In 2021 after numerous museum visits in Southeast Asia, I began reflecting on what collections revealed and concealed about history. The objects that most profoundly shifted my thinking were not the canonical works of art but the agimat, talismans seized under colonial regimes and now dispersed across museums. Just last week (September 21, 2025), while presenting at a conference at SOAS in London, a fellow graduate student asked how Walter Benjamin might be linked to talismanic power as I mentioned him briefly in my presentation. Benjamin never wrote directly about talismans, but his ideas about aura, fragments, and the “weak messianic power” of tradition (Benjamin 1968, 254) seem to anticipate the way the agimat acts as a charged object of memory and survival. It is more than a relic of superstition; it is a historical device through which makers, owners, and wearers entered history itself, inscribing their bodies into struggles of resistance and protection.

Aside from this evocative metaphor of the amulet as a charged object of memory and survival, I would often recall how Hannah Arendt described Benjamin’s historical method, which she saw, by extension, as her own. She called it a form of “poetic thinking,” one that works with the “thought fragments” wrested from the past and gathered about itself. “Like a pearl diver,” Arendt wrote, Benjamin descended to the bottom of the sea “not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface…as thought fragments, as something ‘rich and strange,’ and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene” (Arendt in Benjamin 1968, ix). What is this if not a talismanic practice: recovering fragments crystallized by time, lifting them from ruin, and setting them into new constellations of meaning?

The agimat, too, condenses fragments—verses, diagrams, substances—into enduring objects of power, waiting to be brought to the surface of history. Consider, for instance, the vest of Macario Sakay, embroidered with religious figures and Latin phrases, which he wore as his anting-anting. Believing it could turn away bullets and shield him from harm, Sakay made the talisman part of his historical agency, a material fragment through which resistance to empire was lived and remembered. In this sense, the agimat is both pearl and amulet: a crystallization of the past that survives decay, a charged object through which history is not only recorded but actively enacted.

Arendt would later argue that the tradition of Western thought had by the mid-19th century broken apart, leaving us to “think without a banister.” “I always thought that one has got to start thinking as though nobody had thought before,” she confessed, “and then start learning from everybody else” (Arendt 1979, viii). The agimat offers precisely such a banister—not a total system, but a fragment that allows us to hold onto the past without pretending it was seamless. It reminds us that ideologies, as Arendt put it, are “never interested in the miracle of being” (Arendt 1973, 469). The talisman, by contrast, insists on that miracle: the possibility that life might be protected, transformed, or sustained by means that escape the categories of rational history.

To confront the agimat, then, is also to confront what Michel-Rolph Trouillot called the silences of history: the erasures that enter at every stage of historical production, from the making of sources to the retrospective assigning of significance (Trouillot 1995, 26–27). Yet alongside Trouillot’s framework, Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History offers another lens. If history is not a smooth chain of progress but a constellation illuminated by flashes of memory, then the agimat is one such flash, a fragment through which suppressed traditions interrupt the narrative of inevitability (Benjamin 1968, 263).

In their original contexts, agimat condensed Qur’anic verses, cosmological diagrams, and natural substances into portable forms of power. For their makers, owners, and wearers, they were not curiosities or superstitions but tangible means of participating in history. To wear an agimat was to inscribe one’s body into ongoing struggles, against violence, misfortune, and colonial domination. Trouillot reminds us that silences are produced when such objects are stripped of their agency and recast as superstition, criminal evidence, or ethnographic specimen (Trouillot 1995, 48). Benjamin, by contrast, urges us to recognize in them a “weak messianic power”—precisely what an agimat embodies: a trace of past generations’ hopes that continues to speak in the present (Benjamin 1968, 254).

The agimat thus demands that we rethink what counts as historical practice. Its circulation reveals a history not confined to written documents but embedded in materials, gestures, and beliefs. Trouillot’s insights help us see how colonial archives muted these forms of knowledge, while Benjamin allows us to perceive how they persist as constellations, waiting to be recognized in moments of danger (Benjamin 1968, 255).

What makes the agimat transformative is its refusal of inevitability. It testifies to alternative futures: revolts that nearly succeeded, bodies believed invulnerable, communities bound by talismanic lineage. Trouillot shows how such discontinuities were suppressed in order to make colonial domination appear natural (Trouillot 1995, 96–97), while Benjamin insists that recovering them redeems the possibility of the past having turned out otherwise. The “angel of history,” blown into the future while gazing at accumulating wreckage, is the image of such suppression (Benjamin 1968, 257). Understanding the agimat beyond conventional views as superstition enables us to wrest history away from the victors and return it, however provisionally, to those whose hopes and struggles were condensed in its form.

Encountering the agimat through Trouillot and Benjamin has convinced me that history is not only written in books but also carried in objects of power. The agimat offers a means of historical participation: for the makers who inscribed it with cosmologies, for the owners who invested it with trust, and for the wearers who staked their lives upon it. Why was there a flowering of amulets during the Philippine Revolution? It was in part a response to the overwhelming imbalance of power: revolutionaries confronting Spain and later the United States had to draw strength from sources beyond rifles and cannons. The anting-anting provided such strength, condensing Catholic imagery, indigenous cosmologies, and Islamic esoteric signs into portable objects of protection and defiance. Engaging with the ongoing scholarship on the science talismans is to confront archival silences while refusing to let the past be sealed by inevitability. It is to recognize, as Benjamin might say, that even the smallest fragment of resistance contains within it a revolutionary spark (Benjamin 1968, 263).

References

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.

P.S. Some notes on the symbols in Sakay’s vest

The Central Caravaca Cross – In the 8th century, the Moorish ruler Zeyt-Abuzeyt, curious about Christianity, asked the captive missionary Don Gines Pérez Chirinos de Cuenca to reenact the Last Supper. When no cross was available, two angels appeared with one, and at the consecration the host transformed into the image of a child. The king and his household converted, and the cross—believed to contain a relic of the True Cross—remained in Caravaca as a revered object.

Names of JESUS and MARÍA

CRUCEM NO ODOS UNI DE HONOR – “The cross, no one honors”

VICTORIA – “Victory”

CRUZES Hoc patibulum… – “Crosses, this gallows… you wished to conquer the enemies, grant us signs above the light of your face, O Lord”

SANTAM Subit qui in Fernum… – “He who endures the holy in hell with me, the cross”

CRUZEST ARBOR dighisima IMPARADI… – “The cross is the most worthy tree of Paradise”

EGO SUM VIA BENIDICTUS VOBIS… – “I am blessed on the way for you”

Hom Curpuris – “Man of the body”

Ascendit decite rignabil… – fragmentary, but tied to the Ascension; the cross as the path to Christ’s exaltation.

SALURIT QUEM ANU – fragmentary, possibly “He who saves…”; the cross as the sign of salvation.

ENCLR.S. A. V. P. MLBVS AN BANGALI JUTIC CRU – undeciphered; but its inclusion suggests the cross as cryptic formula, known to initiates.

VENCI DUM N SH – fragmentary, linked to conquest;

NDS+MD. Crusis Furgalo… – fragmentary liturgical phrase, referring to three crosses or the cross as a collective sign of sacrifice and triumph.