Maria Cacao

Like with Makiling and Sinukuan, it is assumed that Maria Cacao's mythology was present prior to Spanish arrival with minor differences.

The new stories suggest that borrowers who fail to pay their loans to the goddess would soon find themselves facing dire consequences, as Maria Cacao's boat comes to take their souls to the next world.

These rumors were accompanied by a warning not to accept invitations to board the boat because the woman was supposedly Maria Cacao "collecting souls for the next world."

In his regular newspaper column, anthropologist Michael Tan noted that this "soul harvester" function wasn't part of the prototypical myth and associated the evolution of the myth with the social need to invent stories as a means of coping with disaster, creating a context for the sense of despair and, to some degree, offering a scapegoat for the situation.

[3] It is also possible that the legend might have been influenced by Maguayen, the Visayan goddess of the sea and death, as both share some elements (i.e. being aboard a water vessel, being female goddesses who bless people with bounty While the story is obviously mythical in nature and a colonial invention, it is cited as evidence of how long the production of tableya has been going on in the area.