TRUE Holy Images and Statues of the Virgin Mary in Las Islas Filipinas

You were once complaining that the old Dieties of the ancient Filipinos were exterminated by the Spanish but I digress. Just as it was the custom in old Europe when a place was being Christianized the Holy Ground which was a local pagan temple was usually demolished, the ground cleansed, and then reconsecrated to the Church but there is still historical continuity with the previous inhabitants. 

As in the case of Viking churches wherein the Wooden Stave Church
@mimoza [Are you viking? Then this might be interesting]

Would be housed above an ancestral grave-yard predating the Church's construction itself.

Which is replicated here in the Philippines as we'll when the Church of Our Lady of the Abandoned... Was built just a little farther, over the burned ruins of the capital of Kingdom of Maysapan, ruled over by Dayang-dayang (Princess) Pasay [Who was half-Bruneian because her father Lacatagcan married a Bruneian and subsequently she was half Mulsim and half Tantric], of which Pasay city in Metro-Manila is named after this princess. 

Anyway, a picture of the Church then.

But this out of whack to my main topic. In this post, in that even though areas had been Christianized there is still historical continuity with it's previous inhabitants since Churches were often built over temples. 

Thus @McDreamyMD

I present you with one of our Ninonos old guardians which had transference into the Catholic order. [It's just a skin-deep transference though since the Virgin Mary is not a goddess and our ancestors just transferred the veneration of the holy virgin by according her a title the previous goddess had and sometimes]

Which in this case happened to the Virgin called "Our Lady of Guidance".

OUR LADY OF GUIDANCE

Her story is quite ambivalent though...

Some records claim that she's an image brought over by Magellan and gifted to a Rajah of Cebu while other accounts say that according to the Anales de la Catedral de Manila, the crew of Miguel López de Legazpi discovered a group of animist natives worshiping a statue of a female figure, later identified as the Virgin Mary along the seaside of what is now Ermita.

She was given the title "Our Lady of Guidance" and was declared the patroness of Manila.

Local folklore meanwhile recounts the Spaniards witnessing natives venerate the statue, which was placed on a trunk surrounded by pandan plants. (This is remembered today by the placement of real or imitation pandan leaves around the image's base as one of its iconic attributes.) 

On May 19, 1571, the indigenous kings, the Muslim Tariq Sulaiman III and the Tantric Rajah Matanda ceded the Kingdom of Maynila to the Spanish. Legazpi consecrating the city to both Saint Pudentiana and Our lady of Guidance.

In 1578, Phillip II of Spain issued a royal decree invoking Our Lady of Guidance to be "sworn patroness" of Manila [She was already her patroness even before the Spanish arrived BTW), making her the city's titular patroness.

In 1897, a novena book titled Pagsisiyam sa Nuestra Señora de Guia ("Novena to Our Lady of Guidance") was published by the Pontifical and Royal University of Santo Tomas in Manila. The prayer book mentioned that the statue was originally worshiped by natives who found it sitting on a trunk, and built a roof above the surrounding Pandan trees. It condemned them for their polytheism and witnessed accounts of murder. The statue spoke and wanted them to abandon idolatry, the worship of demons and polytheism.

The Pandan leaves this Blessed Virgin Mary Statue is associated with and is seen standing over, is very common in Southeast Asian cooking and rituals. 

It is called pandan wangi in Indonesian, hsun hmway (ဆွမ်းမွှေး) in Burmese, pandán in Filipino, bai tooey in Thai, rampe in Sinhala, sleuk toi in Khmer, Daun Pandan in Nonya cooking,[2] lá dứa in Vietnamese, 香兰 ("Xiāng lán") in Chinese and बासमतिया पौधा [bɑːsmət̪ɪjɑː pɑʊd̪ʱɑː] "fragrant plant" in Magahi and Bhojpuri due to its fragrance.

She is a sworn patroness of Manila. She serves as a link to our past and to our neighbors as well as fidelity to our new Christian identity.

Interesting. Kinda cute. And much less intimidating than those huge statues and the cultish clothing of Spain (as awesome as they are to look at - I guess awesome for once actually does imply a feeling of awe here...)! 

Wonder if the uploader or anone else knows that the song is originally German. We're everywhere! 

Loool I wonder if all those Germanic descendants in Spain, Austria and Italy (Gothic and Hapsburg era Germanics) and those who went to Britain (The Saxon in the Anglo-Saxon sort of Germanics) 

As well as the modern diaspora Germans that migrated to Chile, the USA, Brazil, Canada and etc...

All decided to go back to Germany, I think your population would swell to 200 million in no time.

Yes, you guys are everywhere. I think the former president of Argentina is also Germanic BTW.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A9stor_Kirchner

This already barring the Germanic-descendants in the old Germanic spreading over Europe.

(Goth, Ostrogoth, Visigoth, Vandal, and Saxon tribes from Germany...)

Heck man, Germans are everywhere!!!

HUH? When did I say that? In fact I continuously said that veneration of pagan gods and goddesses still continue and I've continuously said that Filipino "Christianity" as syncretic.

But it's true. The Spanish priests wrote it themselves. There were many instances that they destroyed idols by the natives. There's even one story (I forgot the author) where they broke down someone's house twice and couldn't find the idol, until they destroyed the pillars of her house and there they found the anitos which they then destroyed. They often went to babaylan's house confiscated the 'sacred items' and broke it in public to show the natives that these sacred items had no power.