Holy Week and the mystique of Pamitinan
By Dr. Pablo S. Trillana III
During the Holy Week of April 1895, 127 years ago, Andres Bonifacio climbed the foothills of Montalban (now Rodriguez) under the shadows of the great Sierra Madre Range in Morong (now Rizal). He had gone to the legendary cave of Bernardo Carpio in Pamitinan accompanied by Emilio Jacinto, Aurelio Tolentino, Faustino Mañalac, Francisco del Castillo, Valeriano Dalida, Pedro Zabala, and Guillermo Masangkay. Conventional history says they had visited the cave to find safe hiding places for Katipuneros and their weapons. Some historians, however, have argued that the meeting in Pamitinan had a far deeper and wider symbolic context.
Viva la Independencia de Filipinas
The cave was ostensibly used by the Katipuneros to conduct initiation rites for rebel leaders of Morong. After the rites, Bonifacio and his companions went deeper into the cave. With trembling hands and with his Katipunero brothers keenly watching, Aurelio Tolentino, using a piece of charcoal, wrote on the walls of the cave Viva la Independencia de Filipinas (“Long Live Philippine Independence”). Bonifacio and his other companions then signed their own names on the cavern walls. Emerging from the cave, the group was teary-eyed and speechless, overwhelmed by the weight of the moment—of foreseeing, as Aurelio Tolentino would confess later, “how heavily they would have to pay for the ideal they had created.”
Years after the revolution, Tolentino would describe the meeting in the cave as the “first cry” for liberty by the Katipunan. Historians like Esteban de Ocampo, Teodoro M. Kalaw, Teodoro Agoncillo, and O.D. Corpuz agreed and added that it was in fact the first proclamation of independence by Filipinos.
The Pamitinan incident reflects a highly-nuanced facet of Bonifacio’s character, his intensely historical and spiritual bent that directed his actions as the Katipunan leader. Influenced by Reynaldo Ileto’s book Pasyon and Revolution, this essay reflects on that incident in terms of its details—the location, the date, and the libertarian graffiti.
Sacred caves
Philippine folk traditions consider caves as sacred, the reserve of nature spirits and holy ground for rituals such as burying the dead. Bonifacio’s choice of a cave to hold the Katipunan initiation ritual for rebel leaders showed how much he understood the Filipino psyche. Rooting the Katipunan in native spiritual traditions, he brought the secret revolutionary society to the realm of popular consciousness.
Why Pamitinan? The Montalban cave is said to be the sanctuary of Bernardo Carpio, the hero of 19th century folk literature who vowed to return to the lowlands to reclaim the country from colonial enslavement. It was in the Pamitinan cave where he prepared himself spiritually for his mission. The choice of Pamitinan established a parallel world between Bernardo Carpio’s promise and the Katipunan’s quest. In doing so, Bonifacio was able to weld popular imagination to popular reality.
That the initiation rites were held during Holy Week was more than an accident of good timing. It was a calculated choice. Then and now, Holy Week is the most compelling of Catholic holy days in the Philippines. All secular preoccupations come to a full stop. And because it usually occurs on the hottest days of the year, everything “dies.”
Just as Jesus Christ suffered, died, and rose again to save mankind from sin, so too must Filipinos be prepared to make sacrifices, even to the point of dying, to arrest colonial society’s moral decay, redeem the Motherland, and regain their lost paradise of freedom and brotherhood.
Pilgrimage of sacrifice
Holy Week is therefore ripe with all the elements of spiritual communion through atonement and redemption. Filipinos submit themselves to cathartic rites. They recite the pasyon (the retelling of Christ’s life in versified song), join religious processions, fast, undergo flagellations, recall Christ’s crucifixion and death, and, at the end, experience the joyful renewal of resurrection.
To Bonifacio and the early Katipuneros, the course taken by the secret society was like the pasyon of Jesus Christ. They were engaged in a lakaran of sacrifice (“pilgrimage”) to free the grieving Motherland who cried out for damay from her sons (“compassion”).
Just as Jesus Christ suffered, died, and rose again to save mankind from sin, so too must Filipinos be prepared to make sacrifices, even to the point of dying, as a sign of their damay to arrest colonial society’s moral decay, redeem the Motherland, and regain their lost paradise of freedom and brotherhood.
Katapusang Hibik ng Pilipinas
In this light, the Holy Week element of the Pamitinan cry of independence situates the Katipunan’s redemptive mission within the framework of folk religion, specifically the familiar pasyon, which the people could easily understand and identify with. It underlines the spiritual and sacred nature of the people’s participation in the Katipunan movement.
The third significant element of the Pamitinan cry of independence relates to the word Kalayaan, the present-day vernacular term for independencia written on the walls of Pamitinan. According to Ileto, “Kalayaan” did not connote “freedom” and “independence” until there arose the clamor to separate from Spain just prior to the 1896 Revolution. Originally, the term suggests the concept of “becoming one” and of contentment. Root words laya and layaw conjure images of childhood in the care of the loving parent. In this context, Spain was pictured as an uncaring stepmother who had to be rejected in favor of a new and caring mother, Inang Pilipinas.In the poignant language of “Katapusang Hibik ng Filipinas,” a poem attributed to Bonifacio, the hero expressed this rejection of the false mother and bade goodbye to Spain. In the struggles that would bring about this separation, he declared that death itself would be paradise.
To the Katipuneros, therefore, the concept of Kalayaan went beyond the Western libertarian and ilustradoideal of political independence (kasarinlan). The mass base of the Katipunan looked upon revolution as a redemptive process. The Spaniards had lost the moral right to govern, but it was not enough for Filipinos to take up arms and force the colonizers out of power. The Filipinos themselves, who would regain political power, must establish a society in which the redeemed Inang Bayan would genuinely take care of her sons and restore the lost condition of guinhawa, the familial contentment between the mother and her children.
The painful process of redemption
To bring this about, the Katipunan demanded moral sacrifices and inner purification (kalinisan ng kalooban). This was the essential condition of participation in the redemptive process as well as the energizing force that would sustain them in the difficult task of subsequent nation-building. Rizal, the revered moral leader of the Katipuneros, had said so: Redencion supone virtud, virtud sacrificio, y sacrificio amor (Redemption presupposes virtue, virtue sacrifice, and sacrifice love).
During the Decade of the Philippine Centennials, 25 years ago, I also climbed the foothills of Montalban with a group of young Volunteers for Earth Defense headed by Mark Dia. They were working to preserve the historic grotto of Pamitinan as a protected shrine. According to Mark, when he went inside the cave bearing in mind its revolutionary and spiritual significance, he felt such a well of emotional fervor that he could not control his tears.
More than a century separates Mark and his volunteers from Bonifacio and his Katipunan brothers. But their tears were signs of a shared, new consciousness—a double helix of intertwining and equally important strands of fulfilling capacities where both inner and outer conditions of thought and action combine to form the beginnings of smoldering dreams.
As we go from Holy Week into the country’s coming May elections, may the traditions of Pamitinan become, for all times, a wellspring of that double helix of fulfilling capacities. And the Katipuneros probably might agree: “mga espiritung buhay na nagdaraan sa karanasan ng pang-mundong ibabaw (spirits passing through life on earth).”