The Cage of the Healer Birds was not immediately visible to anyone looking into the small loggia. Slung under the narrow, iron staircase that led to the upper floor of the hermitage, it was the cage that hung lowest of all. This was the abode of the shamanic blackbirds, known to the neighborhood as the Healer Birds.
The old hermit endowed to the blackbirds three of a deceased mombaki's talismans from Ifugao, in the north, and the carved, wooden image of a bird used in a pagdiwata ritual from Palawan, in the south. As in the Temple of The Bird Goddess, north and south met within this cage.
The healer birds were favorite consultants of practitioners of magic who lived not only in Cubao but in other regions of the Philippines. They brought with them oil in small bottles and herbs in tiny packets and placed them in inside the cage. The healer birds then drew energy into them from the talismans over three nights of a full moon.
Like these feathered healers, other birds of that color--crows, mynas, ravens, magpies, et alii--are those associated with witches, warlocks, sorcerers, and magi. Despite the appearance of different types of birds as power animals in, for example, Greek and Celtic mythology, of course. The color black absorbs left-hand energy and transforms it for constructive, rather than destructive, means. Black is as heavy as the earth and the night, which was why the cage was located closest to the ground.
Thus were there seven cages in all in the enchanted aviary of the hermit of Cubao, and its 28 inhabitants comprised its community.
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