Excerpt from Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas

by Antonio de Morga
Antonio de Morga was a Spanish high-ranking official in the Philippines from
1593 to 1603. A lawyer by profession, Morga held the position of oidor or judge of Real
Audiencia when he first came the colony. With little experience in military combat,
Morga led the Spanish fleet in its Pyrrhic victory against the Dutch in 1600. However,
Morga was best known as the author of Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (Events in the
Philippine Islands) one the most comprehensive accounts or sixteenth century
Spanish colonization of the archipelago.
Sucesos, as it is and by today’s students of history, was published in 1609 when
Morga was already in Mexico City. The book covers the political economic, social and
cultural life of the Filipinos and Spaniards from 1493 to 1603. This encompassing work
was based on documentary research as well as Morga’s personal involvement and
observation. This was possible due to his position in the colonial government. The work
became more popular when Jose Rizal annotated and critiqued the book in 1890. In the
excerpt of the Sucesos below, Morga talks about the “ignorance” and “stubbornness” of
the non-Christian Filipinos.

Primary Source
In matters of religion, the naives proceeded more barbarously and with grater blindness
than in all the rest. For besides being pagans, without any knowledge of the true God,
they neither strove to discover Him by way of reason, nor had any fixed belief. The devil
usually deceived them with a thousand errors and blindnesses. He appeared to them in
various horrible and frightful forms, and as fierce animals, so that they feared him and
trembled before him. They generally worshiped him, and made images of him in the
said forms. These they kept in caves and private houses, where they offered them
perfumes and odors, and food and fruit, calling them anitos.
Other worshiped the sun and the moon, and made feasts and drunken revels at
the conjunction of those bodies. Some worshiped a yellow-colored birds that dwells in
their woodscalled batala. They generally worship and adored the crocodiles when they
see them by kneeling down and clasping their hands, because of the harm that they
receive from those reptiles: they believe that by so doing the crocodiles will become
appeased and leave them Their oaths, execrations and promises are all as above
mentioned namely May buhayan eat thee, if thou dost not speak truth or fulfil what thou
hast promised and similar things.
There were no temples throughout those islands nor houses generally used for
the worship of idols: but each person possessed and made in his house his own anitos
without arty fixed rite or ceremony. They had no priests or religious to attend to religious
affairs except certain old men and women called catalonas. These were experienced
witches and sorcerers who kept the other people deceived. The latter communicated to
these sorcerers their desires and needs and the catalonas told them innumerable
extravagancies and lies. The catalonas uttered prayers and permuted other ceremonies
to the idols for me sick and they believed in omens and superstitions with which the evil
inspired them whereby they declared whether the patient would recover or die. Such
were their cores and methods and they used various kinds of divinations for all things
All this was with so little aid, apparatus or foundation which God permitted and so that
the preaching of the holy gospel should find time of that region better prepared for it,
and so that those natives would confess the truth more easy and it would be less
difficult to withdraw them from their darkness, and the errors in which the devil kept
them for so many years. They never sacrificed human beings as is done in other
kingdoms. They believed that there was a future life where those who had been brave
and performed valiant teats would be rewarded: while those who had done evil would
be punished. But they did not know how or where this would be.
They buried their dead in their own houses and kept their bodies and bones for a
long time in chests. They venerated the skulls of the dead as if they were living and
present. Their funeral rites did not consist of pomp or assemblages, beyond those of
their own housewhere after bewailing the dead; all was changed into feasting and
drunken revelry among all the relatives and friends.

Source: The Philippine Islands, Vol XVI