Bathala — Bathala Maykapal, “the Creator” — is the supreme god of the ancient Tagalog people of the Philippines: the all-powerful creator of the heavens, the earth, and humankind, the chief of all the deities and spirits, who dwells in the highest heaven and governs the cosmos. He is the great sky-father at the head of the pre-colonial Filipino pantheon.
The Supreme Creator
Bathala (whose name and title Maykapal mean “the Creator,” “the maker”) is the supreme deity of the Tagalogs — the all-powerful god who created the universe, the earth, the sky, and the first human beings. By the famous origin-myth, the first man and woman emerged from a great bamboo stalk that split open when pecked by a bird, and Bathala peopled the world. He is the highest of the gods, the ruler of the heavens, dwelling in the realm of Kaluwalhatian (the celestial paradise), from which he governs all creation and to which he calls the souls of the good.
The Lord of the Lesser Gods
Bathala reigns over a host of lesser deities and nature-spirits who serve as his agents in the world — the gods of the sun, moon, sea, and sky, and the countless diwata and anito (nature- and ancestor-spirits) who inhabit the land. His messengers, the tigmamanukan birds, conveyed his will and were watched for omens. Through these intermediaries Bathala’s power reached into every part of the world, while he himself remained the remote and supreme authority above all.
The God Behind the Word
So central was Bathala to Filipino belief that, with the coming of Christianity, his name was adopted (alongside “Diyos”) for the Christian God, and “Bathala” came to mean simply “God” — the supreme being of the old faith mapped onto the new. Yet the memory of the old Bathala, the creator who made humankind from bamboo and reigned over the diwata, endures in the folklore and the revived interest in pre-colonial Filipino mythology. In Bathala, the ancient Filipinos honoured the supreme creator and sky-father — the all-powerful maker of the heavens, the earth, and humankind, the chief of all the gods and spirits, the great deity at the summit of the Philippine cosmos.