This monograph is an attempt at an anthropological analysis of a Philippine myth. It is a pioneering and exploratory work, and does not pretend to be the final word on the subject.

Myths are succinct statements by a culture about its core concepts. Myths are symbolic statements, held in the hands of individual narrators, and as such potentially told in as many versions of what the recorder-analyst (it is hard to see how the two could be different persons) must translate into universally comprehensible statements about the culture that produced these myths.

The study of Philippine mythology is still on a level comparable to the collection of bows and arrows in early ethnology. Whatever work has been done beyond collecting, i.e., methodologically acceptable collecting, has been in terms of general classifications and attempts at interpretation inspired by the Propp-Dundes tradition. A reflection of later anthropological advances is hardly detectable.[…]