Bathala or Meykapal?
“Others,” continues Morga, “worshipped the sun and the moon, holding feasts and drunken revelries during conjunctions. And some worshipped a bird in the mountains painted yellow (1), which they called Bátala. Commonly, they also revered crocodiles; when they saw one, they knelt and worshipped it in order to appease it. There were no temples, and each person kept and made his anitos in his own house, without fixed ceremonies or priests only old men and women called Catalonas, who were great sorcerers and witches, made prayers and ceremonies for the sick. They believed in another life with rewards for the brave, though they did not know how or where this would be (2). They buried their dead in their own houses, keeping the bodies and skulls as if they were still alive and present.”
According to the Jesuit Quirino, the Filipinos did not use their writing to preserve their religion, but only for correspondence. Thus nothing was found written on religious matters, and all that could be known was based on oral tradition, passed from parents to children, preserved in usage, and in songs they memorized. These songs they repeated during voyages to the rhythm of rowing, and in their celebrations, funerals, and even in their labors when many worked together. In these chants they recounted the fabulous genealogies and various deeds of their gods.
“Among their gods,” he writes, “there was one principal and superior to all, whom the Tagalogs called Bathala Meykapal, which means the Maker or Creator God, and the Visayans Laon, which denotes antiquity. Concerning the creation of the world, the origin of humankind, the flood, glory, punishment, and other invisible things, they told a thousand tales, often varying some in one way, others in another. One of their fables was that the first man and woman came out of a bamboo tube that split open. Afterwards arose disputes about whether they could marry, because of the prohibition against close kinship, which was inviolable among them and only permitted that first time out of necessity for the propagation of mankind.”
The Jesuit Colin (in his Labor Evangélica, Madrid 1663) admits that he took his reports from Quirino, and indeed he copies almost literally this whole part. However, he expands this cosmogony, adding his own details, which to us seems a falsification. What is lamentable is that others Gaspar de San Agustín, Francisco de San Antonio, Moya, Marsden (History of Sumatra), Lubbock, and others copied him literally and even expanded it in turn.
Fr. Colin, perhaps in order to invent a Filipino cosmogony that would support the credibility of Genesis, and mistakenly believing that the blue bird (called also Badhala as an omen) was the Bathala Meykapal, the Creator God of the Filipinos, distorted Quirino’s simple and plausible cosmogony, saying: The world began with only sky and water, and between them a kite bird (the Holy Spirit dove of the Romanists) flew about searching for a place to perch. Finding none, it stirred the waters. The water grew angry, raising waves. The sky, to calm it, covered it with islands on which the bird landed. Then the waves threw up at its feet a piece of bamboo with two nodes. It pecked it open, and from one end came out a man, and from the other a woman. Difficulties arose because of their kinship, but by the counsel of fish and birds (1), one of their gods, the Earthquake (2)—called linog in Tagalog and limog in Tiruray dispensed with the prohibition and married them, and they had many children. Tired of feeding them to no purpose, the father took a stick and pretended to chastise them for their mischief so they would earn their own living. The children fled and hid: some inside the chambers of the house, and these became the nobles; others outside, who became freemen; those in the kitchen became servants; and those who went far away became foreigners. And Moya invented further, saying that those who penetrated into the earth to the region of fire became the Negritos.
“The Tagalogs,” says Quirino, “worshipped a blue bird the size of a thrush, and they called it Baihala, which among them was a divine name.” (4)
In Pampango traditions, Bátala also appears as the name of a bird taken as an omen.
The word Bathara in Sanskrit (the sacred language of the Hindus) means “Lord.” The Bataks of Sumatra, the Bugis, and the Makassarese call their god Bathara (Lord) Guru (Master), which is an epithet of Shiva, the third person of the Brahmanic Trimurti.
A Hebrew, on hearing the word Bathala, told us it was the same as Bethel—House of God, or God of the Semites, by another name Allah so that Bathala would mean house or incarnation of Allah (Genesis XII, 8; XIII, 3–4).
According to the 1572 Relation, the Christians’ God was also called Batala. We believe that the true name of the Creator God among the Tagalogs was Meykapal (as it is now), and not Bathala. In fact, until six years ago the latter was not even used, until Filipinos revived it after learning from those hastily written chronicles that the Filipino God was called Bathala.
Moreover, the Tagalogs no longer even remembered the word Bathala or Bátala, but only Badhala, which is probably the true form keeping in mind that Spaniards always pronounce d as l at the end of a syllable. In the old Tagalog dictionary of Fr. Noceda (1754), Meykapal is the same as Meygawa: “the one who made or created.”
