Manobo ritual is a creative human act that is done or made to influence the mystical forces of nature. It is held to restore the balance and harmony of the elements in the cosmos that would, in turn, bring about pragmatic effects on the secular social order, i.e., so human relations are reconstituted.

    Elaborate rituals held to cure the sick entail the death of the pig. Its body is used as a means for divination. Blood of the sacrificial animal is drank by the medium, as well as liquor. [A chicken egg can takes its place.]

    Manobo elaborate rituals have two parts. In both, the possessed medium dances, in trance, to the rhythms of the paired drum and gong. These rhythms articulate the simple narrative that governs the ritual where hostility of the spirit (in the first part) is transformed to amicability (second part). Personal spirits are invoked with the sight of an assortment of offerings in the beginning of each ritual part: uncooked in the first, but cooked in the second.

    The animal sacrifice is killed in the first part to the accompaniment of “hard rhythm” in drum and gong and then displayed as cooked meat in the second where the rhythm becomes “soft”. Ritualized actions, accompanied by the utterance of formulaic magical speech are enacted in both parts. In the first part, the officiant sprinkles lime on betel quids, the sacrificial chicken is waved, the sacrificial pig is “consecrated”, and then the sacrificial blood is wiped on attending bodies, etc. In the second part, the cooked offerings are elevated, the space is purified by water, etc. In all these actions, the potencies unleashed by ritual actions are canalized for beneficial purposes. Thus, at the core, Manobo healing is a channelization of mystic energies, throwing the bad elements are away from the bodies of the patients and participants and emplacing good ones.

    More importantly, these ritual actions have actual pragmatic effects on ritual participants as social actors. They do rejuvinate human relationships that are remade and displayed in public. And then, who would resist the much-awaited communal feast of solidarity that ends the event?