the more they are in the water the better they
like it. They bathe at all times, for pleasure and cleanliness. When
an infant is born, it is put into the river and bathed in cold water;
and the mother, after having given birth, does not keep away from the
water. The manner of bathing is, to stand with the body contracted
and almost seated, with the water up to the throat. The most usual and
general hour is at sunset, when the people leave work or return from
the field, and bathe for rest and coolness. Men and women all swim
like fish, and as if born and reared in the water. Each house has a
vessel of water at the door. Whenever any one goes up to the house,
whether an inmate of it or not, he takes water from that vessel to
wash his feet, especially when it is muddy. That is done very easily;
one foot is dried with the other, and the water falls down below,
for the floor there is like a close grating.

CHAPTER XV

Of the false heathen religion, idolatries, superstitions,
and other things, of the Filipinos

105. It is not found that these nations had anything written about
their religion or about their government, or of their old-time
history. All that we have been able to learn has been handed down from
father to son in tradition, and is preserved in their customs; and in
some songs that they retain in their memory and repeat when they go on
the sea, sung to the time of their rowing, and in their merrymakings,
feasts, and funerals, and even in their work, when many of them work
together. In those songs are recounted the fabulous genealogies and
vain deeds of their gods. Among their gods is one who is the chief and
superior to all the others, whom the Tagalogs call Bathala Meycapal,
[23] which signifies "God" the "Creator" or "Maker." The Visayans
call him Laon, which denotes "antiquity."

They adored (as did the Egyptians) animals and birds; and the sun and
moon, as did the Assyrians. They also attributed to the rainbow its
kind of divinity. The Tagalogs worshiped a blue bird as large as a
turtle-dove, which they called tigmamanuquin, to which they attributed
the name of Bathala, which, as above stated, was among them a name for
divinity. They worshiped the crow, as the ancients did the god Pan
or the goddess Ceres, and called it Meylupa, signifying "master of
the earth." They held the crocodile in the greatest veneration, and
when they saw it in the water cried out, in all subjection, "Nono,"
signif