oooh tell me more about magwayen 👀
multimuse ask meme / always accepting !
Magwayen ( or Maggie, as I like to call her ) is a Filipino deity originating from Visayan lore. This is an important distinction because the Philippines is an archipelago made out of 7,640 islands, and because our land masses are separated by huge bodies of water, our mythology is also fractured in this way. This means that even though both Magwayen and Mayari ( who is a deity originating from Tagalog lore ) are Filipino deities, they are not from the same pantheon.
Magwayen is the Goddess of the Sea and Death; she is created by Kanlaon ( the god of time ) as the female aspect and balance to Kaptan, who is the god of the skies. According to Visayan mythology, she personifies “the great wide ocean that covers the entire world”. She appears in three distinct forms: the maiden, the mother, and the crone. Sometimes, Magwayen appears as a fair lady walking the vast Philippine shorelines, sometimes she is a woman carrying a baby or holding the hands of a little girl ( her daughter, Lidagat, which means of the sea ). This is her most generous form, the nurturing mother, willing to share the bounty of the ocean with her people. And sometimes, she appears as an old lady holding a budyong ( or a conch shell ) which she blows upon to transform herself into a fearsome water serpent to fight the Bakunawa ( a sea monster who is Magwayen’s bitterest adversary ).
As previously mentioned, Magwayen is the balance of Kaptan, who is known to be temperamental and impulsive. In contrast to the god of the skies, Magwayen is more level-headed, but just like the ever-changing nature of her domain, she can be cold, ruthless, and devastating in her rage. In some versions of their myth, Magwayen and Kaptan are rivals who became husband and wife ( enemies to lovers, how about that ) and their children ( not with each other; Magwayen gave birth to her daughter by herself, and Kaptan created his son by his own divine breath ) Lidagat and Lihangin fell in-love and were married. One day, however, a horde of sea monsters attacked Magwayen’s home, forcing her to temporarily retreat into Kaptan’s domain. Instead of doing the same, Lidagat sought to fight the monsters herself, and her husband went to help her out. They ended up victorious, but their success came at a great cost; Lihangin was gravely injured by the Bakunawa, and he was dying.
After Lihangin passed away, Lidagat became overcame by grief, and she ended up dying out of a broken heart. Overwhelmed by her loss, Magwayen adopted another form -- that of a grieving woman, wearing clothes of mourning and face covered by dark cloth. She ferried the soul of her own daughter to sulad or the underworld in a majestic balangay ( click here ). Ever since then, grief-stricken Magwayen took on the duty of becoming the ferrywoman of the underworld, hoping that by crossing the realm between the land of the living and the dead, she can be closer to her daughter.
Magwayen is also said to have a role in the creation of the first man and woman, Sikalak and Sikabay. After Lidagat passed, the goddess was unbearably lonely, and to ease her pain, Kaptan gifted her a divine seed ( blessed by Kaptan’s divine powers and containing a piece of the goddess Lisuga, one of Lidagat and Lihangin’s four children ). He instructed Magwayen to plant the seed and care for it, which she did so religiously to fill in the hole left by her daughter. This seed, fueled by Magwayen’s diligent love and care, grew to become the first bamboo plant, and eventually it split open to disgorge the first man and woman in the world.
EXTRA: As a goddess of the sea and death, Magwayen was highly venerated by the Visayan people all over the central islands of the Philippines. However, when the Spanish came to occupy our country, they converted the natives to Catholicism and replaced the worship for Magwayen with worship for the Virgin Mary. Nevertheless, her fame withstood the test of time and her myth is still alive in Visayan mythology and even in Filipino pop culture. Her control of the sea is said to be everlasting. She is also one of the few female deities said to have power over the oceans, which in more popular mythology, is usually a role attributed to a male deity.
It would be interesting to see how she’d get along with someone like Antigone, perhaps in a modern verse, or even in a verse where Magwayen travels the world and somehow ends up in Thebes, or in a grishaverse setting 👀 where she’s also a saint. Inej can also possibly meet her, since she’s on her boat being a badass captain !
