In the previous article of this series we met Pedro Paterno, the man who originated the notion that there are hidden meanings in the shapes of the letters of the old Filipino baybayin script, specifically, in the letters that spell Bathala, the name of the ancient Tagalog god of creation.
Paterno was a self-styled renaissance man. He wrote fiction, poetry, stage plays and operas. He was educated in philosophy and theology, and held a doctorate in law. He also wrote several books on Filipino ethnology, including La Antigua Civilización Tagalog (1887), the book where he first imagined the Bathala-baybayin connection, which some people today misconstrue as a real part of ancient Filipino spirituality. But, as we saw last time, his research methods were quite eccentric, to put it mildly.
By today’s standards of scholarship, Pedro Paterno would probably flunk a legitimate history course. His ideas about the ancient Philippines were not even taken seriously in his own time, either. Jose Rizal, no less, wrote the following in a letter to his friend, the Bohemian ethnologist Ferdinand Blumentritt, on March 29, 1887:
In regard to the work of my countryman P.A. Paterno on Bathalà, I tell you, pay no attention to it; P.A. Paterno is like this: [here Rizal drew a line with a series of loops]. I can find no word for it, but only a sign like this: [more loops].
If there is any doubt about what Rizal meant, some of his contemporaries were much more blunt about the “loopy” Paterno. Resil Mojares quoted some of them in Brains of the Nation (2006):
T.H. Pardo de Tavera regarded Paterno’s scholarship with scorn. He called him a plagiarist, and “vulgar imposter” who made false claims about his sources and advertised non-existent books among his works. He dismissed Antigua Civilizacion as “a work of pure fantasy full of extraneous and incredible assertions.” He judged Los Itas a book of “buffooneries” and Cristianismo en la Antigua Civilizacion Tagalog a piece of work “full of surprises for history, science and reason!”…While acknowledging the labor that went into Paterno’s books, [Wenceslao Retana] rejected their arguments as “the dreamy fantasy of a poet” devoid of all “scientific value.”
Paterno’s defence
In an 1892 issue of La Solidaridad, Paterno defended his imagined pre-colonial religion, which he called Bathalismo, by saying, in essence, that his critics had not done their homework:
Some have taken the interpretations I give of Bathala as products of my imagination and that I, according to them, wish to inject into simple letters entire phrases of profound ideas. However, such critics, no matter how respectable they are, doubtless ignore the primitive oriental languages and, in this instance, the Tagalog language, in the roots of which are preserved, on the whole, the purity of the elements of the most ancient ones; or perhaps the first words of the language of man, elements religiously preserved by generations of Tagalogs.
Pedro Paterno was not trained in linguistics or philology and, according to Resil Mojares, he could not even speak Tagalog passably. According to Paterno, the Tagalogs had “religiously preserved” elements of the most ancient languages in the world and yet, in the 1880s, the name Bathala, which he was interpreting, was virtually unknown to all but a few scholars. In Rizal’s letter to Blumentritt, quoted earlier, Rizal said that he “was surprised that no Tagalog knew about the word Bathala” and that “the word Bathala might also have disappeared on account of the Christian religion.”
If Filipino scholars of Paterno’s time ignored his evidence, it was simply because it was so obviously absurd. Since then, generations of historians, linguists, anthropologists, archaeologists and other scientists have done much more research, refined their techniques and, in the process, discredited many theories that were once thought to be true. None of them ever found a scrap of evidence that happened to support Paterno’s preposterous claims.
What did ancient Filipinos really believe?
This is not to say that ancient Filipinos had no religious traditions and mythologies of their own. In fact, they had many more deities and myths than Paterno imagined in his pseudo-Christian, Tagalog-centric fantasies of the land he called Luzonica, which was his name for the ancient Philippines. Pre-colonial Filipinos, were mainly animists, meaning that they believed certain trees, rocks, animals and natural phenomena possessed souls and they revered them as gods. The names of these gods varied from place to place but only the Tagalogs and the Zambals recognized a creator named Bathala, while the approximate equivalent in the Visayas was known as Laon. Despite this fact, today's Bathala Code believers tend to present the supposed Bathala-baybayin connection as an example of the spiritual beliefs of all pre-colonial Filipinos.
As in other cultures around the world, many pre-colonial Filipinos also worshiped the sun, as Paterno claimed. However, this is not a unique belief. The sun is probably the most obvious thing in nature to worship. As such, this hardly qualifies as a Filipino connection to Ra, the ancient Egyptian sun god, as Paterno had claimed. (A good overview of pre-colonial beliefs can be found in William H. Scott’s Barangay, Sixteenth Century Philippine Culture and Society, 1994)
Ancient connections
It is true that at least one far-away ancient civilization (other than China) did have some influence on pre-colonial Filipino culture. Many words found in the languages of the Philippines, such as bathala and diwata (meaning god or goddess), were derived from the Sanskrit language of India. However, these words were likely brought to the Philippines through trade contacts with Malays, and not brought directly from India. Hinduism was one of the religions practiced in the Malay Archipelago before the population began to convert to Islam in the 13th and 14th centuries.
It is also likely that the baybayin writing system was derived from Indian writing but like the Sanskrit loan words, it was not a direct import. It came to the Philippines via the writing systems of the Malay Archipelago. (See my online article, Baybayin, the Ancient Script of the Philippines)
Even so, the Indian influence on ancient Philippine society might have been deeper than even Pedro Paterno realized. The discovery of the Laguna Copperplate Inscription in the late 1980s revealed a language that might have been spoken in Luzon in the year 900 CE, which had many more Sanskrit words than modern Philippine languages have. It is not known how widespread this language was and, unfortunately for Paterno, the inscription was not written in the same script that he imagined contained the essence of Bathala. It was written in the Kavi script of Java, which not only pre-dated the baybayin, but was also more technically advanced than the baybayin. (See The Beginning of Philippine History)
Inventing history
Inventing history is not unique to the Philippines. All nations have legends that are commonly believed to be true. Pedro Paterno might have been the first in the long line of modern Filipino history buffs who saw how much of their culture was lost during the Spanish era and then tried to invent a glorious ancient past for the Philippines. Understandably, national pride played an important part in their efforts and one common element in these inventions was to draw as many comparisons and connections as possible to other ancient civilizations, as though this would somehow validate Filipino culture and heritage. This kind of invented history persists even while legitimate scholars and scientists continue to uncover the truly unique heritage of the diverse cultures that make up the Philippines today. Pre-colonial Filipinos did have a rich spiritual heritage but for the most part, it was kept alive through oral traditions. Eventually, it was recorded in Spanish-authored chronicles and dictionaries – but it was not hidden in the shapes of baybayin letters.
This wraps up our series on the Bathala Code. We didn’t get to see much of Pedro Paterno’s life, as promised last time, but we’ll look at this fascinating character in a follow-up article, next time.
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