Full of Soul
By Resil B. Mojares
Let us celebrate the soul. This is not the Day of the Dead but of something more joyous. Soul is such an important concept in Filipino culture that there is an abundance of words referring to it in Philippine languages and a rich load of folklore about it. A native theory about its character is so highly elaborated that the native Filipino believes he does not only have one soul but a plurality of souls (ranging from two for the Ifugao and Bagobo to six for the Tagbanuwa and seven for the Bukidnon.
Like the Westerner, the Filipino believes that the soul is the “principle of life.” It is what gives energy, character, anima to the human body. The body cannot stay alive without it. True, there are stories and beliefs about how the body can continue to exist even after the soul has departed from it. In the experience of shock or extreme fright, the soul can be dislodged from the body. In sleep, the soul can leave the body and wander, its wanderings glimpsed in the refraction of dreams. Coveted, the soul can be lured, stolen, taken away by evil spirits. In all these cases, the body can continue to exist; yet, it will be a rudderless boat with no direction, the body lapsing into a kind of coma, inhabiting, like a zombie, a twilight between life and death. It is for this reason that we believe in certain preventives and remedies. We shake the child struck by fright to force the soul, dislodged, back into place. We awaken a sleeping person slowly, gently — never abruptly — to allow the wandering soul time to return to its home. We keep the lid on the cooking pot in the kitchen slightly open so the hungry soul, foraging for food in the night, will not find itself trapped, unable to get back. Or we perform rituals, bang pots and pans, raise loud petitions for the return of the kidnapped souls.
The intimate connection, necessity, of the soul to what or who we are is conveyed in the terms we used to refer to it. The Ilocano word for soul, kadkadduwa (from kadduwa, or “companion”), images the soul as constant and “inseparable” companion. The word kaluluwa or karuruwa (the word for soul in Tagalog, Ibanag, and other local languages) derives from duwa, “two,” and expresses the duality of human nature, the twinning of physical and spiritual.
The soul informs the body. It is what gives direction and wholeness to the person. The body is as husk, as driftwood, without it. The Visayan word calagan (from calag or kalag, “soul”) — now, unhappily, somewhat archaic — refers to a person who is full of energy or anima. It does not mean one who is merely busy and active, but one whose energies are purposive, well-formed, high and focused, a person “rich in soul.”
Such is the premium placed on a healthy soul that Filipinos have a complex of beliefs and practices that pertain to soul-nurture. It is believed that the soul grows proportionately with a person’s body. It is weak and faint at a baby’s birth and gradually becomes strong, more firmly lodged, as the child grows in strength, health, virtue, and intelligence. The soul must be continually protected and nourished through prayers, the performance of rituals (the aerobics of a higher order), and the continuing initiation and education of the person in the mysteries of how a full, mature life is lived. Sickness (and we speak of ailments not merely physiological or psychiatric, but moral and social) is the temporary loss of soul. Its permanent loss is death.
Yet even death shall not erase the vivid traces the soul leaves in a life well-lived. It is one of the acutest ironies of human existence that the soul is so fleeting and elusive. But that, because it stirs in us, life, no matter how short, is still sufficient.
