Lumay: the Visayan love charm, and the island that makes it

Lumay and gayuma

Across most of the Philippines, a love charm is a gayuma. In Cebuano and other Visayan languages the usual word is lumay. The two overlap almost completely, and many people use them interchangeably, but where speakers draw a difference, lumay tends to carry the heavier weight.

A gayuma is often described as a way to soften a heart or win attention. Lumay, in many Visayan tellings, is a binding: the person under it loses interest in everyone else, thinks only of the one who used it, and grows restless or ill when kept apart. That darker reputation puts lumay closer to Visayan sorcery like barang than to a harmless charm.

How lumay is said to be made and used

Accounts vary from healer to healer, and those who make lumay are not inclined to share the recipe. Most describe a preparation of oil with roots, herbs, bark and other ingredients gathered at particular times, sometimes with prayers or an orasyon said over it. The charm is passed to the person desired through touch, food or drink, a scent, or by applying it to something they wear or carry.

Some tellings say a lumay must be renewed, and that if the user stops, the bond breaks suddenly and leaves the person freed angry or sick. Others say it can only be undone by the healer who made it, or by another healer strong enough to reverse it.

Siquijor and the mananambal

Siquijor, a small island province south of Cebu and east of Negros, has a reputation across the Philippines as the home of sorcery, healing and love potions. Spanish sailors are said to have called it *Isla del Fuego*, island of fire, for the glow of fireflies in its trees, and the name stuck to its mystical reputation.

Siquijor's folk healers are called mananambal, the Visayan counterpart of the Tagalog albularyo. Many work with herbs, oils and prayer; some are said to deal in sorcery as well. Through Lent, healers gather plants and roots on Fridays, and on Black Saturday they mix their oils in a large cauldron. Since about 2010 this has been staged as a public Healing Festival at Mount Bandilaan, drawing visitors from across the country. Small bottles of oil sold to tourists as love potions are part of the same trade, though locals tend to say the real thing is not sold in souvenir shops.

If a love charm has to be renewed to keep working, that tells you most of what you need to know about it.

What the stories say it costs

Lumay stories are rarely romances. The person bound by it is described as changed, obsessive, cut off from family and friends. The person who used it often suffers too: the love they wanted turns out not to be love, the charm fails at a bad moment, or the harm they did comes back to them. Visayan families tell these stories as warnings, much as Tagalog families do with gayuma.

When someone's behaviour changes suddenly and a lumay is suspected, families go to a mananambal or albularyo to confirm it and break it. The cure is usually another preparation, prayers, and sometimes a confrontation with the person suspected of using it.