LESSON 6

Rizal Search for Origin

OVERVIEW
Before the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan, the West almost knew nothing about the islands where
our ancestors lived. Upon his arrival in 1521, Magellan set forth in his mission to colonize the islands. In
forefront of this mission were the friars who converted the inhabitants to Christianity. It could be said that
Catholicism was one of the most important influences that Spain had on Filipinos.
This chapter will discuss how the Spanish Catholic priest converted the natives and successfully
colonized the islands that comprised what we now call the Philippines.

OBJECTIVES
By the end of of this lesson, you should be able to:
1. Discuss the various views about Pacto de Sangre;
2. Explain why the Spanish catholic priest were successful in converting our ancestors.

CONTENT

THE PACTO DE SANGRE

The Pacto de Sangre (Blood Compact), despite its crucial significance in Filipino conceptions of
history is seldom discussed in Philippine historiography. The event that happened in Bohol in 1565,
involving Sikatuna and Legaspi was narrated in the late 19th century and became integral to the nationalist
emplotment of the past. However, the two principal narrative strands of Marcelo Del Pilar and Andres
Bonifacio differed owing to divergent political projects (Aguilar, 2010).
In tertiary textbooks, the treatment of the Blood Compact or Pacto de Sangre has been highly
variable. Wether ignored, or discussed at length, the Pacto de Sangre has lived on in the national
imagination. Interestingly, in the 2nd half of the 20th century, the term had already been coined in the
works of early historians in the Philippines, such as Gregorio Zaide (1958, 39), in History of the Filipino
People, wrotesimply, “At Limawasa, he (Legaspi) was well received by Bankaw, king of the island –
Sikatuna and Sigala.” In the Pageant of Philippine History, (Zaide 1979, 227-235) gave a longer account,
detailing the background of Legaspi and Urdaneta, describing the voyage, and explaining the context of
the Blood Compact. For his part, Teodoro Agoncillo, (1974), in Introduction to Filipino History, mentioned
nothing but the scarcity of food supplies in Bohol. His example would be followed by Renato Constantino
(1975), Jaime Veneracion (1987), and O.D. Corpuz, who choose to be reticent about the Pacto de Sangre.
History of the Filipino People by Agoncillo (1990, 74) thought it work a quick mention: “by February 1565,
Legaspi reached Cebu and contracted blood compacts with Sikatunaw and Sigala at Bohol. “Fr. Jose Arcilla,
S.J. (1984, 14-15), made no mention of the blood ceremony in Introduction to Philippine History, a work
that first appeard in 1971. In Rizal and the Emergence of the Philippine Nation, Arcilla (1991) began to
mention the Blood Compact. In his discussion, it became florid in the book’s 2003 edition, which provided
the context of Legaspi’s expedition and the circumstances that led to the meeting with Sikatuna,
culminating in the performing of the Pacto de Sangre (Aguilar, 2010, pp. 81-83)
Other historical texts that appeared in the lase decade of the 20th century gave the Blood
Compact more than a passing mention. Rosario Mendoza and colleagues (2000, 30) in the Filipino Saga:
History as Social Change wrote, “Miguel Lopez de Legaspi arrived in Cebu ruled by Raja Tupas, on April 27,
1565. Earlier, he had landed in Bohol, where he befriended two native chiefs Sikatuna and Sigala with
whom he performed blood compacts, first with Sikatuna on March 16, 1565 and a few days later with
Sigala.” In a piece that appeared on the fron page of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, Ambeth Ocampo (1999,
11) explained the Blood Compact within the frame modern diplomacy. It was a “treaty of peace” needed
because the “Spaniards...were not allowed to land in Bohol.” Moreover, the resulting compact between
Sikatuna and Legaspi could be seen not only as the first blood of friendship between the Philippines and
Spain but also the first international treaty between the Philippine and a foreign country. As part of the
official commemoration of Philippine-Spanish Friendship Day, in 2003, Virgilio Almario wrote the book
titled Pacto de Sangre: Spanish Legacy in Filipinas wherein Pacto de Sangre has been described as a symbol
of the cultural transfussion which transpired after Sikatuna drank the wine mixed with Legaspi’s blood.
Thus by drinking Legaspi’s blood, Sikatuna wedded Filipino to Spanish culture and civilization wherein the
Spanish blood runs through the veins of many Filipinos and has become part of the Filipino Genetic stock
(Aguilar, 2010, pp. 81-83).
However, such notion changed during the existence of reformist in which most of them belonged
to what they called the illustrados. Heavily influenced by European political notions, the ilustrados thought
in terms of colonization, assimilation, or independence, such words did not apply during the precolonial
Philippines. A product of their times was Marcelo H. Del Pilar who framed the event of the blood compact
in Bohol in 1565 as the key event that commenced the process of Spanish colonization of the country
instead of viewing the event as a localized event. Furthermore, he interpreted the blood oath as the
pivotal event that established a lasting friendship between Spain and the Philippines.
The ambivalence of the ilustrado’s interpretation of the blood oath of Sikatuna and Legaspi was
registered in Juan Luna’s painting, El Pacto de Sangre, completed in Europe in 1885. This ambivalence was
manifested in divergent readings to which the painting had given rise. Such painting encoded the basic
superiority of Spain as interpreted by Florov Quibuyen, arguing that the focus was on Legaspi while
Sikatuna was rendered faceless, the only islander in the scene dominated by the Spanish conquistador.
However, Paul Zafarella described the historical event as a major cultural document. It underscored the
systematic culture clash in Luna’s painting. Good faith and the honor system were the qualities, which
Sikatuna brought with him to the celebration of the kasikasi tradition while bad faith and deceit
characterized Legaspi. However, the ilustrados’ perspective on assimilation was changed as perceived by
Andres Bonifacio whose political project was separation from Spain by means of revolution. He construed
the Pacto de Sangre as illegitimate, which invalidated the whole Spanish colonialism and justified the
revolution. To conclude, Bernadeth Abrera interpreted the Katipunan as a revival of Sandugo. In her view,
the partaking of blood was bypassed because the primary realtionship that was being established in the
rite was with Inang Bayan (the Motherland), and everyone shared the same blood, and all, therefore,
were siblings (Aguilar, pp. 96-97).

THE ENKANTOS: CONQUISTA ESPIRITUAL

The Catholic priest who were at the forefront of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines distributed
themselves throughout the archipelago, which was administratively subdivided and allocated to different
religiious orders. The friars or the Spanish priest eventually pverwhelmed and overpowered the natives,
thus extending the area Spanish control despite of the minimal military support.
The friar was seen through the indigenous cosmological lenses, and justifiably for the indio and
the friar were one in their belief in a spiritual realm inhabited by a preternatural being. It was on that
common ground that colonial domination was built, and the colonial state’s foundation was laid. Thus,
the friar’s mission in the Philippines was called as conquistae spiritual meaning that the imperial conquest
was spiritual invasion a massive intrusion of Hispanic spirit beings into the islands. Denoting preternatural
entities of a distinctively Spanish origin, the commonly used words in the contemporary Filipino world
include engkanto, engkantu, or ingkanto, referring to a generic spirit being, a word derived from encanto
(charm/echantment/spell) or encantado (enchanted); dwende from duende (elf); multo or murio
(meaning ghost) from muerio (dead); malign (an evil spirit) from malign (malicious/malignant); kapre (a
dark, hairy, otherworldly giant) from Cafre (Kaffir); santilmo (a spirit or soul in the appearance of fore);
sirena (sea nymph) from sirena (mermaid); tag lugar (environmental spirit) in a lugar (space, spot, or site).
Engkantos as described by Jesuit Francisco Demetrio in his paper The Engkanto Belief presented
a portrait of the engkanto based on some eighty narratives obtained from the Visayas and northern
Mindanao. These engkantos were described as being of both sexes and varying ages and of fair
complexion, golden haired, blue-eyed; they had clean-cut feature and perfectly chiselled faces. They were
seen singly or as damilies, but hardly as communities. The engkanto belief was mirrored to them because
of their extremely small numer. However, despite the small number, they had this imposing presence in
which they laid down rules of the social game only they could break. Their order had to be obeyed. Despite
teaching of clerical celibacy, they left Spanish mestizo offsprings. As the friar were the first to infringe the
rules they themselves laid down, colonial rule was founded upon the arbitrary word, a fact reflected in
the engkanto’s whimsical and unpredictable character. Indeed, the engkanto figure constituted a telling
critique of the colonizers who “duped,” “led astray,” and “made fun” of the natives. However, those
Spanish prenatural beings were not at all odds to the islanders. Confronted by the superior power, the
islanders grasped the meaning of colonial conquest in terms of the Spaniards’ alliance with their spirit
world. The friars began to live in newly founded settlement and started evangelizing mission by mastering
the local language and performing Catholic rites; thereafter, the indios received confirmation concerning
the activities of the alien spirits. The indios’ accounts of extraordinary accidents arising from the conquest
were conceptually framed by the friars specifically in terms of enchantments, namely, enchanto. In the
complex process of finding a correspondence between the prenatural being whose presence the natives
had discerned in their midst and the foreign words they heard used by the friars to refer to the native’s
strange experiences, Spanish nouns and adjectives were appropriated, jumbled, and converted into
proper nouns. Those nouns became the words by which the natives learned the alien spirit beings by
name: engkanto, dwende, murto, maligno, kapre, sirena, santilmo, tag-lugar. The naming of the spirits is
the act of naming that constituted the formidable step of confronting and objectifying the altered realities
triggered by colonial conquest (Demetrio, 1969).
The golden age of the friar’s mission in the Philippines also coined what ws called the golden age
of Catholicism in Spain during the second half of the 16th century. Disruptions of everyday life immediatly
provoked religious responses; floods or prolonged droughts, invasions of locusts, frosts, food shortages,
epidemics, all evoked a cycle of processions and prayer. Religious devotion “assumed a propitiatory
nature” closely resembling the indio’s religious practices. Moreover, the prevailing orthodoxy encouraged
the popularity of ensalmadores (casters of spells) and saludadores (healers) in the 17th and 18th
centuries. They used magical objects and performed incantatory rituals. Relying on the white magic, the
Spanish folk practitioners evinced a striking similarity with the indigenous shamans of the islands. In
general, the Philippines became a meeting point for two religious systems that were fundamentally alike.
The European clergy could easily locate the native religion in direct cognitive opposition of their
Catholicism. On the other hand, their differences allowed the natives to perceive the colonizers as similar
to themselves despite the overt sign of difference. The discernment of their basic alikeness made it
possible for the natives to classify and localize the saints along with their ancestors and the engkantos
along with the indigenous terrestrial beings. Just as the Santo Nino (Holy Child) image was initially known
in Cebu as the diwata of the Spaniards; thus, the Catholic idols were seen as equivalent to the native icons
(Demetrio, 1969)
How did the friar power make the Indio submit to the new religion? As the friars went about their
mission, work, they projected the image of shamans whose magical ensemble included in the Catholic
sacraments. In the late 16th century countless missionaries extolled baptism as a most efficacious remedy
for leprosy. It was also employed in reviving a comatose man. According to Jesuit Pedro Chirino’s account,
many were cured of the serious illness after receiving the Holy Sacrements. Moreover, the friars’
paraphernalia were transformed into potent objects. Catholic icons, medallions, rosaries, scapulars, the
cross, and water blessed by the priests became novel media for the transference of power from the
spiritual to the physical domain. Holy water became known as a medicine, such as what happened in
Bohol where those who drank holy water were spared from death in an epidemic that caused pains in the
head and the stomach. It had also been reported that it was applied to a patient’s body. Thus, with the
aid of Catholic magical words, relics, and gestures, the friars demonstrated superior cosmic strength by
their ability to vanguish local spiritual strongholds and break age-old taboos. With the success of the friar
power over the spiritual lives of the native, the anito began to lose their abilities to cause, as well as heal
illnesses and in general, to affect the course of human existence. Furthermore, it also resulted in local
spirits becoming benign, or even innocuous (the present-day translation of diwata being simply fairy)
while the Hispanic spirits assumed the maleficent role of bearers of illness. Engkantos are known to
possess power to inflict diseases: fevers, boils, and any other skin diseases as a result of their curse or
buyag as quoted by Demetrio. It also made friars an integral part of native strategies for coping with life’s
vicissitudes. The legitimacy established through Friar Power became an anchor of the Spanish imperial
presence. Friar auhtority became the basis for the extraction of surplus from the native population.
Contrary to the royal edict, the Spanish priest began to charge sacremental fees. The fathers were
emboldened to reap their material rewards for they saw that the natives would bestow esteem,
confidence, adoration, and anything they owned on anyone who could furnish or promise to do so. There
was, therefore, a monetary angle to the friars’ denunciation of the babylan as frauds (Demetrio, 1969).
However, not all islanders submitted to colonial rule. A number of chiefs and native shamans
resisted it. But given the nature of Spanish hegemony, which reinforced, perpetuated, and altered
indigenous cultural constructs, their resistance was ineluctably articulated in religious terms. Despite its
failure to overturn the conquest, native resistance persisted, and to a degree subverted, colonial authority
and weakened its grip over colonial space. Because of the colonizer’s inability to eliminate the native
resistance, the natives who overtly submitted to colonial rule soon found themselves in the middle of a
power struggle between two opposing spheres – in effect between two conflicting claims to loyalty and
identity.

CULTURAL ENTRAPMENT AND THE COLONIAL COCKPIT

Not all natives were defeated by the colonizer’s spiritual conquest; some local entities did fight
back in the struggle. It was the native women who were the most difficult to attract to the holy faith and
even in the presence of the father missionary. Ecen in the Spanish – controlled areas, the indigenous
religion continued to be practiced clandestinely with the cooperation of the precolonial elite. These
precolonial elites, the shamans, and the datus, defended the indigenous belief system that provided
legitimacy to ther respective social positions, both of which the friars singularly usurped (Aguilar, 1998).
The converts to the new religion were to young to have any affection foe their old practices or
had little or no interest to protect ancient practices. Buffeted by the rising tide of conversions, some
natives expressed their resistance in a less-passive manner. They killed missionaries living in their locality.
Some others poisoned friars or stoned them to death. Others resisted Spanish rule by simply withdrawing
to the wild interior beyond reach of the conquerors.
Although many natives resisted the new religion, some natives moved right into the cabecera, the
capital of the parish or town, while numerous others struck a compromise by settling down in hamlet of
varying sizes (the visitas and even smaller sitios and rancherias), which were widely dispersed but still
“bajo de la campana” or within the hearing of the church bells. With the natives’ residence within the
friar-dominated settlement, the indios have to appease two spheres of power, the indigenous and the
Hispanic; thus; they were confronted with the comprting claims of loyalty and identity. Because of these
historical exigencies, the natives learned to negotiate between two cultures by adhering to two religious
systems, leading to imitation of one and concealing the other, cultivating in the process a social practise
of cultural ambivalence. The percieved clash of powers and the indio response of wandering between two
realms nurtured the native’s gambling outlook in life. Gambling is a universal and of antediluvian origin,
but its local character is the product of specific contingent histories. In the Philippines, the colonial epoch
gave rise to gambling as an articulation of the subjugated natives’ ambivalent response that concomitantly
accepted and rejected colonial realities. Given the highly spiritualized texture of Spanish colonialism and
native gambling’s link to the spirit world, gambling became the idiom that expressed the indio’s
contradictory realtionship to colonial power (Aguilar, 1998).
Thus, a wavering form of wagering on the odds of power became an external manifestation of the
subjectively felt cultural entrapment social gambling. If a native could not escape the two opposing
spheres, it became a sheer case of bad luck; otherwise, the indios moved back and forth between the
overlapping worlds constituted by the indigenous and colonial in a gamble that they would not be caught
in either one. The simultaneous avoidance and acceptance of the clash of spirits was graphically encoded
in the various forms of gambling that flourished during the epoch of Spanish colonial rule.
Principal among the games of chance was cockfighting – bulang or sabong or as the Spaniards
called it, juego de gallos. In cockfighting, the native could be entertained by witnessing what was
essentially a cosmic battle involving imagined preternatural entities who were divided by the granting of
spiritual favor to the contending participants in the game. Gambling, especially the cockfight, was a visual
and thrilling display of the clash of power realms. As a rule, only cocks of equal prowes were matched in
any fight and the opposing centeer bets were equalized before the fight begans. The language of the
spiritual game simplified the cocks’ color into either red (pula) or white (puti), the first referring to the
superior bird, the second to the inferior. The color red signified life and courage while the white
symbolized death and defeat. As of Pigafetta’s observation in Palawan, the cocks were made to fight for
a prize, each one puts up a certain amount on his cock and the prize went to whoever was the winner.
Thus, it was speculated that even in the pre-Hispanic times, the clash of cosmic powers was already the
game’s message. Under the Spanish colonial rule, the popularity of cockfighting was because of the
game’s subtle subversion of the dominant colonial order. The indios who were trapped between
submission and resistance would have read into the cockfight’s red – white binary codes a political
significance. The red stood for the indigenous powers while the white made to assume the colonizers. The
equal division of the center bet between red and white reflected the social cleavage in indigenous society
between resistance and accommodation to colonial rule, as well as the feelings of submission and
resistance that tore apart the individual indio. Furthermore, the gambling’s message was contradictory.
On the one hand, hierarchy and dominance were omnipresent in cockfighting as the outcome validated
the native concept of power as being the rule of the spiritually mighty; on the other hand, it allowed for
the inversion of hierarchy in colonial society; the internal message was counter hegemonic. The red was
not the underdog; it could be asserted and bey on as the favorite by the real underdog outside the cockpit.
Red could win and so the white. Since the outcome was never predictable, the native at least had an
imaginary fifty-fifty chance, so when the red and white clashed together in an arena, the power encounter
between the indigenous and the Hispanic realms (Aguilar, 1998 p48-49).
In the passing of time 1770s, the cockpit began to fall under the colonial state regulation and to
be administered through licensing mechanisms and rules governing the days and times of play. Despite
the changes, the meaning generated by the indios in the ritual game was beyond the colonial ken and
control. It must be remembered that it was the Spanish colonial state itself that lent the conceptual
framework for the cockpit’s system of inversion. Although it had already existed prior to colonialism, it
was under Spain that the game’s written codes were systematized.

THE IDEOLOGY OF SUBMISSION

Religion and Colonialism
Much of the data on religion and ritual during the period of Spanish contact came from various
ethnographic accounts. Journals written by Spanish sailors and letters sent by Jesuits missionaries
included decriptions of the different peoples and customs that they encountered in their travels and
during their attempts to “civilize” the Filipinos. Several Filipino practices were encouraged to be
discontinued by the Spanish colonizers. Cremations were forbidden by the Catholic Church as they were
against the belief that the dead would be resurrected by the second coming of Christ, which required the
body to be intact. The fact that the Spanish Catholics were eagerly anticipating the rising of the dead will
have been disturbing to the indigenous Filipinos who believed that such an event would bring death to
the living (Fitzpatrick, 2013).
The Spanish Jesuit missionaries sent to the Philippines encouraged the Filipino people to convert
to Catholicism, celebrate Catholic holidays, and observe religious days obligation. Converts to Catholicism
would have to be assured that resurreection was a positive experience that did not involve evil. Many
Filipinos converted to Catholicism upon or near death if the individual had not previously been particularly
observant of the Catholic doctrine (Fitzpatrick, pp19-20).
During Spanish colonialism, Spain’s influence was evident through the establishment of Catholic
Churches. Churches were often the center of cities, with regard to both city layout and society. Early on,
the dead were buried both inside and directly adjacent to the outside of the churches. Filipinos with
enough money and influence were allowed burials within the church beneath the floors, walls, and pillars.
The Filipinos who did convert to Catholicism were perhaps more easily drawn to it because of certain
aspects of Spanish Catholicism that were comparable with aspects of Filipino religion. Since the Spaniards
were able to relate to the Filipinos in this regard, the Spaniards used religion as a strategy for colonialism.
Both peoples shared a concern for the treatment of the dead that reflected their specific religious belief
(Fitzpatrick, 2013)