IMAGINE being punished for “singing while traveling at night,” “killing a fish” and other “crimes” with slavery, beating, slashing, stoning, exposure to ants, cutting of fingers, drowning, burning, boiling, being chopped to pieces, and being fed to crocodiles.
These are what the Code of Kalantiaw, said to be the country’s oldest record of law, rules. Hell hath no fury like Datu Kalantiaw scorned.
This September, we recall the martial law declaration. Ferdinand Marcos himself, for all his supposed abuses, thought his government had a just precedent in the phony code.
The year before martial law, Marcos’ Executive Order No. 294 created the Order of Kalantiaw Award for “services in law and justice.” (And when Chief Justice Andres Narvasa, a Thomasian, was to receive the award from Erap, he asked Malacañang to rethink the award’s name.) Marcos also issued Presidential Decree No. 105 in 1973, making the Kalantiaw Shrine in Batan, Aklan sacred. It prohibited all forms of desecration including “unnecessary noise.” Just like the despotic Kalantiaw rules, the penalty was severe: 10 years in jail.
It was Kalantiaw galore then. From Kalantiaw postage stamps, to Kalantiaw naval ships and paintings, and Lakambini ni Kalantiaw beauty pageants. The Kalantiaw Code could have been the primordial stuff.
The code, perpetuated as authentic, was cracked by the UST History Department as early as 1968, after American historian William Henry Scott wrote his dissertation to obtain his doctorate in history from the UST Graduate School. Despite the expose, the fake code is immortalized in the right panel of the new UST Civil Law mural at the lobby of the Faculty of Civil Law. The mural shows two tribesmen dipping their hands in boiling water, and another sporting the code.
Scott said that there is no evidence of “any Filipino ruler by the name of Kalantiaw who ever existed or that the Kalantiaw penal code is older than 1914.” There was even no tell-tale Kalantiaw folklore known before the forger Jose Marco produced the spurious manuscripts in 1913.
The code is being used to, on one hand, support the Western occupation to civilize our laws and on the other, to justify Draconian measures as the mark of the Filipinos’ once “flourishing” culture.
But the code is just too much for slapstick.
Take its third law. “Obey ye: let no one…spend much luxury. He who fulfills not shall be condemned to swim for three hours.” Early Filipinos did not reckon time by the hour. The law’s poor convict would have to swim all his days until Spain arrived with clocks!
In-your-face sex education is a rule, amusingly. The 10th law says, “It shall be the obligation of every mother to show her daughter secretly the things about sex.” While men are punished if they fool around, they “should not punish their wives when they caught them in the act of adultery. He who disobeys shall be torn to pieces.” If you see mom in bed with another, understand that she’s giving sex demonstration.
Although incredible, this law is “interesting” enough for the feminist columnist of the Philippine Daily Inquirer to hail Antique Gov. Sally Perez, who used the passage to ground “reproductive rights” in times yore.
The mural panels in the Civil Law hall, which cost P500, 000 each, were claimed to be the product of “research.” But expert historians and aesthetes in the University were not consulted. They have been approaching the Varsitarian since last year to go over the matter.
Since the mural’s theme is “history” of “law,” and the Dominican motto is “veritas,” you have all the reasons to make the mural bounded by the truth. Artistic license must not overstep that rationale, unless it is purposely deconstructive.
What lofty value or ideal the Kalantiaw Code suppose to serve? Not justice, not truth, not law, not history, not folklore. That part of the mural only serves injustice to the Thomasians who painstakingly decoded the merry Kalantiaw Code, and to those who suffered from its purports. It should be repainted, and like the injunctions of the code, chastised to oblivion.
