Tikbalang: the horse-headed trickster of Filipino forests

What a tikbalang looks like

Most accounts agree on the outline. A tikbalang is very tall and very thin, with a man's body, a horse's head and a horse's hooves where the feet should be. Its arms and legs are too long for the rest of it: when it squats, its knees stand higher than its head. Some tellings give it a thick mane with a few hard, golden spines hidden in it; others have it smoking a cigar, a habit it shares with the kapre, the giant said to live in the same trees.

It keeps to the edges of places people use: forest trails, bamboo groves, river crossings and above all the balete, the strangler fig that grows into huge, hollow, many-trunked shapes and that many Filipinos will not cut down or point at.

Lost on a path you know

The tikbalang is a trickster more than a killer. Its favourite game is to lead travellers astray. A farmer walking home on a path he has used all his life finds himself back where he started, again and again, or deep in a stretch of forest he does not recognise. Some stories add that the tikbalang takes the shape of someone the traveller knows, or of a light ahead on the road, and walks just out of reach.

In older tellings the tikbalang can be dangerous: it carries people off, frightens them into fever, or keeps them wandering until they collapse. In many modern ones it is mostly mischief, the explanation for a lost hour and a long walk home. Either way, the person it fools is often someone who walked through its place without a word of respect.

Two ways to get free

The best-known remedy is to turn your shirt inside out. Wear it that way and the tikbalang's trick breaks; the path you know comes back. Nobody agrees on why it works. Some say the reversed shirt confuses the creature, others that it shows you know what is happening to you, which ends the joke.

The second remedy comes earlier. Filipinos passing a balete, an anthill, a dark grove or any place where something unseen might live say tabi tabi po, roughly 'excuse me, please let me pass', with the respectful *po* at the end. It is a request for permission, and in many households children learn it before they learn why. The same habit of courtesy towards unseen neighbours runs through the custom of usog and much of the everyday belief collected in common superstitions explained.

Saying tabi tabi po costs nothing and teaches a child to walk through a forest like a guest, which is reason enough to keep it.

Taming a tikbalang

The tikbalang can also be won. Many stories say that somewhere in its mane are three thick, golden spines or hairs. A person brave enough to leap onto its back, hold on while it bucks and runs through the night, and pull one of those spines free becomes its master. The tamed tikbalang serves its owner loyally from then on.

The pulled spine is said to be kept as a charm, much like an agimat, and some tellings have its owner use it to call the creature. The taming story turns the tikbalang from a threat into a prize, which may be why it survives so well: it is the one creature in Filipino folklore you might want to meet.

The sunshower wedding

When the sun shines while rain falls, Filipinos say may ikinakasal na tikbalang: a tikbalang is getting married. It is said lightly, mostly to children, and it is one of the most widely known pieces of tikbalang lore in the country, known even to people who could not describe the creature.

The Philippines is not alone in giving the sunshower to a wedding. In Japan the same weather is *kitsune no yomeiri*, the fox's wedding, and other cultures around the world tie a sunshower to an animal or spirit marrying in secret. The weather is strange enough, sun and rain at once, that people everywhere have reached for the same kind of explanation.