Lakapati: the Filipino Transgender Deity

 

Ikapati by Galo B. Ocampo

I recently dealt with the theme of skin color, put on paper in the appendix of the book “Bodies and Identity – Women from the Indian Subcontinent to Italy” written by my friends Sara Rossetti and Katiuscia Carnà.

It's a subject that is very close to my heart and that has been a dominant motif in all these years of photography and portraits of Asian women.

In my appendix, I refer to the fine essay by Pier Giorgio Solinas entitled “Color of the skin color of caste – Person, ritual, society in India”, in which he speaks of “semantics of colors” in Hindu philosophy and cosmogony that permeates not only the Hinduism in India but – in my opinion – also part of the culture, art, and conception of life in many countries of Asia, conveyed by the Indian epics that are in the plots of many of these countries.

Solinas talks about it in the chapter “Skin color of caste”. The scholar analyzes, as an anthropologist, a well-circumscribed area of  India, starting however with the analysis of the four primary colors, or substances, most recurrent in the popular ceremonies of the Hindu liturgy.

Precisely there are four:
        Gobar, the cow dung, which is black;
        Sindur, the natural red pigment, or vermilion (mercury sulfide);
        Turmeric, yellow domestic turmeric;
        Rice, whether ground, raw or cooked, is white.

These four-color elements that make up the Hindu symbolic cosmos innervate every aspect of people's lives. Indeed, they become the triguṇa, or the “three characters”, the three fundamental qualities of being linked to birth, and therefore to caste, in Indian Hindu society, each relating to a color:
        Sattva, the highest, wisest and brightest – the white,
        Rajas, the most passionate, greedy, and strong-willed – the red,
        Tamasa, the most turbid and dark–black.

That, the theme of the “chromatic codification of social status” is outlined, the theory of the four varnas: caturvarna, which will become the four castes of Hindu society.

 

 

A complex and fascinating subject, which does not die out in the past or in philosophy but still has an overwhelming impact on the personal vision of beauty in many girls and women of Asia.

So I started doing some research, to see how other countries had faced this problem, relying this time on fairy tales.

I believe that fairy tales, proverbs, popular songs, are the repository of the culture and beliefs of people. I said repository because it's usually considered in a lesser way, where on the shelves of libraries there are great literature, poems, the sublime art of painting and sculpture. The pride of every nation.

But even from fairy tales you can understand a lot, I quote one above all, the splendid book by Tagore, “The mysteries of Bengal”, a collection of stories of ghosts and mysteries in the fairy tales’ style of the great Nobel Prize winner.

In short, this is how I learned of the Filipino fairy tale about the myth of Magbabaya.

The fairy tale tells of the creator god Magbabaya, who wanted to populate the wasteland and empty of people, so he came down from the sky and made human figures with clay to dry in the sun. Back from hunting he realized that he had forgotten the statuettes for a long time under the sun and realized that the clay was now burnt, completely black as coal.

Then the next day, once the figures are made with clay, he protects them in the shade of a tree and goes hunting. But on his return, he finds that the figures were too pale this time.

So on the third day, after completing the new clay statues, he puts them under the sun but – this time – he stays to check until the sun starts to get too strong, then he covers them with tree leaves, and in the end, he is satisfied with the perfect brown color similar to that of his skin.

He then takes the three types of clay statues, blows them on to give life, and distributes them to different corners of the earth, each with different skin colors: obviously, the people with the perfect brown color were the inhabitants of the Philippines, similar to the god himself.

Which in Tagalog is called kayumanggi, and it often happens that this term-concept becomes a vindication of one's own cultural identity: in Rome, Kayumanggi, is the name of a traditional Filipino dance group.

 

 

However, it is not so much what I wanted to talk about, but about something that intrigued me much more.

Always wandering the paths of these ancient Filipino traditions, I came across the cosmogony of the deities of this country which I totally ignored. The Spanish colonization has paved – as unfortunately often happens – the ethnic-religious specificities of the Filipino people, and until today everyone knows this nation as one of the most Catholic in the world.

But fortunately, the beliefs, spirituality, the ancient wisdom are hard to eradicate, especially in a country with hundreds and hundreds of ethnic and tribal groups.

Classical Filipino mythology, as well as the set of indigenous Filipino folk religions, called Anitism, date back hundreds of years, and for a few thousand years.

It is almost impossible to untangle this thick plethora of mythological figures, heroes, divinities (divided into anitos and diwatas), and ancestral spirits (ninuno), because they vary according to the ethnic group of reference. Therefore, not only between the different regions of the Philippines, between north and south but also within every single region each ethnic group has its own pantheon of divinities.

Let me give an example: in the Ifugao pantheon, the ethnic group of the Cordillera in the north of the country, the deities alone are calculated to be at least 1,500. Well, there are over a hundred distinct pantheons in the Philippines.

To convey the idea of the multitude of divinities who have nothing to envy to the Hindu, for example, even if there are over a hundred million.

Although in general, every Filipino refers to these ancestral deities or spirits with the term anito, then each ethnic and regional group makes a case for itself with the different names and characteristics of the individuals.

 

Lakapati

It's precisely by scrolling through the names and personalities of all these deities that I came across Ikapati, or Lakapati, the androgynous, hermaphrodite deity, for many even transgenders.

Since Italy has only recently passed a law in the Senate to protect the rights of LGBT sexual minorities, sparking a strong debate in society, it seemed perfect timing. So I think it's worth investigating.

It must be said that it is not unique in the pantheons of deities in the different traditions.

In Hinduism itself, the figure of Shikhandi is famous, one of the non-secondary characters of the great epic Mahabharata, who played a fundamental role in Arjuna's victory in the final battle of Kurukshetra. The story of Shikhandi is also interesting: a story of revenge that intertwines the lives of Bhishma and Amba.

Before her name was Shikhandi, she was the first of three sisters, with the name of Amba, princess of the kingdom of Kashi.

Bhishma, made a vow of celibacy, renouncing the throne of the Kuru dynasty, proposed to seek a wife for his half-brother Vichitravirya who became heir and sovereign.

For this reason, Bhishma went to the kingdom where the three sisters lived, just during the swayamvara ceremony (an event in which the princes competed for a bride), rejected all other potential suitors, and led the three princesses to Hastinapura (the capital Kuru) to marry them his brother Vichitravirya. But if the two young sisters were happy to marry the mighty king, Amba refused as she was already betrothed to Shalva. Then Bhishma allowed her to return to her beloved, but he refused the woman considering her already “corrupt”.

Vichitravirya also rejected her because her heart was already devoted to another, and when the desperate woman proposed to Bhishma, the one who had broken all her plans, she was again rejected due to his vow of celibacy.

Amba, in the throes of anger and thirsting for revenge, asked for help from Shiva who granted her a fundamental role in the death of Bhishma in the next life. Without waiting Amba took her own life to be reborn as Shikhandi.

Here are several versions, but all agree – albeit with variations – in speaking of Shikhandi as born female but then transformed, by Shiva or a demon in the woods, into a transgender, so that she would remember her previous life as a woman. In this capacity, since Bhishma recognized him as the incarnation of Amba and refused to fight him, Shikhandi allowed Arjuna to stab him with arrows and get his\her revenge.

 

Shikhandi

 

Let's go back to what can be considered one of the most intriguing deities in Philippine mythology, Ikapati (or Lakapati), the Tagalog goddess of fertility. F. Landa Jocano described her as the “goddess of the cultivated land” and the “benevolent giver of food and prosperity”, whose name itself means “giver of food”.

It's perhaps no coincidence that the name comes from Sanskrit, and literally means “Lord of the world”, loka (place, land, field), and pati (master, lord), which was also an epithet of “Brahman the Creator” and “Vishnu the Preserver”.

Moreover, there are many influences in Philippine religious cosmogonies, especially in the Mindanao area, derived from the Hindu-Javanese tradition.

 

Being a hermaphrodite, transgender, endowed with both sexes, makes her the perfect symbol of fertility, although, in some commentaries, including those of the friars, Ikapati is described as “the hermaphrodite devil who satisfies his carnal appetite with men and women”.

The farmers in the fields turned to her when there was famine, as well as the fishermen who set sail in the sea.

She is represented iconographically as a united man and woman representing the creative power of the union of the two sexes; she is the protector of sown fields, agriculture, vagabonds, and orphans.

During rituals and offerings – known as maganito – in the fields and during the planting season, farmers held a child in the air as they invoked Lakapati and chanted “Lakapati, pakanin mo yaring alipin mo; huwag mo gutumin” (Lakapati, feed this thy slave; let him not hunger).

 

 

I was totally unaware of both this divinity and the immense and ancient mythological-religious and divine tradition of the Philippines, despite the fact that I have been trying to study this culture and people I love for over fifteen years.

Two things made me think.

The first I mentioned at the beginning. Despite the complexes related to skin color, there is something not new in the anthropological field in Magbabaya's fable, namely the ability that cultures and peoples have to create mythologies that adapt to their needs and experiences. Where the color of the skin is that of brown, it becomes necessary that the Creator god be of the same color of skin and consider the lighter or darker skin colors to be errors. Too bad that, in the present, many Filipinos, especially women, have forgotten this story.

It would help them get rid of that sense of inferiority towards the white-skinned ruler, who still remains a model to imitate and envy.

Event of the Filipino community. Rome, June 2013

Second, I have always been struck by the love and often the pride of Filipino mothers for their homosexual children, both male and female, and even transgender ones.

It's not so obvious because it remains one of the most deeply Catholic and devout peoples in the world. And we Italians, who are certainly not as fervently believers as they are, cannot even accept a law that prevents someone from being attacked or humiliated for their sexual orientation.

Yet I have rarely seen a mother look so proudly and boast the beauty of a homosexual child, as in Filipino mothers.

Because, in the end, the discourse is not so much about the sexual identity of the children but, simply, about how much a mother is able to love.

Regardless.

And here, in my opinion, the threads of the discourse are drawn.

 

So writes Syama Allard in her beautiful article on Shikhandi.

“In one sense, the essence of Hindu philosophy is simple. Every individual is an embodied eternal atman (spirit or soul). Being distinct from the body — including its extended attributes like race, gender, and sexual orientation — every atman originates from the same Divine source and is, therefore, part of the same spiritual family, deserving the dignity of love, respect, and equal treatment.”

 

This is the teaching of Shikhandi as well as of Lakapati.

What defines us on the outside is an accident, something we cannot determine. What truly makes us all equal is the atman, the spirit, which is of the same divine substance.

Prejudices are a limited view of existence.

I have never given too much weight, in my many meetings around the world and in Rome, to the color of the skin, sexual orientation, social status. For me, Kings and servants are on the same level.

When we look with eyes sincerely full of love, like a mother, we should never see how sunburnt our skin, sexual tendency, wealth or poverty, but only atman.

 

At least I think so, and I'm happy to have added another small piece to the big mosaic of my little acquaintance.

For those wishing to learn more:
An Ultimate Guide To Philippine Mythology’s Legendary Deities
Goddess Ikapati
Shikhandi: the Mahabharata’s transgender warrior

 

Italian version