Note 22 — Chapter XV

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 Tagálogs call Bathala Meycapal,22 which signifies “God” the “Creator” or “Maker.” The Visayans call him Laon, which denotes “antiquity.”