Umbrarium

Nuno sa punso means the ancestor or grandparent in the anthill. In Tagalog and related speech, nuno is an elder of the spirit world, a tenant of punso, the earth mound raised by ants or termites, and also of rocks, riverbanks, and backyard rises. Spanish-period notes already say permission is asked of the nono before felling a tree or breaking unused ground, lest misfortune follow. The being is pictured as a small old man with a long beard, easily angered if kicked, peed on, or trampled.

Folk distinction matters. A dwende may show itself playfully to children; the nuno is not that hobgoblin. Illness that modern clinics cannot name — swelling of a foot that struck a mound, black urine after an insult to the hill — is still, in many families, taken to an albularyo. Pagtatawas, reading shapes in cooled alum or wax on water, is a documented diagnostic rite to see whether a mound-spirit has been offended. Offerings of food or drink, and a personal apology at the place, are how accounts say peace is made.

Children are taught tabi tabi po, please step aside, before crossing tall grass or a suspected punso. USC’s digital folklore archive preserves contemporary tellings of a nuno’s curse as living campus and family lore, not as museum dust. The temptation in these stories is to treat the mound as empty dirt, or to dominate it. Forbidden knowledge here is the arrogant certainty that nothing unseen holds title to the ground.

Read with care, the nuno is anito logic in miniature: the land has elders. Urbanisation is said to drive them deeper or away, which is itself a story about what is lost when anthills are paved. This record does not list methods for harming the nuno. It records the courtesy that Philippine households still teach at the threshold between path and mound.