 |
 |
| Thursday, 16 July 2009 00:29 | ||||||||
In this series of articles we have been talking about something I call the Bathala Code. This is the idea that the old Filipino writing system, called the baybayin, contains secret meanings hidden in the shapes of its characters – meanings beyond just the sounds that they represent. No evidence supports this theory but it still finds its way on to some Internet web sites and some people are even adopting it as the basis of what they call a “rediscovery” of ancient Filipino spirituality. The Bathala Code is not a new idea but, as we’ll see, it is by no means an ancient one, either.
As we saw last time, the sculptor and spiritualist Guillermo Tolentino invented more bogus meanings for baybayin letters than anyone else, back in 1937. He credited two other men for what he considered to be only minor contributions to his interpretations. One of them was his contemporary, Lope K. Santos, who was a highly respected writer and author of the first official grammar of the National Language. Santos speculated on the word uha (cry of a newborn baby) as the basis for the shapes of the letters Pedro Paterno Fifty years before Tolentino wrote his Ang Wika at Baybaying Tagalog, Pedro Paterno wrote La Antigua Civilización Tagalog in 1887, followed by several other books on Filipino ethnology. These were hardly a small influence on Tolentino’s far-fetched theories; they were probably some of his main inspirations, if not his virtual blueprint. Like Tolentino, Paterno tried to legitimize some really outrageous claims with questionable scholarship and outright fabrications, as we’ll see, but more than that, he himself played a prominent role during a crucial period of Philippine history. So much could be written about Pedro Paterno, the historical figure, but we just don’t have the space in this issue. We’ll stick to his Bathala Code connection for now, and leave his notorious real-life exploits for a follow-up article next time. Inventing a religion Although Paterno was the originator of the Bathala-baybayin notion, it was not the main focus of La Antigua Civilización Tagalog. Like many Filipino writers of his time, his aim was to show that Filipinos were capable enough to take part in governing their own country under Spanish rule. But unlike the other Propagandists, as they were called, Paterno was a conservative Catholic and an ardent supporter of the Spanish regime. He saw Christianity as the highest form of religion and Spain as the embodiment of the highest form of culture and civilization. Through his improbable analysis of history and language, he tried to prove that, even before Spain made first contact in the 1500s, the ancient Tagalogs were already “Spaniards at heart,” as the historian John Schumacher phrased it in his book The Making of a Nation (p. 107). What's more, they even practiced an organized religion that was practically Christianity but with another name. Paterno called this religion Tagalismo and Bathalismo, and it had everything from a creation myth very much like the Garden of Eden story to elements such as priests, bishops, Holy Communion, Confession, a Holy Trinity, a virgin birth and a prophet named Anac Hala who was the son of the creator Bathala. To support his incredible claims, Paterno would ferret out obscure words, like bathala, and often break them down to their basic syllables and letters. He would make irrelevant comparisons and emphasize chance similarities of these elements with words, concepts and personalities from other civilizations around the world – just as Guillermo Tolentino would do half a century later. Resil Mojares showed in his excellent book, Brains of the Nation (2006), how Paterno would freely distort facts and selectively mine his sources, ignoring anything that did not fit his theories.
And, of course, Paterno would also just “make up stuff.” While Tolentino had a baseless origin story for the baybayin script, Paterno had one for his Bathalismo religion. In Paterno’s story – which he said an “ancient Tagalog” had told him – a virgin named Daga was impregnated by a ray of sunlight. When her father discovered the pregnancy, he angrily wrote her name in the baybayin script and inserted the “male” letter The Bathala Code One part of Paterno’s grand illusion of Bathalismo involved the baybayin script. This is where the Bathala Code really started, though today’s Code believers are apparently unaware of its origin. In La Antigua Civilización Tagalog (p. 259 of the 1915 edition), Paterno wrote:
The word baybayin comes from baibai or babai, or babae, which means female or generator, represented by the figure
And on page 33:
Now then; in the Old Tagalog writing of the name of God,
Returning to page 259: This is the origin of the Bathala-baybayin connection that some mystics claim is a link to the ancient wisdom of their distant pre-colonial ancestors – and it was all just made up in 1887.
Even from its beginnings we can see the inconsistencies of the theory emerging. Where Paterno saw a bolt of lightning in the letter In the final part of our series on the Bathala Code, we’ll look at the eventful life of Pedro Paterno and hear what some of his contemporaries, like Jose Rizal, thought of his outlandish theories, and how Paterno defended them. That’s in the next instalment of In Other Words in the Pilipino Express.
Visit Sarisari etc. for more about Filipino history and language.
|
(u), 
(ha) and 
(a). However, neither Tolentino nor Santos could claim to have discovered the Bathala Code. They merely embellished the original idea of another flaky character from a generation before them – the infamous Pedro Paterno.
(la), changing her name to Dalaga. She gave birth to a son who began to perform miracles at the age of 12, thus founding the religion of Bathalismo. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
, an imitation of the external shape of the female genital organ, just as the character corresponding to the Latin letter L, is a sign of lalaque (male) and is a drawing or copy of the male sexual organ.