The basic form of the Maria Cacao legend is that whenever rains flood the river that comes from Mount Lantoy, or a bridge is broken, this is a sign that Maria Cacao and her husband Mangao have either traveled down the river in their golden ship so that they can export their crops or traveled up the river on their way back. She is supposed to live inside a cave in the mountain and the cacao plants outside it are supposed to be her plantation.
Contemporary variants of the Maria Cacao legend One contemporary evolution of the legend is its merger with another common Filipino mythological motif – that of soul-harvesting boats. 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. A very specific variant of this new element of the myth was reported in
Cagayan de Oro in the aftermath of
Typhoon Sendong (Tropical Storm Washi) when there were reported sightings of a boat with a woman at the helm traveling along the river and offering to pick up passengers. 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. It is also possible that the legend might have been influenced by
Magwayen, 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). == Interpretations and cultural significance ==