Excerpt from W. H. Scott, “Kalantiaw: The Code That Never Was” in Great Scott!

The New Day William

Six

KALANTIAW: THE CODE THAT NEVER WAS

I MET KALANTIAW FOR THE FIRST TIME in 1960. It was when I was beginning the study of Philippine
history, as most Filipinos begin it, with Gregorio F. Zaide's two-volume Philippine Political and Cultural
History. Here, in chapter 5, Kalantiaw was presented as the author of a penal code dated 1433, almost a
century before Magellan reached the archipelago. I was delighted Philippine history seemed to be largely
the history of what Spaniards and Americans did in the Philippines. But here was a genuine Philippine penal
code, complete with the name of the Filipino ruler who wrote it and the date on which it was promulgated.114

Penal codes, of course, are very revealing of the society for which they were written. Therefore I
confidently told my students that the Sixth Order of the Code of Kalantiaw, which fixed a fine as payable
either in gold or honey, indicated that gold was as common as honey in the ancient Philippines. My students
all laughed. So the next year I told them that the Sixth Order indicated that honey was as expensive as
gold. But they also laughed. And they were right. If the Code wasn't laughable, it was at least very peculiar.
It prescribed capital punishment for entering a datu's house without permission, but only a year’s slavery
for stealing his wife.

Obviously there was something wrong – perhaps an error in translation. What language was this Code
originally written in, and where was that original? I determined to find out. The opportunity came when I
enrolled as a doctoral candidate in the University of Santo Tomas in 1965 and included the search in my
examination of prehispanic sources for the study Of Philippine history. As it turned out, the source of the
Code of Kalantiaw was Jose' Maria Pavon's 1838-1839 Las Antiguas ndas de la Isla de Negros (The ancient
Legends pf the Island of Negros.)

LAS ANTIGUAS LEYENDAS by Father Jose Maria Pavon, parish priest of Himamaylan, was contained in
two leather-bound volumes, 16 x 11 cm. of 267 and 394 pages respectively, presented to the Philippine
Library in 1914 by Mr. Jose E. Marco of Pontevedra, Occidental Negros. 115 They were accompanied by
another leather-bound volume by the same author, of 103 pages of the same size, Los Cuentos de los
Indios de esta Isla de Negros, dated 1838. Director James A. Robertson noted in his annual report to the
Philippine Library Board for the year ending December 31, 1914, that the Leyendas “contains the only
ancient criminal code of the Filipinos which has yet come to light.” Then in 1917, he published an English
translation in his “Social structure of, and ideas of law among, early Philippine peoples; and a recently
discovered pre-hispanic criminal code of the Philippine Islands" in H. Morse Stephens and Herbert E.
Bolton's The Pacific Ocean in History. The same year Josue Soncuya devoted six chapters of his "Historia
prehispaña de Filipinas contenida en la Conferencia sobre la Isla de Panay" in Boletin de la Sociedad
Historico-Geografica de Filipinas I.

Both the Leyendas and the Cuentos perished in the destruction of the Philippine Library in 1945, but
typescript copies of the text of the former survive in the libraries of the University of the Philippines and the
University of Florida, and in private collections in Manila. Photographic reproductions of three pages of Las
Antiguas Leyendas were published in The Philippine History Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1919), while its
illustrated calendar appeared in the third-anniversary issue of Renacimiento Filipino (July 1913) and in
Enrique d' Almonte y Muriel 's 1917 Formacion y Evolucion de las Subrazas de Indonesia y Malaya. No
copy of the text of Los Cuentos de los Indios is known to have survived the Battle of Manila. An annotated
translation of both works has been published in The Robertson Translations of the Pavon Manuscripts of
1838-1839, Philippine Studies Program Transcriptions Nos. 5-A, 5-B, 5-C and 5-D (University of Chicago,
1957) with an introduction by Fred Eggan and E. D. Hester, and a glossary of Spanish and Philippine terms
by Charles P. Warren.

NOTHING WAS RECORDED ABOUT the provenance of the Pavon manuscripts until Jose E. Marco's 1954
announcement that he had got them all from the old convent cook who had stolen them in the Himamaylan
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looting of 1899.116 This contradicts an oral tradition transmitted by H. Otley Beyer to the late Mauro Garcia
in the early 1950s that it was Marco's own father who had been among the looters who carried away a
chest thought to contain valuables but which, when accidentally dropped in the river, so increased in weight
they realized it contained papers rather than coins or jewelry. At any event, Marco made no reference to
these documents or the information they contained in his little 1912 Reseña Historica de la Isla de Negros,
in which he states that the earliest mention of the island was Loarca's in 1580 [sic].117

Jose Maria Pavon himself is first mentioned in the Guia de Forasteros the 1839 as Catedratico de
Sintasis y Retorica in the conciliar seminary in Cebu; he is not mentioned in a list of priests and parishes
sent by the Bishop in Cebu to the King in 1831, nor in a list of Negros cures sent in 1830 for aid after the
“catastrophe de Orihuela."118 In the Libro de Cosas Notables de Himamaylan, he is listed as taking charge
of that parish on September 7, 1842, succeeding Don Vicente Guillermo who had been incumbent since
1811 and who died exactly two years later at the age of 77 in the outstation visita of Ginigaran which he
had built himself. Upon Ginigaran's elevation to parish status in 1848, Father Pavon was transferred there,
and his signature in an entry of 1849 in the Libro de Cosas Notables de Ginigaran. Thus the Guias for 1843,
1844, 1845, 1846 and 1848 list him as parish priest of Himamaylan, as does R. Echauz's Apuntes de la
Isla de Negros (Manila, 1894) for 1849, while the 1850 Guia shows him in Ginigaran. The Recollect fathers
having taken over Negros in 1848-1849, Pavon presumably returned of Cebu; at least his name does not
appear in an 1851 list of pueblos and parishes made by the Governor of Negros, and he is known to have
been priest of Cebu in 1865-1866. His name is missing from the clerical register of the Diocese of Cebu in
1883, so he presumably had left the diocese by that time through death or transfer. Thus, there is no
evidence of his having been in the Philippines in 1838, or parish priest of Himamaylan in 1839.

THE THREE REPRODUCTIONS OF PAVON pages show that at least the chapter title pages were written
in a childish imitation of printing (e.g., the serifs are drawn in but the upper-case I is dotted, and a variety
of type styles are mixed together), with an inexplicable spellings for the middle of the 19th century like Ivan
for Juan. The orthography is peculiar in the extreme—the first book of Las Antiguas Leyendas employs a
spelling more nearly like that of the 16th century than any other period, while the second book is written in
an exemplary late 19th-century style.119 This change is referred to in a note in the text dated August 1, 1839
stating that the author will henceforth employ the "muchos cambios en la ortografia y en las frases"
contained in the "nuevo diccionario de la Real Academia Espafiola." This would presumably be the 8th
edition of 1837 which, however, makes no such sweeping reforms, merely increasing the number of words
to be spelled with j instead of g, and condemning such practices as writing esperto for experto—which, as
a matter of fact, is exactly what Pavon or his amanuensis continued to do.

The contents of the Leyendas and Cuentos taken together show them to be inappropriately titled, for
in addition to 25 chapters of legends and myths, there are eleven of superstitions current in Pavon's day,
and 26 of straightforward ethnographic nature such as lists of weapons or musical instruments, an
illustrated Philippine alphabet, a native calendar, and translations often documents dated between 137
(1137?) and 1661. They are written in a personalized style of considerable charm, moralizing digressions,
and profuse acknowledgment of oral and written sources—25 different informants on 22 different dates
between 1830 and 1840. Among the documents translated are six with prehispanic dates—namely, the
1137 account of old forts, the 1239 narrative of King Maranhig, the 1372 description of burial customs and
1372 list of extinct animals, the 1433 Code of Calantiao, and the 1489 formulary for making talismans and
charms.

At the outset, the question of the calendar by which prehispanic FiIipino documents could have been
dated must be raised. Eggan and Hester comment:

For dating old documents, either in romanized Bisayan or in the old Bisayan syllabary, and ranging
from 1239 A.D. to the Spanish period, he [Pavon] gives no clue as to his procedures. Since he
states that the Bisayans did not keep track of the years for any extended period, it is possible that
the dates are estimated in terms of genealogical tables, though none is included in the text. Internal
evidence suggests that several of the dates will have to be modified. 120

Originally appeared in Looking for the Prehispanic Filipino and Other Essays in Philippine History, pages 159-170.
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To this understatement must be added the comment that the dates themselves, like 15 others in the
document, are highly suspicious. They range from the doubtful or meaningless to the anachronistic or
absurd. The date of the invention of coconut wine is given as 1379, and the invention of certain kind of
weapon as 1332. An official inscription dated "July 21, 17" (1717?) appears in a document bearing the
rubric "March 31, 14" (1714?). A "translation and exact version of a Visayan Higuecine document of the
year 1489" refers to the "first Friday of the year," years with "three numbers alike, as for instance, 1777,"
and coins of Charles V (1519-1556). Reference
Is made to a map of the island of Negros by Encomendero Madrigal in 1509, and two talismans of the same
person—Reyezuelo Aroy of Cebu—are dated 1006 and 1737. The Calantiao Code is stated to have been
in use in 150 since 1433, and Calantiao himself is referred to in an 1137 source as built a fort in 1433.

The- Bisayan alphabet by Pavon (but dated 1543 and credited to 17th-century Francisco Daza, SJ) is
erroneously presented as a phonetic Alphabet rather than a genuine Philippine syllabary and contains a
blatant modulated 'N' they supplied by their combined letter and the guttural sign," the guttural sign being
nothing other than a tilde. He says there is no letter c, o, or r, but fills Visayan transcriptions them, and says
they use k instead Ofc but only uses it once himself (viz., “Ilokano). And he thinks the characters
representing e or i is ei and o or u is ou.

These perplexing details and confused dates are typica of many peculiarities in Las Antiguas Leyendas
and Los Cuentos de los Indios. Their supposed author, for instance, was a secular priest—"The entry 'D'
(for 'Don') rather than 'Fr' (for 'Fraile') preceding Pavon's name in the Guias is evidence of his status as a
secular cleric," Eggan and Hester point out—yet he more than a dozen times signs himself "Fray Jose
Maria Pavon" and speaks of making a trip to Borneo "together with some companions of the habit." He also
dates his residence in the "convento de mi parroquia" in Himamaylan as early as July 17, 1830, and the
completion of these books on August 1, 1839, although official records indicate that he did not become
parish priest in Himamaylan until 1842. Moreover, he claims to have come to the Philippines in 1810 and
been a Seville schoolboy together with Fray Jorge G. Setien in 1788, which would have made him at least
86 when he was parish priest of Cebu—to say nothing of the fact that Fr. Jorge Guzman de Setien was
identified in Marco's Reseña Historica as the author of a 1779 travel book about the Philippines.

TO THE PECULIARITIES ALREADY MENTIONED, the historian must add the following outright
anachronisms in the text of the Pavon manuscripts:
1) The author prays for the preservation of the King of Spain on June 24, 1838, and dedicates a
book to him on August 1, 1839, although Spain had no king between 1833 and 1874.
2) The author expresses his gratitude on January 14, 1838 to Don M.V. Morquecho, although
Manuel Valdivieso Morquecho was not appointed Alcalde Mayor of Negros until January 8, 1847, did not
take office until May 1849, and on October 16, 1847, was still in Cadiz petitioning the Queen not to be sent
to the Philippines at all.121
3) The author presents a document signed by Francisco Daza, SJ, on "March 31 of the year 14"
which bears a stamp, "Parish of llog of Occidental Negros" with the superscription, "R.S. in the province
and town above named on the twenty-first of the month of July in the year 17." Daza was born in 1620 so
the year "14" would have been a standard contraction for 1714, which would have made him 96 at the time
of executing this document. Moreover, there was no province of Negros Occidental either then or in Pavon's
day, the province of Negros not having been divided until 1908.
4) The author refers to an ancient fortress "located on the seashore next to the barrio occupied
by the Monteses Mara and Y-io—about twenty leagues north of this town?' This was presumably written in
Himamaylan about Pontevedra (formerly Marayo), which two towns are approximately 20 kms. apart. The
legua has varied during different periods of Spanish history, but at no time was it shorter than 3.9 kms., and
in Pavon 's day it was taken as one-twentieth of one degree of latitude, or 5.5 kms.
5) The author refers to "the great and extinct Lemurian continent" (which Robertson misread as
"continent of Muriano"). Lemuria was an imaginary land mass hypothesized by English naturalist Philip
Lutely Sclater to explain the distribution of lemuroid animals from Madagascar and Ceylon to Sumatra, and
was first presented in a paper read before the Royal Zoological Society in 1879. The theory was soon
rendered unnecessary by discovery of lemur fossils in Europe and North America, but the romantic idea of
the lost continent was later revived by theosophists and anthrophosophists, and was mentioned in one of
the footnotes in Marco Reseña Historica.

Originally appeared in Looking for the Prehispanic Filipino and Other Essays in Philippine History, pages 159-170.
 4

6) In the Pavon description of the calendar, the author makes the following statement about the
month of November—"They called it a bad for it brought air laden with putrified microbes of evil fevers."
The theory that infectious germs could be transmitted through open air was first argued by Louis Pasteur
in the 1850s, and the word "microbe" invented by Dr. Charles Emmanuel Sedillot and proposed publicly for
the first time in a lecture in Pasteur's honor before the Academy of entitled, "De l'influence des traveau de
M. Pasteur sur les progres de la chirurgie," in 1878.122
All in all, these ludicrous errors and anachronisms can be explained by one conclusion—namely, that
Las Antiguas Leyendas de la Isla de Negros and Los Cuentos de Ios Indios de esta Isla de Negros are
deliberate and definite frauds. They were therefore not written by Father Jose Maria and their contents have
no historical validity.

THE MARCO-PAVON ANTIGUAS LEYENDAS is the source, and the only source, of the Kalantiaw Code—
chapter 9 of Part I. The Code therefore can be no more valid than the forgery which contains it. It is entitled
"The 17 theses, or laws of the Regulos in use in 150 since 1433," and was supposedly discovered in the
possession of a Panay ruler in 1614, its original being still in the possession of one Don Marcilio Orfila of
Zaragoza in 1839. The figure "150" must mean 1150 in accordance with the usual custom of abbreviating
dates and the example in the second chapter of Part Il where the year of a Kalantiaw-built fortress is given
as 433 instead of 1433. This makes the statement, "in use in 1150 since 1433," ridiculous, of course, but
no more ridiculous than the fact that the fort-building date of 1433 appears in a source itself dated 1 137.
Despite these peculiarities, however, Robertson published an English translation of the Code in apparent
good faith in 1917, the same year Soncuya published the Spanish version.
The name of Kalantiaw himself appeared in print for the first time in a 1913 article by Manuel Artigas in
the Renacimiento Filipino, "Informes ineditos sobre Filipinas," which made mention of "prehispanic
civilization... a calendar—written laws—forts."123 Artigas was the head of the Filipiniana section of the
Philippine Library, and the year before, he had supplied footnotes to Marco's Reseha Historica—which, as
a matter of fact, were much more scholarly than the book itself. The name is documented in no earlier
source, though Digno Alba of Kalibo, in connection with the inauguration of the new province of Aklan in
1965, sought it in local folklore. "I had tried to get stories or legends from the present generations of
Aklanons living in Batan," he later wrote, "but not one old man can tell me now.”124

This shift of the Code from Negros to Panay presumably began with Soncuya's conclusion that Rajah
Kalantiaw—as he called him—had written the code for Aklan because of the presence of two Aklanon rather
than Hiligaynon words in the text. By the time Zaide included the Code in his 1949 history, the words "Aklan,
Panay" had been added to the original rubric, "Echo en el afio 1433—Calantiao—30 regulo." This process
of naturalization was completed in 1956 when Digno Alba announced that Kalantiaw had organized his
government in Batan as the ancient capital of the sakup of Aklan. A request by the Philippine Government
of the Spanish for the return of the original codex by the descendants of Marcilio Orfila elicited the hardly
surprising information that the Police Commissioner could find no record of any such family in Zaragosa.

By this time, Kalantiaw was well on his way to becoming a National Hero in 1966, Sol H. Gwekoh's
"Hall of Fame" in the old Sunday Times Magazine (August 21) gave new biographic details—e.g., Datu
Bendahara Gulah, was born in 1410, his father was Rajah Behendra Gulah, and he becamethe third Muslim
ruler in Panay at the age of 16. Then in 1970, Zaide's Great Filipinos in History argued that his real name
was Lakan Tiaw gave a direct quote—"The law is above all men." The next Manila Bulletin reported the
celebration of the 538th anniversary of the
promulgation of the Code on December 8 with the coronation of the “Lakambini ni Kalantiyaw." Artist Carlos
Valino, Jr., depicted the event in oil on canvas with the law-giver reading from a node of bamboo held
vertically, The President of the Republic bestowed the Order of Kalantiaw on deserving justices, and a 30-
centavo postage stamp was to commemorate his name. Finally, lest some future generation forget who
"possessed the wisdom of Solomon, the fighting prowess of Genghis Khan, and the sagacious
statesmanship of Asoka," his Code was fittingly inscribed on brass in the Kalantiyaw Shrine in Batan, Aklan.
125

The contents of the Code itself are no less peculiar. They were promulgated by a central authority of
sufficient power to put local chieftains to death for failure to enforce them, and prescribe 36 different
offenses irrationally grouped in 18 theses, punishable by 15 kinds of corporal and capital punishment

Originally appeared in Looking for the Prehispanic Filipino and Other Essays in Philippine History, pages 159-170.
 5

bearing no relation to the nature or severity of the crimes. None of these theses can be duplicated in other
historic codices, many are hard to understand, some contradict others, and all are utterly unfilipino in their
harshness. Genuine Philippine custom law as described in early Spanish accounts permits even the most
serious offenses to be settled the payment of fines or debt servitude. Only Jose E. Marco thought that
chieftains ruled with "a strong arm and the severity and hardness fit and natural to the ancient governments
of the world" (Resefia Historica, 18).

Legalist commentators have not been wanting to cite the codes of Leviticus or Hammurabi for
comparisons of severity, but what is incredible about the Kalantiaw Code is not its severity but its capricious
viciousness. Its catalogue of punishments alone sounds like the fantasies of some uninhibited sadist—
plunging the hand into boiling water three times, cutting off the fingers, laceration with thorns, exposure to
ants, swimming for three hours, drowning weighted with stones, beating to death, or being burned, boiled,
stoned, crushed with weights, cut to pieces, or thrown to crocodiles. One wonders what pedagogical
mischief has been done to three generations of Filipino youth by the belief that their ancestors suffered a
society submissive to such a legal system.

THESE CONCLUSIONS WERE PRESENTED in my doctoral dissertation, and defended on June 16, 1968
before a panel of eminent Filipino historians which included Teodoro Agoncillo, Horacio de la Costa,
Marcelino Foronda, Mercedes Grau Santamaria, Nicolas Zafra, and Gregorio Zaide. During the revalida,
not a single question was raised about the chapter which I called "The Contributions of Jose E. Marco to
Philippine historiography." Once the degree was granted, the thesis was published in Unitas 41 (1968), and
as Prehispanic Source Materials for the Study of Philippine History by UST Press the next year, with a
revised edition in 1984 by New Day Publishers. So far as I know, they have been challenged by no other
historian to date.

For some years after these publications, I had reason to hope that the ghost of Kalantiaw had finally
been laid. The popular myth was not repeated in Amado Guerrero's Philippine Society and Revolution
(1970), Pedro A. Gagelonia's Concise Philippine History (1970), Ferdinand E. Marcos's Tadhana (1976),
or Perfecto V. Fernandez's Custom Law in Pre-conquest Philippines (1976). And when my own mentor,
Dean Antonio W. Molina, published a Spanish version of his 1960 The Philippines Through the Centuries
as Historia de Filipinas (Madrid, 1984), he replaced the Code with one sentence— "La tesis doctoral del
historiador Scott desbarate la existencia misma de dicho Codigo (The doctoral dissertation of the historian
demolishes the very existence of the said Code)." Yet, at the time retired from teaching Philippine history
in 1982, freshmen were still entering State University persuaded that Kalantiaw was an actual historic figure
that he promulgated a genuine Philippine penal code in 1433.

I wonder if my successors are still sharing their classrooms with this Filpino phantom and the law code
that never was.

Originally appeared in Looking for the Prehispanic Filipino and Other Essays in Philippine History, pages 159-170.