Oblivious & the Babaylan

October is Filipino American History month. I racked my brain for ideas on how I could tie it into the Oblivious Nerd Girl world, but I'm drawing a blank.  October is also Halloween time and it's also fall TV time. There is cheap candy on the shelves and witches on TV.  Last night was the premiere episode of American Horror Stories: The Coven and it was ridiculously awesome.  This season of AHS covers a coven of witches.  And it lead me to remember an Oblivious Story that Pops once told me.

As an Oblivious Nerd Girl I was surrounded by my maternal side of the family. These are the people who saw me in all my early obliviousness.  I learned about Pops' side of the family through stories.  Pops would regale me with stories about my grandparents, my great grandparents, and his siblings.  These stories weave our family history with Filipino Folklore.  Many of these stories surround my great grandmother, Lola T.  When Pops was little he would get into fights with other kids because they would call Lola T a "babaylan." According to wikipedia this is the definition of a babaylan:

Babaylan is a Visayan term identifying an indigenous Filipino religious leader, who functions as a healer, a shaman, a seer and a community "miracle-worker" (or a combination of any of those). The babaylan can be male, female, or male transvestites (known as asog, bayoc, or bayog), but most of the babaylan were female.

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Now to me this definition sounds awesome.  When Pops revealed this I thought COOL! But to Pops, babaylan was a slur.  Babaylan meant witch.   He didn't want his Lola to be called this and he frequently got into fist fights over the word.  

Lola T got this reputation because she was a bad ass lady.  One example of her bad ass ness was that she was telekinetic.  She could move things with her mind.  Pops shared that she could move a glass of water from one end of the table to the end.  Lola T could make pencils levitate on their tips.  As a child I would concentrate so hard on cups at the dining table. I would try to move it a centimeter on the table to no avail.  In class I would balance a pencil on my desk and try to have it stay up with my mind.  I always failed.   

Lola would eventually have to give up these powers so her son could be ordained as a Jesuit priests.  I do not know what Jesuit bureaucracy existed in the the early 1950s, but some entity prevented my grand uncle from becoming an ordained priest because his mother, my Lola T had these powers.  She had to vow to never use her powers.  She had to put away her tools.  One item that Pops recalls is a whip made out of sting ray tails.  Apparently the whip had an extra snap to it. This sting ray whip had some kind of power attached to it.  I always imagined it was like Wonder Woman's lasso of truth.  You could not lie if it struck you!  When Pops moved to the States he tried to find it, but it was lost forever.  

As I watched American Horror Stories: The Coven, I thought about Lola T. The story line in the show explained that sometimes powers skip a generation.  Lola T's power skipped over me. Instead the stories of her actions and her powers resonate in my mind, in my family history. One day I will tell them to my own children and they will learn our family stories.  And if my child can balance pencils with his/her mind I will be both jealous and stoked. Until then, I'll keep trying.