Santiguár @ Alliance Total Gallery

Santiguár
Alliance Total Gallery
Alliance Francaise de Manille,
209 Nicanor Garcia St., Bel-Air II, Makati City
January 16, 2007 to February 17, 2007

The word sounds either arcane or quack, but as practiced in Bikol santiguar is a curing or divining ritual, in which the healer or medicine man or woman, usually an herb doctor (herbolario), calls upon the power of the elements or gods, later of God.

To reveal the cause of a person’s illness and thereby proceed to cure him. There are apparently many versions or variations of santiguar, but two are quite common. One, in which the scryer smokes a clear dish (of glass or china) by candle flame and interprets the shapes created by the smoke. Another involves letting fall wax melting from a lighted candle on a basin of water and likewise reading the shapes. Santiguar is really preliminary to the cure. The chant in pig Latin or pidgin Spanish is simultaneous with or followed by the divination, then the application of the appropriate herbal or poultice.

Santiguár (Sp., to make the sign of the cross, to bless; santiguo, santiguas, santiguan). It is unclear whether the word is a Spanish descriptive of the native ritual the friars found in the colonies (the word appears in administrative reports of the Conquista in both Central America and the Philippines, and is still found in Spanish dictionaries available on the Web), or it is an adoption or corruption, in practice and language, by the natives themselves as they came into contact with Spanish Catholicism. But a closer look at the word reveals its probable and syncretic origins - from santo and agua, holy and water (water of the saints?) - pointing to a priest’s ritual sprinkling of holy water, mainly as a blessing, but taken by natives as a charm against harm. Pagans, after all, used a wet leafy branch instead of an aspergillum to anoint the faithful.

The blessing, the making of the sign of the cross (mag-santó in Tagalog), might have lost currency in our pill-and-cough-drop, ultra-sound, magnetic-resonance-imaging digital world. But the chanting and the herbals might yet reveal to us our inadequate relationship with nature: how by calling it by name, we might yet work and live with it without killing or wasting it, or how we might even exorcise our ignorance of how it works. And how, with rudimentary understanding, we might yet clear ourselves away from the path of its upheavals, by ocean or crater, or at least soothe and salve our wounds, our losses, our deaths.

Nature is not easy to understand. Man, a bit easier. Well, he seems, in fact, the only one capable, among all species, of understanding nature and himself. If he can’t, or refuses to, and disregards others, and steps on toes and paws, fins and claws in the process, and ends up in sand and slick, he needs santiguar. Bless him.

Alliance Total Gallery is located at the Alliance Francaise de Manille, 209 Nicanor Garcia St., Bel-Air II, Makati City.

For more details on Santiguár at the Alliance Total Gallery, which runs from January 16, 2007 to February 17, 2007, please call 895-7585, 895-7441 or email: info@alliance.ph.