Anting-Anting Stories and Other Strange Tales of the Filipinos

The Anting-Anting is both talisman and fetich: it is the Filipino version of good medicine. The characters and situations in these eleven stories are from an earlier, less progressive era. These stories contain adventure, mystical elements, pirates, pearls, man-apes, towering volcanoes, strange animals and birds, and even stranger men, pythons, bejuco ropes stained with human blood, feathering palm trees at one moment fanned by soft tropical breezes and the next uprooted and hurled aside by tornadoes. Mr. Kayme tells the eleven stories, and tells them cleverly, from the point of a non-Filipino looking in on Filipino life and makes no attempt to imitate Kipling. Kayme's "Anting-Anting" stories give the native Filipino of unmixed blood a place in western fiction. In the late 19th C. he was favourably compared to the North American Indian of the same era. But that was over 100 years ago and perceptions and attitudes have changed a lot since 1901. So pickup this interesting volume, settle into a comfy chair and enter into the colourful world of Filipino life, folk beliefs and superstitions of a hundred years ago. And if you should ever visit the Philippines, don't be surprised to find that these superstitions are as prevalent today as they were a century ago.