> There are more than 7,000 islands that make up the Philippines, and the former Spanish colony is home to 175 different languages and a wide array of cultural practices. But if there’s one indigenous belief that survived centuries of Spanish rule and continues to haunt Philippine nightmares, it’s the terrifying bogey man known as the aswang.
> The aswang doesn’t have an exact match in the Western pantheon of monsters. Some people call it a vampire, but it feeds on more than just blood (organs, unborn children, phlegm) and it can take on alternate forms like a giant pig, a nasty dog or even a man-sized vulture. Whatever shape it takes, the aswang is widely believed to be the source of sudden illness, mysterious deaths and other misfortunes in the Philippines.
> Believe it or not, back in the Cold War craziness of the 1950s, a CIA operative in the Philippines took advantage of aswang superstitions to scare off communist rebels. And how he did it — puncturing a victim’s neck with two vampire-like holes, hanging them from a tree and draining them of their blood — might have been even scarier than the aswang legend itself.
fuyu-no-hanashi on
`Aswang`isn’t one thing, it’s an umbrella term for creatures of the night (often malevolent), like how there are different demons and fairies.
But generally, they’re usually shape-shifters whose true forms are more akin to demons/beasts, some intelligent some primal. They’re compared to bloodsuckers in other cultures except they eat entrails, fetuses, and bodily fluids too.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aswang) provides the most common forms though, more often viscera-suckers and vampires, but also witches, ghouls, and weredogs. What I find interesting though are the traditions born out of fearing Aswang, like:
>A chicken whose jugular vein is cut is tossed down the steps and is allowed to flutter away and die while the dead is carried out of the house. The chicken would serve as a distraction for the ghouls
Ugkvrtikov on
Hehe, based CIA right?
/s
BrokenTorpedo on
one of the few times one of CIA’s bat shit insane shenanigans wasn’t a competently failure.
DorimeAmeno12 on
Cia try not to be morally-bankrupt challenge: impossible
TornSkate on
Ah yes, the good ol’ Aswang, a monster us Filipinos were taught in our childhood to scare the shite outta us into submission
Turbulent-Plum7328 on
It doesn’t matter if they believed vampires were actually stalking the jungles or not, because something far fouler and much more real was lurking there.
7 Comments
https://history.howstuffworks.com/world-history/cia-vampires-communist-rebels-philippines.htm
> Author: Roos (2023)
> There are more than 7,000 islands that make up the Philippines, and the former Spanish colony is home to 175 different languages and a wide array of cultural practices. But if there’s one indigenous belief that survived centuries of Spanish rule and continues to haunt Philippine nightmares, it’s the terrifying bogey man known as the aswang.
> The aswang doesn’t have an exact match in the Western pantheon of monsters. Some people call it a vampire, but it feeds on more than just blood (organs, unborn children, phlegm) and it can take on alternate forms like a giant pig, a nasty dog or even a man-sized vulture. Whatever shape it takes, the aswang is widely believed to be the source of sudden illness, mysterious deaths and other misfortunes in the Philippines.
> Believe it or not, back in the Cold War craziness of the 1950s, a CIA operative in the Philippines took advantage of aswang superstitions to scare off communist rebels. And how he did it — puncturing a victim’s neck with two vampire-like holes, hanging them from a tree and draining them of their blood — might have been even scarier than the aswang legend itself.
`Aswang`isn’t one thing, it’s an umbrella term for creatures of the night (often malevolent), like how there are different demons and fairies.
But generally, they’re usually shape-shifters whose true forms are more akin to demons/beasts, some intelligent some primal. They’re compared to bloodsuckers in other cultures except they eat entrails, fetuses, and bodily fluids too.
[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aswang) provides the most common forms though, more often viscera-suckers and vampires, but also witches, ghouls, and weredogs. What I find interesting though are the traditions born out of fearing Aswang, like:
>A chicken whose jugular vein is cut is tossed down the steps and is allowed to flutter away and die while the dead is carried out of the house. The chicken would serve as a distraction for the ghouls
Hehe, based CIA right?
/s
one of the few times one of CIA’s bat shit insane shenanigans wasn’t a competently failure.
Cia try not to be morally-bankrupt challenge: impossible
Ah yes, the good ol’ Aswang, a monster us Filipinos were taught in our childhood to scare the shite outta us into submission
It doesn’t matter if they believed vampires were actually stalking the jungles or not, because something far fouler and much more real was lurking there.