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The Philippine Bestiary: An Illustrated Field Guide to Philippine Mythology: the Monsters, Spirits and Enchanted Beings of Filipino Folklore
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 18 2026
Pages: 84
Weight: 0.27
Height: 0.17 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Your shirt goes back on wrong side out and the tikbalang loses track of you, which is the only reason anybody ever gets home from a road that keeps returning to the same tree. Salt packed into the legs a manananggal left standing stops her from ever sitting back down, and the sunrise does the rest. As for the nuno sa punso, he only ever wanted to be greeted, and the price of forgetting is a foot that swells like rising dough. This is practical folklore, and every entry ends with the practice.
The parts are ordered by intent, which is why the devourers come first. They are led by the aswang, in whose eyes your own reflection stands on its head. After them the colossi, with the bakunawa climbing out of the water after the moon and the kapre watching the road from his balete tree. Then the ones who lead you astray, the beautiful and the drowned, and the night terrors that arrive around three in the morning. Wonders and omens close the guide, and they open on the sarimanok, a Maranao standard of good fortune and never once a monster.
Twenty-nine entries, twenty-nine plates- Every creature gets a plate of its own, full page, in color, on white paper.
- Three paragraphs per entry: what the thing is, what it does to you, and what the household used to reach for.
- A remedy at the end of every entry, from a fistful of garlic to a whole barangay banging pots at an eclipse until the serpent spits the moon back.
- The region and the tellers named in italics under every title, before the first sentence.
- Written for adults. The monsters take every joke in the book; the people who feed them take none.
What gets sold as Philippine mythology is a whole archipelago of mythologies flying one flag. The aswang of Capiz and the batibat of the Ilocano north belong to different peoples, different languages, different islands, and this book says so on the page, entry by entry: Tagalog, Bikolano, Hiligaynon, Cebuano, Ilocano, Maranao, Bagobo and others. The reading list at the back says where all of it comes from. And the manananggal is filed under manananggal, not under vampire.
Who to give it to- Filipino American households who want a book that gets Capiz, Lanao and the Ilocos right.
- Gift-givers who want the plates worth a second look and the entries worth reading aloud.
- Readers who know the names but never got the stories, and want the folklore underneath them.
- October gifting, housewarmings, balikbayan boxes, and the pasalubong problem generally.
- Bestiary and mythology readers who have done Greece and Japan and want the archipelago next.
- Lolas, titas and titos who will check whether you got the province right.
Start with the aswang. Everyone starts with the aswang.
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