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The Politics and Poetics of Philippine Festival in F ONT SI ZE

Ninotchka Rosca's State of War
Myra Mendible, Florida Gulf Coast University

"Both the social function and the symbolic meaning of the festival are
closely related to a series of overt values that the community recognizes JOURNAL HEL P
as essential to its ideology and worldview, to its social identity, its
historical continuity, and to its physical survival, which is ultimately what Context-
festival celebrates." Sensitive Help
-Alessandro Falassi [1] Quick-
Reference
Festivals serve to regenerate and unify a community; they recount a never-ending story Guide (pdf)
that, like all narrative, is both the product and producer of culture. But the festival tells a Documentation
@ SFU
potentially subversive tale that fosters communal solidarity and purpose, rekindling vital
Support Forum
energies that can form the basis of collective resistance. Throughout the more than seven
@ SFU
thousand one hundred islands comprising the Philippine archipelago, hundreds of
festivals are celebrated annually. They dramatize the con icting histories, in uences, and
myths that have shaped Filipino identity: Spanish Catholicism and indigenous religions
claim their authority through rituals and ceremonies; the rhythms of tribal drums and JOURNAL
American pop music assert precolonial and neocolonial in uences; and street spectacles CONTENT
showcase cultural icons and symbols. Engaging nearly all aspects of Filipino cultural
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identity from religion to language, folklore to politics, these festivals constitute,
symbolically, a way of recalling the mythical and historical origins of the community. They
Search Scope
o er a respite from oppressive structures, an exuberant a rmation of collective
All
freedom.
Search
In this essay, I will examine the festival as a literary strategy of resistance in Ninotchka
Rosca's State of War. [2] Praised as one of the nest novels of 1988, [3] Rosca's debut Browse
novel is set in the Philippines during a festival similar to the annual Mardi Gras By Issue
celebration on Panay Island. The narrative traces the rise and fall of a contemporary By Author
dictatorship (modeled after that of Ferdinand Marcos but never naming him directly). By Title
Through her protagonists' personal memories, Rosca recalls the events leading to the Other Journals
current predicament: an ongoing "state of war" that never actually erupts into outright
revolution. The festival, which sets the stage for an antigovernment display of force,
establishes a context, frames the action, and informs the novel's revolutionary theme.
USER
Rosca's festival serves as a symbolic and literal site of transgression. Variously referred to
Username
as a "festival of memories," and "a singular evocation of victory in a country of too many
Password
defeats," the festival establishes the novel's connection to Filipino tradition and identity.
Like her text, Rosca's festival is a celebration born of rebellion and bequeathed through Remember me
language and memory. It is the locus where anything is possible-where peasant farmers Login
transform into ancient warriors in tribal costumes, guerilla ghters feast and dance with
enemy soldiers while transvestites parade through the streets with sawed-o shotguns
under their skirts. At this site of radical possibilities, the symbolic dissolution of
boundaries hints at the prospect of revolution. Linked to a cultural ethos of self- I NFORM ATION
determination (Mikhail Bakhtin's "feast of becoming"), the novel represents, in Robert
For Readers
For Authors

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Stam's suggestive description of carnival, "the oppositional culture of the oppressed, a For Librarians
countermodel of cultural production and desire." [4]

Exiled during the Marcos years because of her controversial writing, Rosca maintains that
"the written word has an authority so vast that a dangerous status has often been
conferred upon writers." [5] This "heightened sense of the value of the word" de nes
Filipino subjectivity. In Rosca's view, the commingling of precolonial and modern history,
as well as the tension between colonial and neocolonial languages, shapes a personal
identity that "shares in all of the contradictoriness of the national self" ("Myth" 242). It
also informs a tradition of adversarial writing: Filipino literature re ects "the pride, the
commitment to independence, that saw Lapu-Lapu skewering Ferdinand Magellan in
1521 for his crime of intervention in domestic a airs." E orts to continue this tradition,
Rosca concludes, guarantee that "the Filipino writer still stands on the shores of Mactan,
confronting Magellan" ("Myth" 241-43).

Rosca's festival-text embodies a spirit of rebellion that de es anyone who believes they
can "rule, regulate, manage, and control seven thousand one hundred shrapnels of a
boisterous celebration" (339). Part myth, part legend and imagined history, the text
resists any singular interpreter, authority, or ideological framework. Its very structure
expresses an anarchic vitality that intentionally complicates the act of reading. From the
outset, the reader is disoriented by sudden shifts in time, discontinuous narratives,
confused causality, fantastic and ordinary characters. These fragments and dislocations
re ect the ruptures imposed by a history of changing colonial identities, languages, and
value systems. As readers of her text, we attend "a festival confused by time and history"
(156). But we are not admitted as passive spectators-the text compels us to participate, to
seek and create meaning out of "seven thousand one hundred islands of a fractured
history" (337).

The festival's unpredictable, multifarious topography re ects the problematical nature of

identity in the Philippines, where "there is always a con ict between the social orientation
of the bedrock culture and the fragmenting e ect of colonialism" ("Myth" 240). Rosca's
festival-text reenacts the "confusion over language and memory" that began with the rst
colonial encounter (337). In melodic, gurative prose, Rosca encapsulates a history of
struggle and continuity-from the rst Malay exiles, to the Spanish conquest, to the norte
americanos, "The new invaders, [who] could not quite understand why anyone would
object to being benevolently assimilated by the great North American nation" (77). Even
the name "Filipino," we learn, represents "the ridiculous mix of history that they were-
Malay, Chinese, Arab, Hindu, Spanish, British," and originally refers to "pure-blooded
Spaniards born in the islands" (160). Rosca registers an illusory Philippine history so
confused "that in this Festival of commemoration there remained no more than this
mangled song" (337).

The segments of the novel set in the present focus on Eliza Hansen and Anna Villaverde,
the "laughing princess and the princess who could not laugh" (13), and on Adrian
Banyaga, the son of a wealthy landowner who is their friend and lover. By chronicling the
imaginary but emblematic histories of her protagonists, Rosca envisions a matrix of
communal identity founded on (but not limited to) shared experience. Familial and
colonial relations, the reader discovers, link Eliza, Anna, and Adrian's histories. The
emphasis here is on continuity and reconciliation, as the novel self-consciously
contributes to an ongoing dialogue among voices and in uences past and present,
precolonial and postcolonial. [6] The text suggests that enemies and friends in the
present are distant cousins or half-brothers and -sisters. Even those designated the
"invaders"-the "visitors who owed no allegiance to any tribe the Japanese, the Chinese,
the Caucasian, the urbanite" (15), can be "subdued and merged" into the rhythm and
history of the event. The reader, like the tourist who visits the festivity, therefore
participates in "no one's and yet everyone's personal history" (13).

In the psychosocial arena of festival, con icting forces converge and interact. These
forces, registered in part by the presence of Anna, Eliza, and Adrian at the festival, are
ineluctably bound to a network of power that delimits the course of events. The festival
"exposes the complexities inherent in community tensions and reveals the seeds of
transformation located in the voices of the oppressed." But it can also express "moments
in which the oppressed fail to complete the emancipatory impulses." [7] This tension
operates primarily through Colonel Amor, the head of the secret police and localized
embodiment of a repressive state operative. His name is an ironic inversion of his identity
and attests to the duplicity of language. The Loved One is a man who takes pleasure in

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watching through a two-way mirror as detainees are tortured in "the romance room" (55-
56). He admits that extracting information from his prisoners "was exquisite rape" and
that "unlike his men, he preferred to fuck the soul" (67). Amor's love a air, the text
demonstrates, is with power; his arsenal is information-knowledge which makes him "a
true scholar of the human psyche" (355).

As the site where opposing forces conjoin, Rosca's festival links its participants (and
readers) in time-through blood ties, interlocking histories, ideological bonds. As reader-
participants, we are immersed in what Bakhtin described as a "feast of time, change and
renewal" [8] that ritualizes a Filipino history of resistance. In the words of Guevarra,
Rosca's guerrilla leader in the novel, "The rites of this land seize us by the hair and force
us into a design begun a long, long time ago" (381). Guevarra believes he is destined to
meet everyone again through time, that "before the war made us strangers we were all
kin" (360). Even Colonel Amor remarks, "We're fated to keep on meeting each other
through time" (356).

The past commemorated through the festival represents Rosca's rebuttal against
"o cial" history. [9] Anna's ancestor, Maya, is granted a voice in the text, as the festival
commemorates origins and reenacts an ongoing struggle for control of the word. [10]
This struggle, which begins with the Spanish conquest, is ironically voiced in children's
rhymes and songs scattered throughout time in the narrative and in the local patois that
hybridizes colonial languages. While Maya struggles to learn Spanish, she realizes that
"the children's voices in the street were already concocting a new, hybrid language of
their own" (165). The children take possession of the colonists' languages and revise their
o cial stories. In one song that is repeated throughout the text, a grand colonizing
adventure is summarily de ated in the form of a pun: "Ferdinand Magellan, the crazy old
coot; took ve ships and circumcised the globe" (180). The pun, as a kind of Bakhtinian
grammatica jocosa whereby the o cial language is carnivalized, transgresses
grammatical authority "to reveal erotic and obscene or merely materially satisfying
counter-meaning." [11] Through this pun on the word "circumnavigated," Magellan's
historical mission translates into a phallocentric ritual of initiation and marks the onset of
a patriarchal cycle of "discovery" and domination.

The narrative resists the chronological ordering of events associated with Western
models of historical narration. Instead, it uses repetition and contiguity to establish links
between past and present, self and other, contemporary state violence and colonial
violation. The Spanish monk who rapes the young Maya (whose Hindu name means
"origin") leaves his imprint on Philippine history by fathering a succession of mestizo
children. The monk's insidious sermons "condemned his own brood by repeating over
and over again that the sins of the fathers were visited upon their descendants" (191). As
Anna Villaverde's ancestor, he represents a violation that is reenacted in the present by
the ruling regime (in Anna's case, "the sins of the fathers" descend in the form of a
military dictatorship that uses rape as a means to subjugate and control women).

The American occupation, described through fragmented accounts, hearsay, and legends,
bestows a new language on a nation with hundreds of indigenous languages and a prior
colonial one already in place. Since the novel is written in English, the colonizer's voice
still authorizes Philippine stories. But as festival, the text undermines the status of
colonial history makers, playfully challenging the "truth" of history and inverting the
hierarchy of Western supremacy. While we learn that Filipino indios were mockingly
referred to by the colonizers as "monkeys without tails" (77), we also read humorous local
legends and anecdotes that situate the colonizer in the "exotic other" position. We are
told the tale of americanos "who were rumored to have penises as huge as their noses"
(77). General Douglas MacArthur is remembered as the "son-of-a-goat" who would "strut
through the attened city of Manila and lisp, 'told you I'd be back,' gaddamit" (125).
Rosca's "festival of memories" in this way refuses to forget, and thus capitulate, Philippine
history. [12]

This struggle over control of the word is implicit in the rumor that gives birth to
Guevarra's legendary status. What begins as a "life-and-death struggle over [Guevarra's]
name" (Amor had tortured Guevarra, convinced that the young man was refusing to
reveal his "real" identity), comes to signify the mythmaking power of language. Following
Guevarra's capture, rumors circulate about a brave prisoner who de ed Amor by refusing
to disclose even his name. These rumors spread the news of Amor's failure-and fuel
collective resistance. At the conclusion of the novel, Rosca unmasks her revolutionary
hero, revealing that his name really was Guevarra-Ismael Guevarra. Ironically, Amor has

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propagated a myth by attaching legendary signi cance to the name. In the spirit of
carnival, an inverted hierarchy here undermines Amor's power; his e ort to control
Guevarra by extracting "truth" from him achieves the opposite e ect. Mystifying
Guevarra's name, Amor creates his own enemy: a symbol of hope against oppression.

Rosca's festival-text parodies the dissembling power of "rational" discourse, most overtly
in the scene where a pedantic lecturer utters indecipherable English phrases that an
interpreter then translates into English. As part of an "educational program" sponsored
by the Commander's wife, this segment during the festival is meant as a display of high
culture amidst the festivities. In that instance, the reader attends a ludicrous festival
within a festival-o cial discourse, unintelligible and ine ectual, is satirized and
demysti ed. The hierarchy of high and low is inverted, so that the presumably superior
speaker (who has "seven Ph.D.'s" [139]) is exposed as ridiculous. The incoherent
"solutions" he o ers ("options which may respond to the citizenry's spectrum of desires
while coincidentally providing resolutions to this quagmiric quandary" [142]) mock o cial
discourses presumably grounded in "reason." As Old Andy humorously tells Adrian, "
[Manila] came out of chaos, lived with chaos, and would survive any chaos. The question
was whether it could survive order and reason" (28).

Rosca suggests that the boundaries separating the idealist from the tyrant, the "civilized"
from the "savage," are often relative and obscure. Anna's husband Manolo, a physics
professor, founded a committee "hailed as the new center of the intelligentsia, leaders of
a coming rational and scienti c age" (63). But what begins as "a current fancy for politics"
(62) eventually leads to his arrest and presumed death. In a surprising revelation at the
end of the festival, Manolo resurfaces wearing a jackal costume. [13] Interestingly, masks
do not just conceal identity during festivals; they also manifest arti ce itself, signaling that
"a symbolic message is being conveyed." [14] The festival thus exposes the mutability of
its participants: Manolo, the "young rabble-rouser, all good intentions and wisdom" (371),
turns out to be an informant (the professor who taught Amor the methods for "getting at
the truth," 374), and Anna becomes her own husband's assassin (375).

In the tradition of oral cultures, Rosca also evokes possibilities beyond language. She
implies that human understanding is not achieved through ossifying systems, but
through a collective wisdom that transcends the logic of binary representation. To the
"civilized" mind, this faith in a knowledge that supersedes the word's authority reeks of
superstition and issues as proof of the native's primitive and unrealistic view of the world.
As one American commander, Mad Uncle Ed, remarks: "We've never changed you, you
people. You still believe there's something stronger than money and bullets. Obligations
and spirits, honor and monsters!" (315). Ironically, Mad Uncle Ed, a caricature of U.S.
military attitudes in the Philippines, embodies this disdain. He is the "civilized" white man
whose "passage was a swath of terror and destruction" (315); who "laughed with
approval" the deaths of thousands of "insurgent" Filipino peasants; and who sponsored
the "festival of death" (318) that would change the course of Philippine history.

While Rosca tries to "make sense" of the past that has shaped the present course and
identity of the Philippine people, Rosca rejects the authority vested in conventional
historical "realism." Instead, the narrative is interspersed with fanciful imagery that revels
in creative freedom and stretches temporal-spatial boundaries. Incorporating a style of
magical realism, Rosca's text eludes the self-assured, mastering script of colonial history.
[15] As Stephen Slemon points out, magical realism foregrounds the "gaps, absences, and
silences produced by the colonial encounter and re ected in the text's disjunctive
language of narration." [16] Rosca's fantastic events and characters also re ect another
reality: the "civilized" world created in the name of progress and reason is a sham. In this
"new world" Philippine context, there is always an "elusive, almost illusory war that was
everywhere and yet was nowhere" (20). Modernity seems to have inaugurated a
disharmonious and grotesque reality-an "era when dead cats would masquerade as
babies" in women's arms (32).

Rosca's text privileges the "truth" of storytelling, a form of folk communication that keeps
resistance vital and vigilant. Guevarra's desire to hear Anna's tale in exchange for his own
con rms the revolutionizing prospects of storytelling. Anna commits details of her life to
Rafael's "eidetic memory," which are later repeated to Guevarra. Guevarra promises to
tell Anna "the most fascinating story she would ever hear" (72). As collective memories,
stories emerge in Rosca's text as redemptive and subversive; they o er the means to
discredit o cial history or refute its authority to classify experience. Pointing to the
profound relationship between memory, writing, and insurrection in Philippine history,

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Rosca has remarked that memory "anchors us, for, though it is fragile, it is also the
longest umbilical cord" ("Myth" 242).

Of course, the task of remembering and recording a past relies on what Rosca recognizes
as perishable materials, "language and memory-uncertain, imperfect" ("Myth" 242). These
are vulnerable, easily tampered with, subjected to alterations and interpretations. While
language shapes communal identity, it also distorts and delimits it. Anna's foreboding
that "even [the festival] will be forgotten" highlights the festival's cognate relation to a
fading cultural memory (149). The festival's participants dance about the plaza in a
"parody of celebration" (339), suggesting that the festival is a degraded version of the rst
celebration, a vestigial cultural expression. But as a composite of history, legend, and
storytelling, Rosca's festival-text preserves a tradition begun "in memory and in de ance"
(61). It o ers a buttress between cultural amnesia and cultural renewal.

While Anna stresses the importance of language as intermediary between past and
present, Colonel Amor locates its function in the dynamics of power. He understands that
disunity and silence are the allies of power-and that language is a mercenary at the
disposal of any authority. Colonel Amor's counter-revolutionary strategies therefore
include severing the people's cognitive link to their past: "Language had to be changed;
names had to be changed all moral and ethical signposts eradicated" (349). In
possession of the word, Amor imagines, he becomes "the truth, the way, the life"-the
keeper of history. The ancestral matriarch, Maya, had recognized and resisted this
colonizing strategy, noting that "if we forget, how are we to proceed?" (186). Centuries
later, Maya's words would be echoed by her great-granddaughter, Anna. Rosca's
reluctant heroine is a history teacher who does not "like it when people monkey around
with language" (143). Anna responds to the parodic "educational program" with disdain:
"Mess up language, mess up memory. People forget. Even what they are" (143).

As a postmodern event, Rosca's festival is also a commercial venture-a locally produced

spectacle to be commodi ed and appropriated. During the governor's dinner party, the
main topic of conversation is the prospect of establishing a year-round festival "instead of
this annual bash which drove people crazy" (37). This attempt to domesticate the
festivities is capital's attempt to regulate the event, thus securing its own interests and
participation. By acquiring a vast section of waterfront property and building tourist
resorts, the governing elite hopes to reap the "bene ts" of a tourism-sponsored "endless
esta": "Modernization. Progress. Contact with the world. Employment" (38). In their view,
half the town would "go on with the Festival for the tourists" while the other half could be
trained "to work in the hotels" (38). In this way, a joyfully transgressive event is
transformed into an exclusive domain of power-where folk "participation" means catering
to the needs of an elite coterie.

This scenario dramatizes the tensions underscoring the event. On the one hand, the
festival holds the potential for revolution; this is, after all, the site Guevarra has chosen
for a daring display of force-an explosion that will kill or maim several government
o cials. The exuberant mood of the people, their licentious behavior, and the spirited
de ance that energizes the event seem bound to erupt in violent rebellion. On the other
hand, though festivals create a public domain where solidarity may be formed, they also
reenact "moments in which the oppressed fail to complete the emancipatory impulses."
[17] Once the explosion occurs, the crowd erupts into a Dionysian frenzy that
momentarily dissolves individual identities. They become "things on the sidewalk, things
trying to climb trees and walls, things dangling from windows" (367). In the midst of this
uproar, Eliza is taken by soldiers-"a butchered pig, ready for aying" (368). She becomes
the festival's tribute, the sacri ce that will temporarily restore a semblance of order. Thus
the cycle of oppression continues: extended periods of repression, then periodic
outbursts of insurrection followed by a return to the law and its authority.

The commercialization of the festival dramatizes its paradoxical status as cultural model
or epistemology. While the festival situates popular rebellion and expresses the
complexities and tensions inherent within a community, it also depends for survival on
economic support and the wink of an authorial eye. Rosca further hints at this
relationship through the "unauthorized" festival occurring during the o cial event. The
Procession, or "poor folks' festival" as it is called, takes place in the margins of the central
event-and is attended by the islands' peasants (117). This event, ignored by most festival
participants, is a somber and less vocal form of communication. It involves a modest
candlelight display that pays homage to the spirits of Philippine ancestors. Falassi notes
that in such perambulatory events, ruling groups display themselves as the keepers and

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guardians of the community's icons, and as depositories of religious or secular power (4).
But in Rosca's text, the "depositories" and "keepers" of Philippine culture are not the
community's rulers or its authorized representatives. Engaged in an ongoing dialogue
with the past that is both celebratory and solemn, the peasants' festival remains
uno cial, independent of the main event. It occurs on the sidelines, uncompromised by
the dictates of authority.

There is, of course, a counter-resistance operating during the main event: the
Commander and his wife (undoubtedly modeled on the Marcoses) also attend the
festival. Authority's presence is part of a broader spectacle, the spectacle of power
masquerading among the "folk." Appearing as participants, o cial power in ltrates and
regulates the festivities. Soldiers with M-16's slung over their shoulders seem to merge
with an unruly crowd, but they are a constant reminder of the law's presence. They
ensure that the people's "symbolic transgression" remains symbolic.

Though Rosca's festival-text expresses the possibility of cultural transformation, she

admits that no book, no work of art, "has produced profound social change; it takes
collective action to do that." But Rosca adds, "there has been no profound social
disturbance that has not been preceded by, accompanied by, and followed by
disturbances in the realm of art and literature" ("Myth" 237). As festival, the text
participates in a symbolic protest that refuses to capitulate the site of struggle-the word
itself. To participate in Rosca's festival is to celebrate its decolonizing spirit and
passionately hopeful vision. In the novel's nal moments, Anna's pregnancy suggests the
prospects of cultural renewal: Anna's child, "nurtured by the archipelago's legends," will
become "a great storyteller" (382). The text's last words, "Time passes," carry the promise
of another day, another story. They hold the assurance that long after this festival, others
will reenact "stories of love, of abuse, of kindness, of betrayal. But of kindness above all,
which enabled them to survive, which in turn allowed the archipelago to keep on
dreaming its history" (381).

Notes
[1]Alessandro Falassi, Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1987) 2.
Return to article
[2]Ninotchka Rosca, State of War (New York: Norton, 1988). Subsequent references are to
this edition and are cited in the text in parentheses.
Return to article
[3]
Edith Milton, "The Year in Review: 1988," Massachusetts Review 30 (1989): 116.
Return to article

[4]Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 95.
Return to article

[5]Ninotchka Rosca, "Myth, Identity and the Colonial Experience," World Englishes 9.2
(1990): 242. Hereafter cited as "Myth.
Return to article
[6]
For an analysis of the a liative nature of carnival structure, see Julia Kristeva, "The
Carnival: A Homology Between the Body, Dream, Linguistic Structure and Structures of
Desire," The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)
48-49.
Return to article
[7]
Richard A. Quantz and Terence O'Connor, "Writing Critical Ethnography: Dialogue,
Multivoicedness, and Carnival in Cultural Texts," Educational Theory 38.1 (1988): 104.
Return to article
[8]Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1984) 109.
Return to article

[9]
For a discussion of this impulse in postcolonial cultures, see Helen Ti n, "Post-
Colonialism, Post-Modernism and the Rehabilitation of Post-Colonial History," The Journal

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of Commonwealth Literature 23.1 (1988): 169-81.
Return to article
[10]
Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourses in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination, ed. M.
Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 259-
422.
Return to article

[11]
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1986) 10.
Return to article

[12]Signi cant correspondence and o cial documents exist recounting the Philippine-
American War from a U.S. perspective. They provide depictions of Filipinos (often referred
to as "gugus" or "niggers") that rival Rosca's fantastic creatures and mythic aliens. See H.
W. Brands, Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992) 30-32.
Return to article
[13]For a documented report on American atrocities during the Philippine insurgency, see
Brian McAllister Linn, The United States Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippines
1899-1902 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989) esp. 145-46.
Return to article
[14]
Falassi 211.
Return to article
[15]
Cf. Homi Bhabha, "Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of
Some Forms of Mimeticism," The Theory of Reading, ed. Frank Gloversmith (New York:
Barnes, 1984); and Gerald Martin, "On 'Magical' and Social Realism in Garcia Marquez,"
Gabriel Garcia Marquez: New Readings, eds. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Return to article

[16]Steven Slemon, "Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse," Canadian Literature 116

(1988): 13-18. In Egyptian mythology, Anubis, the god of the underworld, is sometimes
represented as a black jackal, other times as a man with a jackal's head.
Return to article

[17]
Quantz and O'Connor 104.
Return to article

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