Manama

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. The Manuvu account of him begins with an insistence on his priority: he had no known beginnings and simply pre-existed, without father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or companion; he looked like a man from the first; and he thought of his own name. 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. Before sky or earth existed he lived in a place called Linggawayan.

His creating is described as methodical, and it began with staff. In his solitude he made assistants first — the diwatas and anitus, given katusan, foreknowledge and power, to help in his labors; their bodies were like fingernails, smooth and shiny, with skin only at the joints, and they did not eat, though they learned to chew betel. 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. He was not satisfied — the world was rock, without soil, where only one hardy kind of tree would stand — and he was perplexed for a long time while his world remained bare. Another Manuvu tale has him shaping a landscape from the dead body of a huge eel, one of his own pets, that had gone looking for the sea.

The tradition also explains, through him, why people die. Manama wanted to infuse humanity with everlasting life; while he was away, the marplot Oggasi — the Manuvu's counterpart to the spoiler figures of neighboring peoples' creation myths — infused man with life using a knotted abaca fiber, and so human existence is short. The pattern is the classic Philippine one the collectors describe: a supreme god whose good intentions for the world are qualified by interference, accident, and the stubbornness of materials.

The paragraphs below are extrapolated; no source supports them.

Manama reads as a craftsman-sovereign — methodical, self-sufficient, and somewhat solitary even after peopling his own workshop. The fingernail detail runs through his record like a signature: he builds from his own substance, and his assistants are made in the image of the material. His long perplexity over the barren world suggests patience without hurry, and the Oggasi episode a certain administrative distance — a god whose one flaw is being away at the wrong moment. Read from his myths, and marked as speculation.