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We never heard about Isabelo de los Reyes in school. The first time we encountered the name was in Benedict Anderson’s Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-colonial Imagination, which traced the influence of anarchist thought on the works of Jose Rizal and of his contemporary, De los Reyes. If we’d taken up De los Reyes’s book, El Folk-Lore Filipino, we wouldn’t have spent Social Studies class trying to teleport ourselves out of the room.

Published in 1889, El Folk-Lore Filipino was a two-volume compilation of local knowledge. Historian Resil Mojares (The Brains of the Nation: Pedro Paterno, T.H. Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes and the Production of Modern Knowledge) calls it the founding moment of “Philippine studies” by Filipinos. These are the moments that build nations, and Mojares pays homage to De los Reyes by creating an archive of his own.

Isabelo’s Archive is a delightful compendium of essays on a wide range of historical subjects. Erudite but never pedantic, intellectual yet accessible, Mojares’s book is a gateway drug to a long, wild trip through our nation’s history. We meet the sorority of cloistered maidens of Philippine epics, from the Ilianon maiden sealed in a room of gold to the Subanon maiden whose suitor must construct a golden bridge “thin as hair” between their houses so that she may never tread on the ground.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes of men with tails in One Hundred Years of Solitude; European missionaries visiting the Philippines in the 17th century reported that among the tribes of Mindoro were men with tails. Herman Melville mentions “Manillamen”—Filipino sailors—in the crew of the Pequod in Moby Dick; an American geographer concluded that Filipino seamen who escaped from the Spanish galleons in Mexico in the 16th century introduced tuba (coconut brandy) to the Huichol Indians.

Mojares ruminates on our notions of time (We have no word for it), and shame, and brings up half-forgotten figures such as Bartolome Saguinsin, possibly the first Filipino to publish a book of poetry; Rufino Baltazar, author of what may be the first book of arithmetic by a Filipino; and Gabriel Beato Francisco, one of the first Filipino novelists. The first novel in Tagalog may have been Francisco’s Cababalaghan ni P. Bravo (The Amazement of P. Bravo, love the title).

There are pieces on beheadings and headhunters that should please both scholars and tabloid readers. Mojares takes a Borgesian turn in A Poem of All the Names of the Rivers, The Book That Did Not Exist, and Unicorns in the Garden of Reason.

We thought we were going to snack on Philippine history; we ended up having a feast.

Isabelo’s Archive is available at National Bookstores, Php850.