Filipino Shamanism, Myth, Traditional Tattoos & Cultural Connection | Lane Wilcken (2020)

Lane Wilcken from Season 1 (2020) of Birdsong.

Lane is a scholar, cultural tattoo practitioner, known as a mambabatok, and an advocate for the critically endangered practice of "batok" which are the cultural tattoos of the Philippines.

He’s studied many of the indigenous traditions of the Philippines and greater Pacific, with nearly three decades of research and experience. He’s the author of "Filipino Tattoos Ancient to Modern" and "The Forgotten Children of Maui: Filipino Myths, Tattoos, and Rituals of a Demigod."

He’s also been a contributing writer to "Back from the Crocodile's Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory" and "Shamanic Transformations: True Stories of the Moment of Awakening," as well as several articles for various magazines and journals.

In this conversation, we cover traditional cultural tattoo, animism, shamanism, mythology, origin stories, similarities between not just the Philippines, but many of the islands and cultures within and around the Pacific, cultural restoration, and several other threads that we stitch into the fabric of our dialogue.

 

TIMESTAMPS:

[3:35] Lane open the conversation with a Filipino prayer

[6:25] How did Lane get started on this path?

[7:30] The Philippines are a product of an admixture of peoples for over a millennia

[8:15] Why did Lane feel so comfortable around Hawaiian culture?

[9:15] The similarities between pre-contact Philippines culture and Polynesia

[10:00] Lane’s rite of passage into tattooing

[18:20] Philippines: The Island of the Painted People

[19:00] Ancient tattoo artifacts discovered roughly 4,000 years ago

[19:45] The link between ancient tattooing and Chinese medicine / acupuncture points

[21:20] Sacred geometry in tattoos and the potential link with psychedelic trips

[21:56] Animistic relations and tattoo symbology

[23:00] Filipino plant medicine and acacia??

[25:30] Animism and the understanding that everything has a spirit

[26:00] Banyan trees and deification of the dead

[26:35] Filipino afterlife beliefs

[28:15] Filipino shamans (Babaylans) and ancestral rituals

[31:36] Lanes grandmother as a Filipino healer

[32:23] Lane discussing his “activation” of ancestral healing knowledge

[35:00] Self-initiation as a response to the lack of connection with our ancestral roots

[36:00] Was it predominantly the women who became the shamans?

[37:47] The matriarchal thread throughout traditional Filipino culture

[41:00] Women were considered spiritual portals into this world and the other

[41:23] The story of the Babaylans being fed to the crocodiles

[42:42] Headhunting traditions and eating part of the warrior as spiritual culture

[44:00] Is there a link between symbology and practicality when it comes to shamanic canoe travel?

[46:46] Cross-cultural pollination between seafaring Pacific cultures

[49:33] The great debate of whether the Philippines is linked to South East Asia or Pacific Island

[51:15] Mainland Asian culture vs Pacific culture

[53:00] Linguistic similarities between traditional cultures

[54:50] The sweet potato of the Philippines is of Native American origin

[56:15] Did Maui, the Demigod, bring sweet potato to both the Philippines and New Zealand?

[57:20] Laumuaig / Maui fishing up the islands

[59:00] Tattoos as mnemonic devices that commemorate ancient mythology

[1:00:36] For Filipinos, the Philippines is not our original homeland

[1:01:30] The link between ancestral arrivings by bamboo tube and the symbolic feminine

[1:05:10] Nurturing the soils of cultural restoration

[1:15:38] The tribe known as the Dreamweavers

[1:21:30] Cultural appropriation and rebuilding a visual vocabulary of entholinguistic groups of the Philippines

[1:23:00] From pottery and textiles to tattoos on the skin

[1:24:40] Receiving tattoo meanings through dreamtime realms

[1:27:12] Lane gives thanks to close up the conversational container