Philippine E-Journals

Understanding The Filipino Through Meta-Mythology

Sidney Carls Diamante

 

Abstrak:

The treatment of the supernatural is terrain that leaves much exploration in philosophy. Yet, a society’s concept of supernatural beings constitutes the earliest stage of its method of knowledge acquisition: Before science was organized to answer the questions of the world, tales involving otherworldly entities provided our ancestors with detailed explanations for why certain things existed and why the processes of nature took place the way they did. One may even go so far as to posit the supernatural world as early science, because its constituents were systematically used to determine causes in the world. But unlike science, the concepts laid out by the panorama of the supernatural provide a clearer reflection of the worldview of its people of origin. While both science and mythology arise from the need to answer the questions of what, how, and why, their methods of arriving at the answers are radically different. Science bases its claims on the results of processes

designed to eliminate or minimize subjectivity, while mythology incorporates the cultural components of the people of origin. While science aims at uniformity in understanding phenomena, mythology is too tightly enmeshed in culture that no two mythological systems can be identical. Thus, the supernatural can be used as a text in the hermeneutics of a people.