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CRUCIFIXIONS IN THE PHILIPPINES |
Educated
TopG |
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SPECIAL REPORT
Vol. XVIII x No. 4 APRIL-MAY 2006
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Behind the media show Every Good Friday, foreign tourists, curious Filipino onlookers and the national and international media throng to watch live crucifixions. Tourists drive to the province of Pampanga, because of its proximity to Manila, particularly to Cutud, Guagua, and San Fernando, where there is a Calvary setting. But crucifixons also take place in Bulacan, and even in Bantayan (northern Cebu). Let’s try to understand the phenomenon that lies behind the “show”: what looks as a barbaric form of expiation is also a way to acquire spiritual and psychic power, deeply rooted in Filipino culture, which can have many different motivations.
By Leonardo N. Mercado, SVD
In the Philippines, every Good Friday, devotees, dressed like Christ, are nailed to different crosses with five-inch nails which have been soaked in alcohol. Their support team have bandages ready to assure the safety of the crucifixion which may last between five and fifteen minutes. Newspapers, radio stations, local television and international cable news groups normally cover these live spectacles. In spite of the prohibition, the Church authorities cannot stop these popular devotions which tourist agencies also advertise.
Crucifixions are not the only events. On Good Friday, in the streets of Manila, Bulacan, Laguna, and Pampanga, one can also see hooded men, usually in groups, who continually flagellate their blood-soaked backs with sharp whips. Some of their relatives and companions even slice the flagellants’ skin with glass-encrusted paddles and razor blades in order to keep the blood flowing.
Why live crucifixions? What drives the devotees to do such an act? The media often ascribe atonement for sins as the motive. But is that really the only driving force? No. There are different and deeper motives.
For some devotees, the motive is out of a panata (Tagalog for vow or religious promise). The conditions of the panata are self-imposed and depend upon the person. The panata may be a vow to get crucified for a number of years, according to the intention of the devotee. The vow is made either to obtain a divine favor or as an act of thanksgiving for answered prayers. One of the practitioners, Ruben Enage, said that he started the yearly practice of crucifixion in thanksgiving for his mother’s cure of tuberculosis.
The act of thanksgiving need not necessarily be expressed in the form of a crucifixion. A barren woman who begets a child makes a vow to make a yearly pilgrimage to a Marian shrine. A woman who prays for her sick child vows that her child will wear the brown San Antonio garb, for a number of years. A farmer who has a good harvest may vow to join the Quiapo procession which takes place every Good Friday and on January 9, the feast of the Black Nazarene.
The children may inherit the panata of their parents. If the father vows for a crucifixion or any form of thanksgiving as a panata, the son or daughter may continue the same thing out of respect for the parents until it becomes a family tradition. The holy is concrete The motivation could be a desire to acquire psychic and spiritual power for healing purposes. This motive is based on the Filipino understanding of being holy. This needs some explanation. When Moses saw the burning bush in Mount Horeb (Exodus 3:1-5), the sight both intrigued and bothered him. Although the sight attracted him, he covered his face out of fear because to see God, in the Hebrew Bible, entails death. The holy or sacred then has two faces: one, is fascinating (fascinans) or attractive, immanent; the other is terrifying (tremendum), transcendent. Now these two aspects of the holy have different proportions in varying cultures. Judaism, Western Christianity, and Islam stress the holy as terrifying and transcendent. But like those peoples of the Pacific and other parts of Asia, Philippine culture stresses the holy as fascinating or immanent. The holy is concrete as a divine power (bisa), which can be localized in a statue, stone, or tree, just as the divine is immanent in the Eucharist. This immanent concept of the holy explains the phenomenon of punas-punas, where Filipino devotees wipe sacred statues with the handkerchief. They believe that the power in the sacred statue will be transferred to the handkerchief and can be used for healing purposes. Because Christ’s power also extended to his attire, touching it with faith cured the woman suffering from hemorrhage (Mark 5:28). Likewise “God did extraordinary deeds of power through the hands of Paul. Even handkerchiefs or clothes that had touched His skin were laid upon the sick and their illnesses were cured, and evil spirits also departed from them.” (Acts19:11-12) To become a healer The so-called penitential rites are often exercises of acquiring spiritual power. The flagellants’ main motive during Holy Week, says anthropologist Prospero Covar, is not expiation for sin but to acquire spiritual and psychic power. The same applies to practitioners of crucifixion. Many of those who get crucified also become healers. But flagellation or crucifixion is not the only means of acquiring psychic power. Another source is meditation. That is why Filipino healers also retire in caves or in cemeteries during the Holy Week. The notion of power also explains the practice of having amulets (anting-anting). Those amulets sold outside the Quiapo church are analogous to car batteries for sale. Just as newly-bought car batteries have to be charged with electricity, newly-acquired amulets have to be charged with prayers and deeds. The term used is pinapakain, literally, to feed the amulet. However, some crucifixion devotees who were interviewed said they do it out of pakikiramay (sympathy), to imitate what God has done for us in Jesus. This pakikiramay may also be called pagmamalasakit, literally, to feel pain with or com-passion for the community and for the family. One devotee, Ramil Lazaro, who was interviewed by a news agency, replied: “I’m doing it for the Filipino people who are not close to God.” The motive may also be atonement or expiation for sins. Another interviewee said he felt cleansed after the crucifixion. Macho spirituality Crucifixion also expresses the Filipino male or macho spirituality. The appearance of women for crucifixion is a recent phenomenon in this domain of men. The number of men crucified far outnumber the women. Although the flagellants are usually men, one can find a few women flagellants in some of the cults of Mount Banahaw which have priestesses. According to anthropologist Fernando Zialcita, another motive for bloody devotions is to express a manly spirituality. Being warriors was the traditional role of Filipinos. Some Ilonggots of Northern Luzon used to prove their masculinity and coming of age by chopping a head of somebody outside the village and the tribe. In other indigenous peoples in Mindanao, the role of the husband has been to defend the family from wild animals and hostile enemies. That is why, when leading his wife in a mountain trail, the husband only carries his weapon so that he cannot be encumbered in case of wild attacks. But in peaceful situations, the same practice still continues. The husband still leads the trail with only his light bolo while his wife carries the baby and other heavy things on her back, a sight which may infuriate the feminists. With the coming of the Spaniards and diminished tribal fights, men had to find substitutes to show their traditional masculine role, continues Zialcita. Some want to prove their masculinity by drinking, by having many women, or by carrying firearms. The Quiapo procession of the Nazareno on Good Friday morning and on January 9 is like an organized chaos where barefoot men compete to grab the honor of drawing the cord of the procession carriage and to touch the image of Christ with their towels. The same is true in the Marian procession of Our Lady of Peñafrancia in Bicol, where men struggle to get hold of the carriage and to wipe the image of Our Lady with their towels. Hence the symbolic struggles in the Quiapo and Peñafrancia processions are signs of showing the devotees’ masculine spirituality. Some men of Smokey Mountain, who seldom attend Mass, show their untapped masculinity when they join bible study sessions in order to learn the arguments to attack non-Catholics. Their mystique of the warrior appears also when they try to defend their shanties from being demolished by developers. A kind of advertisement In San Fernando, a half-breed Filipino or mestizo yearly undergoes crucifixion in order to advertise himself so that his unknown American father in the United States will come and notice him. Hence the motivation is personal, not religious. However, the motive may also be accompanied by a petition to ask for a divine favor. If this is the case, then it can also be classified as a panata. In short, we cannot assign a single motive to the devotees of crucifixion because it depends upon each person. It can be done out of a religious vow (panata) as thanksgiving or petition. It can be an inherited duty. It can be for the acquisition of psychic and spiritual power. It can be done out of solidarity with God and with the people. It can be done to show a manly spirituality. It can be done for particular, individual reasons. This list of motives does not pretend to be exhaustive because there can be others. At any rate, a single act of crucifixion can be triggered by a combination of different motives. Some or perhaps all of the motives mentioned above may also apply to other Lenten devotions like the flagellation; the sinakulo (a passion play which is staged during the Holy Week dramatizing the passion and death of Christ), sometimes for eight consecutive nights; the pabasa (chanting of Pasyong Mahal, versed catechism which starts from Creation until the second coming of Christ); the Moriones of Marinduque (those who clad themselves as Roman centurions in ritual search for Longinus, the one-eyed Roman centurion who was cured by the blood of Christ); the Palo Penitentes or Tais-dupol of Leyte (hooded men wearing clothes like the Klu Klux Klan who join the Good Friday procession); and other observances. Minimal pain Do the devotees suffer pain? It depends. If they have the altered state of consciousness, the pain is almost minimal. During one Good Friday, I saw a woman crucified in Paombong, Bulacan. While she hung on the cross, I noticed that she was in the altered state of consciousness while she was preaching. Likewise, a particular group of Filipinos in Cavite practices a ritual of walking barefoot on fire. The devotees do not feel any pain at all. These devotions are like some Hindu festivals and the Vegetarian Festival of Phuket, Thailand where one can see people insert sharpened knives and ice picks into their faces, shoulder blades and other parts of their bodies or pull heavy things with hooks attached to their backs with no apparent pain. We have not gone into the Filipino concept of sin (sala), which may include the non-intentional (see box). Another topic is the concept of original sin which is not strong among Filipinos (these topics and related ones are explained in our book entitled Filipino Popular Devotions, The Interior Dialogue Between Traditional Religion and Christianity; Logos Publications, Inc.). Lent has, actually, a special Philippine flavor. For example, while Good Friday is like an ordinary day in Rome, the seat of Catholicism, the streets of Metro Manila and other cities in the Philippines are deserted on that day. <WM
THE WRONG WORD FOR SIN The Spanish missionaries in the Philippines were trying to communicate new concepts in a language that they had not quite mastered. So the use of the term kasalanan is rather vague. Kasalanan in Tagalog or basol in Ilocano is not really the same as the Christian notion of sin because the Christian notion of sin refers to an act that is grievous in itself, done with full knowledge and full consent. But in Tagalog, Ilocano, Visayan, a failure, even how minor, is considered a kasalanan. So you did not show up in a party because you forgot, that’s a kasalanan. You dropped a class, that’s kasalanan. I think the missionaries did not know the right word to use. Probably they should have used kasamaan [evil] for sin. They kept using kasalanan. Therefore, it is interesting what Vince Rafael discovered: missionaries complained that Filipino women seemed to be fond of confession. When they went to confession, they not only confessed their kasalanans but also those of their neighbors. Of course, they meant failures! Kasalanan, thus, has become wider in scope. This is a big problem. The concept of utang (debt) is understandable in the context of superior-inferior relations. The wealthy in a baranggay, in order to assure themselves of a profit, normally charge high interest, even for a hundred percent. But this, of course, can be negotiated. I can understand why missionaries made use of the word utang to mean offenses done by people towards God. But this creates problems. In fact, it creates problems even today – that everything can be negotiated. <WM / Fernando Zialcita
Sakripisyo, as understood today, seems to be related to God and country. I can better understand sakripisyo in the concept of alay [offering]. When you offer yourself, naturally there are consequences. When a mother gives herself to her children, there are sacrifices involved. Sacrifices are involved in marriage. If one remains single, sacrifices are also involved. People like Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio dedicated their lives for the country. Somehow, God is part and parcel of the process. In his Ultimo Adios, Rizal mentioned God, putting the country under His care. One way to understand the notion of sacrifice within the Filipino context is to look at those people who offered their lives for the country. I have a favorite prayer from Mount Banahaw. “Amang makapangyarihan, tunay na sa ami’y nagmamahal, ipagkaloob Mo po sa amin ang karunungan para sa aming bayan [Almighty God, who loves us, give to us wisdom for our country].” I hope this is what we are trying to do. In the light of colonialism, of poverty, and of all the problems we experience, I hope we find the wisdom we seek, with the help of our ancestors who have gone before us and have sacrificed themselves. A long time ago when I was trying to understand Filipino spirituality, I happened to find out that the Germans call Germany as their fatherland while we call the Philippines as our Inang Bayan [motherland]. One of our friends thinks that the concept of bayani [hero] is derived from bayan [country]. The bayani is not only a warrior; he should also be a spiritual warrior. He should be moral, brave, courageous – a totality of a warrior. <WM / Teresita Obusan (Excerpts from Filipino Popular Devotions, The Interior Dialogue Between Traditional Religion and Christianity, edited by Leonardo N. Mercado, SVD) Copyright©2003-2006 World Mission Magazine |
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WARRIOR'S SACRIFICE