[New School] Becoming a Mayari rather than an Artemis

When I was 13, I wanted to be Artemis.

It all started in high school when I first read Percy Jackson. I remember being fascinated by Greek and Roman myths, deities, and heroes. I would lie in bed and imagine I was a demigod. And if I were a demigod, I would join the Hunters of Artemis. In my eyes, she was everything that I wanted to be — strong, fierce, and independent. And she was a huntress and a goddess, both of which seemed pretty cool to me.

But I did also wonder why we didn’t have our own deities. True, I thoroughly enjoyed reading about Percy and his encounters with the reimagined versions of Greek gods and goddesses. But I also remember feeling like those stories never truly felt like home. Like they weren’t…mine.

Fast forward.

I am 19 years old. Freshman year in college. In one of my classes, we were asked to group ourselves and each member would take up the name of a Philippine god or goddess. Imagine my shock when I found out that we had deities aside from Bathala.

Not to say I wasn’t aware of Philippine mythology and folklore.

After all, what Filipino didn’t grow up on or at least heard tales about the kapre and the tikbalang, the diwata and the engkanto, the mangkukulam and the aswang?

I was in elementary when I first heard about the kapre living in the sampaloc tree on the street next to ours. I believed in it immediately. But while Filipinos are well-versed in lower mythology, so many of us are wildly unfamiliar with our higher mythology. As a child, I used to read books with fairy tales and folklore from French, German, Danish, Russian, and Japanese cultures. But none of those books offered stories from the Philippines, though. Little did I know that magic and myth have long been woven into our culture and lives.

So when my professor asked us to introduce ourselves with the name of a Philippine god or goddess, I was overcome by an intense shame. I felt like a traitor to my own people. Ask me to name three Greek deities and I could give you ten. Or ask me to name at least three Egyptian deities and I’m fairly confident that I could name five. But ask me to name one, just one, Philippine deity aside from Bathala and I would clam up.

However, the shame was slowly replaced by a hunger to learn more about Philippine mythology and folklore. It was during that time that I found out about Mayari, the Goddess of the Hunt and the Moon. Our Goddess of the Hunt and the Moon. Artemis had always felt like a separate entity from me, someone I wanted to be that was out of reach. But Mayari was me and I was her; it was just a matter of looking inside myself and bringing her to the surface.

But no sooner had the hunger formed when it was also quelled by the severe, crippling lack of resources on our own mythology and folklore, unfortunately.

I was at a loss.

But then last year, Trese was animated and streamed on Netflix.

There were lots of differing opinions and emotions about it, but one thing is sure for both me and the many Filipinos who watched it. It felt personal, intricately connected to who I am.

And because Trese is set in Manila, a place so familiar to us whether we call it home or not, and they spoke our language, there was a sense of unity — us connecting to those mythological deities and characters, and us being unified with each other as we find common ground, a shared experience and culture, and learn what ties us as a people.

Since then, there has been an undeniable resurgence in Philippine mythology and folklore in mainstream media, most specifically in komiks. These modern retellings and reimaginings of our mythology and folklore — not yet lost but on the verge of being forgotten — is vital to the survival and persistence of our culture.

So much of our stories were lost during colonial times. Our narratives were warped by colonial influences. To begin with, our country was fractured from the start. Multiple islands resulted in a fractured nation and that made it hard for us Filipinos to form a unified sense of identity, but made it easier for our colonizers to keep us under their thumb.

But with the rise of technology in the 18th and 19th century, we were able to finally communicate with one another. That led to a sense of oneness among Filipinos, thus giving birth to concepts of nationalism and Filipino identity.

But although Philippine mythology and folklore are slowly being reimagined and reclaimed, there’s still much to do to bring awareness about them. Our mythology and folklore are more than relics of our past and do not only serve to remind us of our culture and history; they also strengthen our unity and identity. For these stories remind us of what we once were, what our ancestors sought to be, what we are now, and who we want to be.

Everywhere you look, all the streets and the rivers, every nook and cranny of the places you call home and even the ones you don’t — the very soil of our land is alive with magic and folklore.

And by partaking in the recollection, reimagination, and documentation of our myths and folklore — whether by creating or consuming or raising awareness about them — we should hope to step a little bit away from Western myths, to remember and rediscover our roots, to reclaim our stories. Maybe then we can beckon each other home.

Maybe then we could become Mayaris rather than Artemises. – Rappler.com

Althene Jilanah Gonzaga, 23, is a senior BA Communication Arts student at the University of the Philippines Los Baños. When she’s not working and studying, she spends her time reading, watching horror films and then questioning this decision, and paying off her sleep debt.