The Mountain

Mount Banahaw straddles the boundary of Laguna and Quezon. It is an active volcano, and it is the site of the densest concentration of folk-religious communities in the Philippines. Several dozen groups maintain a presence there. Some have existed for over a century.

The mountain has a mapped sacred geography. Sites called puestos are distributed across it, each with a name, a function and an associated observance: springs, caves, rock formations, points along the ascent. Pilgrims move between them in sequence, particularly during Holy Week, and the sequence constitutes the rite. It is a landscape read as a text, which is a form the archive has met before in other traditions and which nobody imported here.

The groups are syncretic in a way that resists easy description. The vocabulary is Catholic. The structure is not. Several are led by women. The Ciudad Mística de Dios, founded in the early twentieth century, has been headed by a succession of female figures understood as bearers of divine authority, in a country where the church that supplied the vocabulary ordains no women at all.

The most striking element to an outside reader is the position of José Rizal. Several Banahaw groups, and the wider set of movements sometimes called Rizalista, treat Rizal not merely as a national hero but as a figure of religious significance, in some formulations a manifestation of the divine, in others a Tagalog Christ. He was executed in 1896, which places the origin of this within living memory of people alive in the twentieth century.

The reflex is to file this as confusion. It is more usefully read as a functioning solution to a specific problem. The Catholic tradition arrived as the religion of the colonial power and remained administered by that power's clergy. A population wanting the tradition without the administration needed a figure who was unambiguously theirs. Rizal was educated, executed by the Spanish, and Filipino. He fits the available slot exactly.

There is a longer pattern here. Movements of this kind, called colorum in the Spanish and American periods, appeared repeatedly across the archipelago, generally led by figures with healing or prophetic authority, generally suppressed. The Banahaw communities are what survived, partly because a mountain is difficult to police and partly because after independence nobody had a strong reason to.

What makes them valuable to this archive is that they are not reconstructions. Nothing here was recovered from a Spanish manuscript by a modern scholar. These are continuous practices with living practitioners, and they demonstrate what the syncretic layer actually did rather than what anyone theorises it did.

What it did, on the evidence of the mountain, was preserve the shape of the older arrangement inside the newer vocabulary: local authority, frequently female, sanctioned by direct experience rather than by ordination, embedded in a landscape rather than housed in a building.

That is the babaylan's structural position, occupied by different people, using Catholic words, four centuries later.

The mountain was closed to pilgrims for a period to allow the ecosystem to recover from the volume of visitors. That is the current threat to the tradition, and it is a planning matter rather than a theological one, which is its own kind of ending.