Sources

How to read this list

Three kinds of material appear here and they are not equivalent.

Fieldwork and collections — folklorists recording what people said, mostly between 1850 and 1970. The best evidence available, with the standing limitation that all of it is late: the beliefs recorded had already been lived alongside Christianity for centuries, and the collectors' own assumptions shaped what they asked and wrote.

Colonial accounts — Spanish friars and officials in the Philippines, from 1521 onward. Valuable for dates and for the existence of a word at a given moment. Unreliable for meaning: they were documenting beliefs in order to replace them, they wrote in Spanish using European monster vocabulary, and they frequently label what they record as the devil's work. When one of them writes "satyr", that is a translation decision, not a description.

Dictionaries — the most underrated sources on this site, particularly for the Philippine material. A lexicographer has no position on whether a belief is true; he only has to record what a word means to the people who use it. The absence of any equine element in Noceda's 1754 entry for tikbalang is better evidence about the creature's history than any chronicle.

Slavic

• Mikhail Lomonosov, Rossiyskaya grammatika (1755) — earliest clear written record of the name Baba Yaga, as "Iaga baba". Attestation only; no description.
• Josef Virgil Grohmann, Sagenbuch von Böhmen und Mähren (1863) — Bohemian collection; the basis for the Czech water-spirit material, which differs markedly from the Russian.
• Alexander Afanasyev, Narodnye russkie skazki (from 1855) and Poeticheskie vozzreniya slavyan na prirodu (1868) — the great collection of Russian tales, and the study of Slavic views of nature. Note that Afanasyev was editing material gathered by many hands: the versions he printed are versions, not the tale.
• Vuk Karadžić, Srpski rječnik (1818) — Serbian dictionary; the source for mora in the South Slavic sense of nightmare.
• S. V. Maksimov, Nechistaya, nevedomaya i krestnaya sila (St Petersburg, 1903) — pre-revolutionary collection on unclean forces, contemporary with the fieldwork behind most of the nature-spirit material.
• Dmitry Zelenin, Ocherki russkoi mifologii, first issue: Umershie neestestvennoi smert'iu i rusalki — "Those Who Died an Unnatural Death, and Rusalki" (Petrograd, 1916). The title is the argument: the unclean dead and the rusalki in one volume.
• Jan Máchal, in The Mythology of All Races vol. 3 (1918) — comparative treatment covering West and South Slavic alongside Russian; the main source for the household-spirit names.
• Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale for the structural frame, and Russkie agrarnye prazdniki — Russian Agrarian Festivals (Leningrad State University, 1963) for the competing reading of the rusalki as calendar figures.
• Linda J. Ivanits, Russian Folk Belief (1989) — the English-language survey and the usual entry point; also the route by which E. G. Kagarov's reading of the domovoi reached English.
• James Bailey and Tatyana Ivanova, An Anthology of Russian Folk Epics (1998) — standard English edition of the bylina material.
• Elizabeth Warner, Russian Myths (2002) — short survey; best on how the epic and folktale versions of a figure relate.
• Andreas Johns, Baba Yaga: The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale (Peter Lang, 2004) — single-figure monograph built on hundreds of variants; a model of the method.
• Neonila A. Krinichnaya, Russkaya mifologiya: Mir obrazov folklora (Akademicheskiy Proekt, Moscow, 2004, 1005 pp.) — the most detailed modern Russian treatment of the nature spirits.
• Rick Derksen, Etymological Dictionary of the Slavic Inherited Lexicon (2008) — the authority for the -mora element and its Germanic relatives.
• Afanasyev, trans. Jack V. Haney, The Complete Folktales of A. N. Afanas'ev (2015) — makes the tales citable by number, which matters when details migrate between them.
• Éva Pócs, Between the Living and the Dead (1999) — comparative study of night spirits and the departing soul; the frame for the mora material.
• Cosmas of Prague, Chronica Boemorum (c. 1125), and Helmold, Chronica Slavorum — medieval testimony for carrying household figures to a new land. Evidence for the practice, not for the word.

Philippine

• Antonio Pigafetta, account of the Magellan expedition (1521; Nowell ed. 1962) — earliest recorded use of chapri, the ancestor of kapre.
• Fray Juan de Plasencia, Customs of the Tagalogs, letter dated Nagcarlán, 21 October 1589; English translation in Blair & Robertson, The Philippine Islands, 1493–1898, vol. VII (1903) — earliest descriptions of the osuang, magtatangal, tigbalaang and patianac. Read here in that translation.
• San Buenaventura, Vocabulario (1613) — early Tagalog dictionary.
• Fray Domingo de los Santos, Vocabulario de la lengua Tagala (Tayabas, 1703; reprinted Sampaloc 1794, Manila 1835) — defines the manananggal as a witch who flies carrying only half her body.
• Fr. Tomas Ortiz (1731, via Martínez de Zúñiga 1893) — describes the eclipse rites, and records that his informants disagreed about whether the moon-eater was a dragon, a tiger or a crocodile.
• Juan José Delgado, Historia general sacro-profana, política y natural de las islas del poniente llamadas Filipinas (written before his death in 1755; published Manila, 1892) — first description of the tikbalang in recognisably modern horse-headed form; also gives the Visayan name unglo.
• Juan de Noceda, Vocabulario de la lengua Tagala (1754) — glosses tikbalang as fantasma de montes, with no horse. The key evidence for dating the equine form.
• Isabelo de los Reyes, El Folk-Lore Filipino (1890) — the first major collection by a Filipino rather than a friar or colonial official; source for the tikbalang taming lore.
• Fletcher Gardner, "Philippine (Tagalog) Superstitions" (1906) — early twentieth-century record, predating the popular literature.
• Fernando Buyser, Mga Sugilanong Karaan (1913) — first documented version of the seven-moons story, in Cebuano.
• Mansueto Porras, Signosan (1919) — records the Bakunawa's movements as a geomantic calendar. A contemporary source, not scholarship.
• Carlos "Botong" Francisco, essay in This Week (1955) — the painter's description of the kapre; much-quoted and influential on how it is pictured.
• Maximo D. Ramos, "The Aswang Syncrasy in Philippine Folklore", Western Folklore 28 (4), 1969, pp. 238–248, and Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology (1971) — the foundation of the whole field. He later expanded the article into The Aswang Complex in Philippine Folklore (1990); the three are separate works.
• Alfred W. McCoy, "Baylan: Animist Religion and Philippine Peasant Ideology", Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 10 (3), 1982, pp. 141–194 — the scholarly treatment cited for the Bakunawa's calendrical use. The serpent material sits inside a wider argument about peasant ideology.
• F. Landa Jocano, The Hiligaynon (1983) and related work — the anthropologist who most deliberately reframed Philippine folk belief away from the colonial accounts.
• Damiana L. Eugenio, Philippine Folk Literature (multiple volumes, 2002–2008) — the standard collected texts, including the regional variants that contradict each other.

Corrections

If a citation here is wrong, or a page states as settled something the scholarship disputes, we want to fix it. Send the correction with the source.

What we could not confirm

Some claims that circulate in the literature could not be traced to a source we could read. They have been removed from the pages rather than repeated with a hedge:

• Argensola is often cited as an early notice of the Bakunawa. Conquista de las Islas Malucas (Madrid, 1609) is a real and relevant book, but we could not find the passage, so the earliest confirmed notice here is Ortiz in 1731.
• Pigafetta's chapri is given as the first record of the word behind kapre. The attribution travels through reference works rather than from the manuscript, and whether the word there names a creature or a people is exactly what it would settle. Reported on the page as reported, not established.
• Earliest written attestations for leshy, rusalka, vodyanoy, kikimora and domovoi are not given, because we did not find them. Dates are stated only where a text could be named.
• Regional character differences in the West Slavic and Ukrainian/Belarusian traditions, and in the Visayan kapre, are left blank rather than guessed. The names are given; the rest is not.