Manama
Also called Sigalungan.
Manama is the creator god of the Manuvu of the Philippines — pre-existent and alone, who framed the world on crossed steel bars and molded it from the scrapings of his own fingernails.
At a glance
- Tradition
- Philippine folklore
- Region
- Philippines (place of origin)
- Trait family
- The Two-Realmed
- Symbols
- gods
Near this figure
Symbols
Judged against the description by a model. Meanings are our own paraphrase.
- gods is Gods are worshipped powers governing natural or abstract domains, represented as human, animal, vegetal, or formless; Mesoamerican categories resist simple European equivalence.
why
Manama is the supreme deity of the Manuvu people of Mindanao, one of the company of tribal high gods the Philippine record preserves side by side — Bathala of the Tagalogs, Melu of the Blaan, the Bagobo creator among them.
Traits
Read from the figure's description, which a model wrote. Open "why" for the sentence a trait came from.
Behaviour
- Knows past present and future
why
That original name was Sigalungan, meaning far-seeing and all-knowing — he could see, know, and hear anything at any distance, past, present, or future — and he revealed it through the diwata spirits.
Utility powers
- Creation
why
Then the world: Manama took two bars of steel and set them criss-cross as a frame, scraped his fingernails, molded the scrapings into a solid mass, and grew it by will power until it became the world.