Da Bathala Code           Part 1 of 4

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	This is the most common style of baybayin writing shown in some school history books. It was designed for a Spanish printing press in the early 1600s. Some baybayin enthusiasts have unknowingly used fonts like this to divine hidden meanings in the letter shapes, unaware that the shapes have been modified and influenced by the Roman alphabet. Note the distinctive V and 3 used for the letter SA.

For Filipinos, however, baybayin writing is more significant – or it should be – because it is not part of a mere fantasy; it is part of their heritage. After centuries of being regarded as little more than savages under the Spanish regime, then as backward “little brown brothers” under the Americans, most Filipinos are proud, and rightly so, when they discover that their pre-colonial ancestors were, in fact, highly literate.

But it seems that for some proud, well-meaning Filipinos, this is not enough. A few Internet web sites promote a theory that baybayin letters have deeper, mysterious meanings beyond being just graphic representations of the spoken word. Since the most accessible sources of information about the baybayin are often the most superficial, some baybayin enthusiasts feel free to embellish the known facts with apparent revelations of spiritual meanings that they claim to see in the shapes of baybayin characters.

Bathala and the baybayin

The promoters of this idea – that there are hidden meanings in the shapes of baybayin letters – usually start their revelations with the word bathala (pronounced bat-hala), which is the name of the pre-colonial Tagalog god of creation. In baybayin writing, bathala looks like this:

The very nature of God is supposedly revealed in its baybayin spelling with the concepts of femininity, masculinity, creation and divine inspiration all contained in the shapes of the letters. The  (ba) is said to represent the female aspect of creation because it is the first letter in the word babae (woman) and its shape is supposed to mimic the genitals of a woman. Similarly, the  (la) represents the male aspect because lalaki (man) starts with the letter L, which, apparently, looks like a penis to some people. These two concepts are united by the letter  (ha), which represents the divine breath (hininga) or wind (hangin) that gives life to the spirits of women and men. If the letter  (ta) is erroneously inserted into the baybayin spelling of bathala, it symbolizes a spark or a bolt of lightning from God that ignites the human spirit – or something like that.

Like Dan Brown's best-selling novel and blockbuster movie with a similar title, this "Bathala Code," as I like to call it, is very enticing, pretty far-fetched and uses dubious scholarship to dress up what is basically a fantasy. The details can vary widely since each believer often likes to insert his or her own alleged discoveries based on superficial observations of unrelated religions and New Age philosophies. What they never do is question the very premise that baybayin letter shapes are pictures that have meanings beyond the sounds they represent. To them, it is just a given fact.

Letters as pictures

But are the shapes meaningless? It's safe to say that almost all non-pictographic writing systems in the world have origins that can be traced back to predecessors that were pictographic. Our English letter A, for instance, is said to have descended from an Egyptian hieroglyph that was a picture of an ox. It doesn’t look much like an ox today and it’s not even used to spell the word “ox.” Nor should it be. Its shape is the result of an evolutionary process that at took thousands of years and involved several intermediate writing systems and spoken languages including Latin, Ancient Greek, Etruscan, Phoenician, two Middle Eastern alphabets and a simplified form of the original Egyptian hieroglyphs. But, the letter A just means “A” to us now. Similarly, predecessors of the baybayin letters might have once had pictographic meanings, but they certainly did not have anything to do with any Tagalog words like babae, hangin or lalaki.

What if Tagalog people really did design the baybayin letter shapes?

Many pictographic interpretations rely on very specific details of how baybayin letters are drawn, but these details can vary greatly, or even disappear, depending on which specimen of baybayin writing is examined. The letter  (ba) for example was often written as an ordinary circle. The  (la) often had straight lines and looked like a T. The modern bathala theories are not based on interpretations of the way that the people of Luzon or the Visayas actually wrote five centuries ago. Most of the common historic styles of the baybayin that we know today were actually typefaces that were originally designed for Spanish printing presses. Nobody knows exactly what the earliest baybayin looked like because the letter shapes were not standardized and the oldest surviving specimen was made on a Spanish printing press in 1593. This begs the question, how do the Bathala Code believers know that they are interpreting the correct shapes?

Even if the baybayin letter shapes that we know today were 100% faithful to a pre-colonial Tagalog design, there is no evidence that the Tagalog designers based them on the things we think they did. The letter  could stand for bato (stone) as well as for babae or any of a hundred other B-words. Even if we grant that the letters of bathala look vaguely like a vagina, the wind and a penis, is this really any more significant than noticing that god spelled backwards is dog?

While it is highly improbable that the words babae, hangin and lalaki were derived from bathala, it is even more absurd to claim that bathala was formed from those Tagalog words since the name bathala is a variation of the Indian Sanskrit word batara, meaning "lord," which is found in many languages throughout India, Malaysia and Indonesia.