Bringing the Manananggal into the Future

In The Witch of Pontevedra, Cymbeline Villamin reawakens the legendary manananggal, not as a simple creature of horror, but as a symbol of repressed feminine power, colonial resistance, and mythic continuity.

The novella begins in 18th century Pontevedra, Capiz, where Maria, daughter of a Babaylan, resists conversion to Catholicism and becomes the victim of lust and violence in the hands of a friar. 

Her transformation into a winged being is not a curse but a survival instinct, a radical form of fuga or flight. Across a millennium, her spirit survives in Vina, a high-tech airline captain, and in Lyra, a wordsmith shaping reality with quantum language.

The Witch of Pontevedra offers a rich tapestry of Filipino precolonial mysticism, colonial critique, speculative science, and intergenerational drama. It invites readers to rethink familiar tales: What if the monster was a woman who refused to die? What if witchcraft was science misread by the patriarchy?

Powerfully sensual and deeply political, Villamin’s novella is a rare achievement in Philippine literature: a mythology of the future, grounded in ancestral rage and erotic healing.