Gulgol: An Ilocano post-burial ritual for grief, cleansing and healing

For Ilocano communities across Northern and Central Luzon, mourning does not end with burial. A day after accompanying their departed loved one to their final resting place, bereaved families make their way to a river or the sea to take part in an age-old ritual known as gulgol.

“From the provinces of the Ilocos Region to the diasporic Ilocano communities…people practice ‘gulgol’ as part of their mourning rituals,” Aldous Tracy Rubio, an anthropologist pursuing a Master of Arts in History at the University of the Philippines Baguio, told the Inquirer.

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In a previous submission to the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA), the practice was described as a ceremony intended to cleanse mourners of lingering sadness, misfortune and spiritual pollution associated with death.

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More than a customary post-burial observance, gulgol symbolizes the transition from grief to healing, giving the bereaved an opportunity to gather their strength and gradually return to their daily lives.

The ritual also fosters collective grieving and emotional support, allowing families to mourn together while symbolically washing away the pain of losing a loved one, according to the NCCA.

Through this shared act of cleansing, gulgol becomes more than a farewell to the dead. It is also a step toward healing for those left behind.

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How the ritual is performed

Despite variations in location and practice across Ilocano communities, certain elements of gulgol have remained consistent.

A day after the burial, family members gather at the nearest body of water, accompanied by an elderly woman, usually a balo, or widow, who leads the ceremony and serves as the ritual specialist.

The family brings several materials, including a pail, an ungot, or coconut shell with a small opening; a dipper; one or two live chickens; arutang, or dried rice stalks; matches or a lighter; and basi, a traditional sugarcane wine that is commonly replaced with gin today.

In a prayerful state, the elderly woman first collects water from the river, sea or other water source and pours it into the pail. She then mixes in the alcohol before slitting the neck of a chicken and adding its blood to the mixture.

Meanwhile, she places the dried rice stalks inside the ungot and sets them on fire, allowing the stalks to burn until only ashes remain. She then moistens the ashes with some of the liquid mixture from the pail.

Once the preparations are complete, family members line up to undergo the cleansing one at a time.

The elderly woman pours the mixture into the coconut shell and allows it to flow through the opening onto the bowed head of each participant.

After the washing, each participant is immediately instructed to enter the body of water and rinse off. This may be done in a river, at the seaside or in another available water source, including an artesian well.

Once rinsed, the participant removes the clothes worn during the burial and throws them in the direction of the flowing water. For this reason, mourners often wear old or tattered clothes during the ceremony.

The act of throwing away their clothes is known as panangiwaksi, derived from the Ilocano word waksi, meaning to shake off or cast away. It symbolizes leaving behind the sorrow and impurities associated with mourning.

‘Disinfection’

The ritual’s significance, however, goes beyond its spiritual and emotional dimensions. Rubio suggested that gulgol may have also served a practical purpose in earlier times: disinfection.

In traditional Ilocano communities, the use of natural materials such as plant extracts, rice-straw ash and alcohol-based mixtures was part of everyday hygiene.

These same materials appear in preparations for gulgol, raising the possibility that the ritual’s cleansing component may have originated, at least in part, from indigenous knowledge of personal sanitation.

The use of water, chicken blood and basi also figures in another post-burial observance. Those who participated in digging the grave or attended the burial were expected to wash their hands and feet before entering the deceased’s home.

Rubio cited an account documented by Isabelo de los Reyes in El Folk-lore Filipino, which described how gravediggers were required to wash their hands and feet first with the blood of a white rooster, followed by basi and, finally, water.

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Rubio said he had also witnessed variations of this practice in which an elderly widow washed the hands, feet, forehead and back of the neck of those returning from the burial, sometimes using guava leaves soaked in a mixture of water and basi, cane vinegar or gin.

He noted that the alcohol in these substances may have been recognized by earlier generations for its disinfecting properties, even before the scientific principles behind sanitation were understood.

But while disinfection may offer one explanation for the ritual’s practical origins, gulgol carries a deeper significance in the cultural and spiritual lives of Ilocano communities.

Long before colonization

Its historical roots may reach further back than the earliest written accounts.

One of the earliest documented references to gulgol appears in the 18th-century Vocabulario de la Lengua Ilocana by Spanish missionary Fr. Andres Carro. The dictionary defines gulgúl as a special washing of the hair or head using substances such as libás, a type of vine, or rice straw. It also refers to the water and substance mixed into it, believed to possess a strengthening spirit.

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Another account appears in De los Reyes’ Historia de Ilocos, which describes how Ilocanos used the bark of certain trees, coconut oil, gogo and rice-straw lye to keep their hair black and glossy.

These descriptions point to a possible linguistic connection between gulgol and gogo, also known as gugo, a vine whose bark produces a lather when mixed with water and was traditionally used as a natural cleansing agent.

For Rubio, these accounts suggest that gulgol may have evolved from an older indigenous practice of washing and cleansing the hair using materials derived from nature.

Although its earliest known written record dates to the 1700s, he believes the practice likely existed in Ilocano communities long before the arrival of Spanish colonizers.

Its ritual elements offer further clues to this possibility, as historical accounts describe an elderly woman, preferably a widow, leading the ceremony — a role compared with that of the katalonan, or a female ritual specialist in precolonial Philippine communities.

This echoes the important spiritual and ceremonial roles traditionally held by women, including those associated with the babaylan.

The incorporation of Christian prayers into the ceremony, meanwhile, reflects how indigenous customs adapted and merged with religious practices introduced during the Spanish colonial period.

Survived through generations

Beyond its historical and anthropological dimensions, gulgol remains significant because of what it represents to the communities that continue to observe it.

In a society where death is not only a personal loss but also a shared family experience, the ritual provides a collective way of confronting grief.

Through the guidance of an elder and the participation of relatives, mourners are given a moment to acknowledge their loss, symbolically leave their sorrow behind and begin the process of returning to ordinary life.

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Its continued practice also preserves fragments of indigenous knowledge, from the use of natural cleansing materials to the roles of traditional ritual practitioners.

While its forms may have changed across generations and communities, its central purpose endures: to help the living move forward after death.

In gulgol, the act of washing is therefore not merely physical. It is a cultural expression of cleansing, remembrance and renewal — a reminder that while the dead have reached their final resting place, those left behind must also find their way toward healing.

“Hence, it makes sense if, after the mourning period and burial, symbolically and functionally, people would end the mourning by cleansing all the ‘pain’ and ‘impurities’ of mourning,” Rubio said. /dm