieces of trash. This is an extreme example, but it goes to show that superstitious rituals often defy logic; routinely picking up trash would not make a serial killer a “good person,” but it may have a greater positive impact on an average person. The next logical question in such a perspective is then: at what point is someone’s poor karma irredeemable by small actions?

The idea of “karma points” therefore poses interesting philosophical considerations, but it can also be examined in a psychological context. The compulsion for the informant to pick up a piece of trash every time they lock eyes on it may be suggestive of a disorder such as OCD. While the inability to suppress an obsessive urge is a symptom of OCD, it is also a common experience for people who consider themselves superstitious; they will go to great lengths to avoid taking an action that they believe will bring about a negative outcome in their life. Ritualistic superstitious actions “dig the hole deeper” for the person who engages with them; as one gets in the habit of taking a specific set of actions, they assign more emotional significance to it and therefore become less likely to disengage with the superstition.

Break a Leg Ritual

Text
“So this is like the traditional ‘break a leg!’ before a performance, because I’m a theater major. But before any type of performance, instead of just saying ‘break a leg,’ the performing group that I grew up in since I was a kid to high school, we always would say ‘break ALL your legs.’ As like a way of saying ‘you’re even gonna do better than just break a leg, like you’re gonna have a phenomenal performance.’ And then we would- I don’t know how to explain this properly, but we basically lock our pinky fingers together, and then like, bump each other’s hips, each hip twice, and then like, spin, like, turn with our arms. And I was like- everyone in the group that I grew up in performing did this, um, and was incredibly superstitious about it. It was a thing of like, even if you were called to places, you would run backstage to the other side of the stage to find the other people in the cast to do it to. Because it was an incredibly, like, you HAVE to do this. Like, if not something’s gonna go wrong. Um, and so I was incredibly superstitious about it. Like if I didn’t get the chance to do it to everyone, I, like, I was not comfortable on stage and I was like ‘something’s gonna go wrong, I’m gonna mess up, just it’s not gonna be the performance I know it can be.’

And now that I’m in college and I’m not part of this performing group anymore, I still carry it on. Um, especially with this one, like, performance group I’m part of. Backstage before every show that I’ve started since freshman year doing, I teach it to like anyone who’s new in the group, and I do it with as many people in the cast as I can do, and I even like, explain the story of it to people, like ‘this is something I used to do in my past performing community that I was a part of, and we’d say break all your legs,’ and I teach it to them and then like, they go on to do it to other people in the cast and explain it to them. So it’s something I’m like carrying on and spreading to other people.”

Context
C is a current student at the University of Southern California and grew up in Palm Desert, California. She gave the context that she had been part of the same local theater group for her preteen and teenage years until coming to college. When asked to elaborate about some of the logistics of the ritual, C explained how the ritual would be done between two people in the cast, with the goal of everyone in the cast eventually doing it with everyone else. She also stressed the importance of performing the ritual as immediately before the beginning of the performance as possible. She also described how different people in her original group believe in different degrees of consequences for not performing the ritual with everyone in the cast; while some people think it is not strictly necessary, many, including C, believe that there will be “severe and immediate consequences” during the performance for not doing it with everyone. Finally, C explained that, while she is not sure when the ritual began, allegedly everyone who her director had worked with had a similar kind of ritual, which leads her to believe it stemmed from him and evolved to what it is today.

Analysis
As C acknowledged, this tradition takes a widely-known example of theater-specific performative speech and adds an additional physical element as added superstitious behavior. I would say that this ritual combines elements of homeopathic and contagious magic. By believing that not performing this ritual correctly induces bad luck, this theater group exhibits the ‘like produces like’ belief behind homeopathic magic; however, the contact required for the ritual, perhaps to ‘share luck’ amongst the cast, suggests that the connection between two cast members lingers after contact, which is characteristic of contagious magic. There also seems to be an added dimension of promoting the group’s strength and unity; by requiring everyone in the cast to perform this bad-luck-warding behavior together, it reinforces the idea that the group is stronger together. Ultimately, I think this ritual is a perfect example of the multiplicity and variation that is often said to be a core component of folklore, and I would be interested to see if/how this ritual changes after its introduction to USC theater spaces.

SoCal Ghost Story

Text: When the informant was three, her grandmother, who was battling breast cancer, passed away in 1967. Choosing not to undergo the harsh treatments of the time, she died at home, survived by her husband and four children, the youngest being seven-year-old Jerry. After her passing, the grandfather remarried and continued raising the children nearby, renting out their old home. Years later, when Jerry was in college, he and his roommates, Gordy and Bob, rented this family home. Gordy occupied what used to be Jerry’s bedroom, while Jerry stayed in the master bedroom and Bob in another children’s bedroom. left it out on the dining table. Upon seeing it, Gordy was shocked and exclaimed, “What the fuck!” and “That’s the women.”  He explained that a woman resembling the one in the photos visited his room every couple of nights to turn off the lights. Bob also confessed to seeing her well. This revelation was the first time the roommates spoke of any supernatural occurrences in the house, and notably, Jerry never witnessed the apparition of the woman.

Context: The Informant believes her grandma had unfinished business, because she died leaving her cousin as a little kid. She is a devout Catholic but she says she believes in this ghost because she believes Her grandma had to try and take care of Jerry. this took place in Pasadena in 1967 and the ghost part 15 years later. The informant grew up in suburban Virginia in a Irish Catholic home

Analysis: The grandmother’s death and subsequent appearances as an apparition reflect a common motif in folklore where spirits linger due to unfinished business, in this case, to care for a family member. The informant’s integration of Catholic beliefs with the concept of ghosts demonstrates the personalization of spiritual beliefs, showing how individual experiences influence the interpretation of traditional religious doctrines.