Santelmo

There is no single codified origin in the provided sources. Scholarly-summary and popular accounts present Santelmo as a syncretic concept in which European/meteorological St. Elmo's fire was assimilated into Filipino folkloric imagination; the Center for Art and Thought notes that European and Filipino accounts shared "the vision of the santelmo as a rage of fire." Media and encyclopedic entries treat the term both as the local name for the atmospheric phenomenon and as a folkloric fireball in stories.

Sources describe Santelmo as a glowing, fire-like ball or a "rage of fire." Popular summaries call it a fireball that flies around forests; a poetic fragment also depicts it appearing on the tips of horns or knives during electrical storms. Descriptions emphasize luminous, small-scale flames or orbs rather than a humanoid form.

Accounts link Santelmo to hovering or flying as a fireball (e.g., described as a fireball that "flies around the forest") and associate it with electrical storms and pointed objects via its conceptual relation to St. Elmo's fire (a corona discharge). Some popular summaries and modern writeups attribute omen-like or symbolic behaviors (e.g., associations with unresolved matters or quarrels) but these interpretive links appear in secondary sources rather than in primary ritual or ethnographic documentation.