Before the Cross: The Spiritual Warrior Women Spain Called Witches — The Real Babaylan Story

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]What if an entire civilization's writing system used by literally every man, woman, and farmer across an entire archipelago just disappeared? Not because of a war, not because of a massacre, but because of something far more insidious than either of those things. Today we're diving into Bayan.

[00:00:19]The ancient Filipino script that was thriving centuries before the Spanish arrived, nearly vanished under colonial pressure, got weaponized by revolutionaries, and is right now showing up on people's bodies in fashion runways and in the halls of the Philippine Congress. We're covering the history, the science of how it works, the single copper plate pulled from a riverbed that rewrote Philippine history, and the revival nobody saw coming. Every part of this matters.

[00:00:49]Let's go.

[00:00:58]All right, let's start at the end because the end of this story is honestly kind of wild and I think it changes the way you feel about everything that comes before it. Right now, today, Babine is having a moment.

[00:01:12]Young Filipinos all over the world are getting this script tattooed on their arms. Filipino American artists are selling by buying calligraphy prints online. There are by buying street wear brands, by buying coffee shops. And in 2018, the Committee on Basic Education and Culture of the Philippine Congress approved House Bill 1022, the National Writing System Act, which would officially declare Bayine the National Writing System of the Philippines. That is a big deal because just a few hundred years ago, a Spanish frier named Sebastian Detoanesses literally wrote the orbituary for this script. In 1745, he said the Filipino who knows how to read by bine is now rare and the one who knows how to write it even rarer. He thought it was done. So here we are. A script declared extinct now showing up on people's skin and in congressional legislation. But here's the thing that nobody talks about. And this is the part that completely flipped my understanding of this whole story. Babine didn't die because the Spanish banned it and burned every manuscript in some dramatic colonial bonfire. The real story of how it vanished and how it came back is so much more complicated and honestly so much more interesting than the simple villain story most people assume. So, let's go back way way back, 1300 years back to a world that most people's history education completely ignored.

[00:02:46]And a network of island kingdoms, legendary seafarers, and an ancient Indian script that island hopped across the ocean without anyone teaching it how. There is a writing system in the Philippines that island hopped across the ocean from India and nobody taught it how. It just traveled on trade boats in the hands of legendary seafarers across the open South China Sea and somehow it arrived in the Philippines and became the most widely used script in its region. Now most people's mental map of ancient civilization goes Egypt, Greece, Rome, China. Done. But out in the waters between India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, there was an absolutely thriving network of island kingdoms, trade routes, and cultural exchange happening for over a thousand years. And the single most influential ancestor of almost every writing system in South and Southeast Asia is a script called Ramy. the great great grandmother of Thai, Camar, Burmese, Javanese and yes, Babine. From India, Brahmi spread to Java where it devolved into Cavei.

[00:03:58]From Cavei, scripts developed throughout the archipelago and the most likely direct ancestor of Babine, the Boogis, and Macaser peoples of Sului. The Boogies people were legendary seafarers who had been trading with Philippine communities for centuries. They brought spices, gold, cloth, and apparently the concept of writing. There's actually a popular theory that the phrase boogeyman derives from Europeans being genuinely terrified of Boogie's pirates. So along with possibly inspiring one of history's greatest childhood fears, they gave the Philippines its writing system, Solid Legacy. Now, most linguists believe by was developed in the Philippines itself, probably in the 1300s or 1400s based on these imported ideas. It wasn't a copy paste. Filipino ancestors took these concepts and shaped them into something uniquely their own, something that fit the sounds and rhythms of their languages. By the time the Spanish showed up in 1565, Maybind wasn't new.

[00:05:02]It was already deeply embedded in everyday life across the islands. Okay, real quick question. You know how English has 26 letters and we still manage to constantly misspell things?

[00:05:15]Babine does everything English does with 17 characters. 17. Here's why that's actually genius. Babine is what linguists call an abugida. Abu da. In an abuggida, each character already contains both a consonant and a built-in vowel. So the babine character for the b sound doesn't just say b, it automatically reads as ba. The a vowel is baked right in. Every character is already a complete syllable. You're not building sounds. You're reading whole units. If you want to change that built-in vowel, say you want B I or B U instead of BA, you add a small mark called a diiacitic above or below the character. Kind of like accent marks in French, except instead of subtly adjusting the sound, they're doing a full vowel transplant. Now, what about a consonant at the end of a syllable with no vowel after it? like the L at the end of mahal which means love than toalic babayan technically has a cancellation mark called a pamud pod for that but historically a lot of ancient writers just didn't use it they left the ending consonant implied you figure it out from context and that quirk leaving final consonants unmarked is actually a linguistic fingerprint because the south sulawa scripts Babayian descended from did the exact exact same thing. If you can read the absence of a mark, you can trace a writing systems entire family tree. And one more thing, this one is genuinely beautiful. Filipino anthropologist Dr. Julius Command Dante put forward a theory that the visual shapes of Babayan characters were derived from the natural contours of the tlobo, the giant clam which was a sacred object in pre-colonial Filipino culture.

[00:07:17]Not just a food source, a ritual anchor, a symbol of the ocean world these islands were built around. The idea that the shape of these letters was literally encoded with nature. That every time you read Babayan, you are reading an echo of the sea is not just poetic. It points to a writing system with a soul. This wasn't imported whole cloth from India.

[00:07:41]It was reshaped by people who lived between the waves. When the Spanish arrived in the Philippines in the 1500s, they came in with the standard colonial assumption. primitive people, no real culture, nothing worth preserving.

[00:07:56]That's the self-serving lie that justified everything they were about to do. What they actually found didn't match. Father Pedro Churino, a Jesuit missionary writing around6004, was clearly taken aback. He wrote that there is scarcely a man and much less a woman who does not read and write. and he was describing ordinary Filipinos in the Tagalog regions, farmers, traders, fishermen, not scholars. Father Francisco Colin writing in 1663 said people cling fondly to their own method of writing and reading. What were they writing? Everything. Personal letters, trade contracts, legal documents, poetry, official records. This was not a civilization discovering writing. This was a civilization using writing fluently, universally, as a matter of daily course. There's a difference, and it's important. But here's the archaeological tragedy baked into this golden age. They wrote on bamboo, on leaves, on tree bark, not on stone, not on clay, not on metal. And in the tropical heat and humidity of the Philippine Islands, rain, insects, thyme, bamboo, and leaves just disappear. Unlike the stone inscriptions in Egypt, where the clay tablets of Mesopotamia, the everyday written record of this entire civilization returned to the earth, the evidence wasn't burned, it just rotted. Which makes what we do have all the more extraordinary. And here's something that completely reframes the Spanish arrival. When the missionaries first came, some of them actually used Babayan. The Doctrina Christristiana, published in 1593, one of the first books ever printed in the Philippines, was printed in three versions, including Tagalik in Babayan script. The book that launched Spanish Catholic colonization in the Philippines used the indigenous script to do it. The colonizer's message wrapped in the colonized people's own language.

[00:10:06]Complicated history, folks. Hey, real quick. I want to ask you something before we get to the part that rewrites everything. We're talking about a civilization where millions of people wrote on materials they knew would rot.

[00:10:20]Their everyday words were never meant to outlast them. So, here's my question for you right now in the comments. Would you rather write something impermanent that reaches everyone around you or something permanent that almost no one ever reads?

[00:10:35]Drop your answer below. I genuinely want to know. And now back to the story because what comes next is going to hit differently.

[00:10:44]And honestly, if the story ended there, it would already be incredible. A literate civilization, a beautiful script, a slow colonial fade. kind of sad, but kind of complete. Except it doesn't end there. Because in 1989, a man pulled something out of a riverbed that made historians completely tear up the Philippine timeline. And I mean completely tear it up. It's 1989. A man is dredging the riverbed near Lagona Deay, a lake southeast of Manila. He pulls out a small, dark, corroded sheet of metal. He has no idea what it is. He sells it to an antique dealer for next to nothing. The dealer eventually brings it to the National Museum of the Philippines. The museum is stumped. The inscription on it doesn't match anything familiar. It's clearly old, but what is it? They call in a Dutch anthropologist named Antonune Pastma, a scholar who had spent decades living in the Philippines studying indigenous cultures. Pastma takes one look and starts translating.

[00:11:52]What he deciphers changes not just what historians knew about Philippine writing, it changes what historians knew about Philippine civilization itself.

[00:12:02]The Lagona copper plate inscription, that's what it's now called, dates to Monday, April 21st, 900 CE, 900 common era, over,00 years ago. It is the oldest known calendardated document ever found in the Philippines. The date was verified using the Saka calendar referenced in the inscription Shaka year 822 month of Vishaka confirmed to map precisely to April 21st 900 on the Julian calendar locked in real undeniable. So what does this thousand-year-old document say? Royal proclamation, sacred text, ancient warrior decree. It's a receipt. Well, technically it's a debt forgiveness document. A chief of Tondo declares that a man named Nam Warren and all his descendants are absolved of a debt of gold complete with witnesses, a date, a location, the oldest written document in the Philippines. Is basically an invoice marked paid. But here's what this piece of copper is actually telling us. In the year 900 CE, more than 6 and a half centuries before the Spanish arrived, the Philippines already had formal legal systems, written documentation of civic transactions, connections to the Japanese kingdom of Madong, trade relationships embedded in the wider networks of Indian influenced maritime Southeast Asia. The inscription contains old Malay loaded with Sanskrit loan words and old Japanese vocabulary. proof that these islands were plugged into a sophisticated international world of commerce and culture centuries before anyone from Europe sailed within a thousand miles of them. For context, in the year 900 CE, England was still 86 years away from William the Conqueror and the Domesday Book. The Philippines had written legal records. This was not a primitive archipelago waiting to be civilized. This was a functioning, literate, legally sophisticated society already connected to the world. And one small corroded receipt proved it all.

[00:14:20]Okay, so here's where things get complicated and honestly a little heartbreaking. When Spanish colonization consolidated its grip on the Philippines through the late 1500s and into the 1600s, Bayain didn't immediately vanish.

[00:14:37]The missionaries were actually using it in early printed religious materials, a practical communication bridge. But over the following decades, the incentives in Filipino society quietly, steadily shifted. Learning the Latin alphabet meant access, a colonial clerk's job, a notary's income, the ability to navigate the new power structure. The colonial system didn't need to ban Bayain. It just made it economically unnecessary.

[00:15:08]And remember what Babaiene was written on bamboo and leaves. There were no babayin stone libraries to pass down, no permanent monuments to visit. This is what linguists call script death. And it almost never looks like a dramatic murder. It looks like a slow signal fade, like a radio station losing power one watt at a time. Nobody announces the last broadcast. One day you just realize the frequency is silent. By 1745, when Toteness wrote his grim observation, it had been less than 200 years since Spanish colonization began in earnest.

[00:15:53]200 years to go from near universal literacy in a script to near total extinction. That's seven or eight generations of people. That's how fast cultural memory dissolves when the material conditions stop supporting it.

[00:16:10]And now here is the most genuinely strange irony in this entire story. The reason we know as much as we do about Bayain today, its grammar, its characters, its funological rules is almost entirely because Spanish missionaries documented it. They wrote detailed grammar guides describing exactly how Bayain worked. They documented it while they were simultaneously replacing it. The colonizers are in a deeply uncomfortable twist some of the primary sources that preserved knowledge of Bayain from modern scholars and revivalists. History is not clean. History refuses to fit the story we want to tell about it. And that's how a script nearly disappears forever.

[00:17:04]Now, let me tell you about the man who helped bring it back and the revolution that made it dangerous. Fast forward late 1800s. The Philippines has been under Spanish colonial rule for nearly 300 years. 300. That's longer than the United States has existed as a country.

[00:17:24]And a generation of Filipino intellectuals, many educated in Europe, are coming home with something burning in their chests. Enter Joseé Rzol, novelist, of themologist, polymath, the man whose face is on the Philippine 1 peso coin. He wrote essays arguing that pre-colonial Filipino civilization was sophisticated and advanced and that vibain was proof of it. the intellectual architect of a revolution he never fully intended to start. And then there's Andreas Bonifasio where Rzol was the thinker. Bonifasio was the man who acted. He founded the Katypunan, a secret revolutionary society dedicated to overthrowing Spanish rule. They met in basements by candlelight, recruited in whispers, operated under Spanish noses for years. And when it came time to choose an emblem for their movement, a symbol that would mean everything without saying anything out loud, they reached back past the Spanish, past the colonizers, all the way back. They chose a single baby character, ca just one symbol. That character, that single curved brushstroke became the emblem of Filipino resistance. They called Bayain the Sulat Bayani, the hero script. Think about the power of that choice. You take a writing system that colonialism spent two centuries erasing from public life and you make it the logo of your revolution. You're saying we haven't forgotten where we came from. You tried to erase us, but here we are riding in our own letters, fighting for our own land. And the Katypunan's imagery combining the Bayain CA with the sun symbol directly inspired the Philippine flag itself. The eight rays of that flag sun represent the eight provinces that first rose in revolt. The visual thread connecting a pre-colonial script to a modern nation's flag runs straight and unbroken. A script born in India, island hopped to the Philippines, nearly erased by colonialism, resurrected as the symbol of independence.

[00:19:49]That is one of the most extraordinary arcs in the history of any writing system on Earth.

[00:19:56]All right, we've come full circle back to the present. And now that you know the full journey, the Bayain revival we opened with hits completely differently, right? Today's movement isn't just about aesthetics. Though the script is genuinely gorgeous. Those flowing curved characters are beautiful. It's about something far bigger. Filipino communities in diaspora, especially in the United States, Canada, and Australia, have been rediscovering Bayain as a form of identity reclamation. People whose families immigrated generations ago, who grew up in Los Angeles or Chicago or Sydney, are learning this script as a way of reaching back. Filipino American Babai artist Christian Kabouai has said something that cuts to the core of it.

[00:20:43]The heart and soul of a country is its culture. The problem is that we don't value it due to our colonial mentality.

[00:20:52]That phrase colonial mentality is doing heavy lifting. Colonialism at its most effective doesn't just occupy your land.

[00:21:01]It convinces the occupied people that their own culture was never worth much to begin with. Bamin's revival is in part a direct psychological reckoning with that legacy.

[00:21:14]Now the revival is not without its own complications. And I want to be honest about that. The Philippines has over 170 living languages and dozens of related indigenous scripts. The Kuliton of the Kapampangan people, the Hanuno and Buhid of Muro, the Tagbani of Palawan. These are distinct scripts with their own communities and their own survival struggles. And some of their advocates argue that privileging Bayain as the national script repeats the exact kind of toalagentric cultural dominance that has historically marginalized other Filipino identities. So the question of which script to revive and how is genuinely politically complex inside the Philippines today. And that complexity deserves to be named, not glossed over.

[00:22:05]There's also the practical question, can you really revive a script when most modern Filipinos can't read it? Some linguists are genuinely skeptical, and they have a point. But here's what I keep coming back to. Script revival movements rarely need to succeed completely to matter. The real value isn't whether every Filipino ends up reading their morning news in Bayin. The real value is in the act of remembering, in choosing to say, "This existed. This was ours. It was beautiful." And we choose not to forget it. Because history that is deliberately forgotten is history that can be erased again. And this time, there might not be a copper plate in a riverbed to save it. Okay, one final geek detour before the big finish. And this one ties the whole thing together in a really satisfying way. Linguists who study writing systems have found something fascinating about abugidas like Babai. They can actually be more efficient for certain types of languages than standard alphabets are.

[00:23:12]In languages like Tagalog, the syllable is the fundamental rhythmic unit of meaning. Tagalog is organized around syllable beats in a way that English with its clusters, reduced vowels, and complex consonant endings really isn't.

[00:23:27]So, a writing system that maps directly to syllable units is a more natural phological fit for Tagalog than a standard alphabet. Here's the best analogy I've got. Imagine someone forced you to play jazz using sheet music written for a classical orchestra. You could technically do it, but it would always feel slightly off because the notation wasn't built for that kind of music. That's what using the Latin alphabet for Tagalog is. Functional, yes. A natural fit, debatable. Babai was designed from the ground up for these languages. The instrument and the notation were made for each other.

[00:24:06]There's also research in cognitive neuroscience showing that the type of writing system you learn shapes the neural pathways you build for language processing. Studies on learners of Japanese, Chinese, and Latin alphabet languages show measurably different brain activation patterns depending on the script type. Abugidas occupy a fascinating middle space, a different cognitive workout. Not harder, just different. Some Filipino educators argue that introducing Babaieen early, even just as a supplemental activity, could actually strengthen Tagalog literacy skills by making learners consciously aware of syllable structure in a way that Latin alphabet learning doesn't.

[00:24:50]That is not romantic nostalgia making that argument. That is applied linguistics making a practical case for a 400year-old script based on how human brains actually process language. A script that island hopped from India, took root in the Philippines in the 1300s, survived colonization, fueled a revolution, and ended up on people's wrists. Also happens to be a cognitively efficient match for the language it was built for. It wasn't just symbolically valuable. It was good at its job all along. So, let's bring it all home.

[00:25:27]Bayin is not just a pretty script. It's not a tattoo trend. It's not a history lesson you didn't get in school. It's a story about how civilization moves.

[00:25:39]Carried across oceans on trade boats, baked into the shapes of giant clamshells, scratched onto bamboo that would rot before the century was out.

[00:25:49]Pressed into copper that outlasted a thousand years. Printed inside the very religious documents meant to replace it.

[00:25:57]Scrolled on revolutionary pamphlets in the dark. and finally inscribed in ink into living skin. Permanent at last.

[00:26:07]It's a story about how colonial power actually works. Not through conquest alone, but through the slow, patient erosion of what a people believes about itself. Through making sophisticated mean European and primitive mean indigenous. The most dangerous thing colonialism ever took from the Philippines was not the land, not the labor, not even the language. It was the confidence to believe that what came before was worth keeping. And it's a story about something humans do across every culture and every era that I find genuinely moving. we remember. Even when the evidence is gone, even when the bamboo has rotted and the palm leaves have crumbled and there are no stone monuments to visit. The Filipino ancestors who wrote in Babayin didn't know their script would survive. They wrote on materials they knew would decompose. They couldn't have predicted that one small sheet of copper tossed into a riverbed would survive,00 years to tell their story. They couldn't have known that their script would become the logo of a revolution. They couldn't have known it would one day be inked onto someone's wrist in Los Angeles. They wrote anyway. And today, young Filipinos born in Manila, in Los Angeles, in Sydney, in London are learning those same 17 curved symbols.

[00:27:36]Not because anyone is making them, not because their economy requires it, but because something in them knows there is a part of their identity written in those characters waiting. The lost script is being found again, and that honestly is one of the most human things I have ever heard.

[00:27:58]Now, there's one more piece of this story I haven't told you yet, because Bayane is not alone. Across Southeast Asia, from the Bat scripts of Sumatra to the Lantara of Sula to the Kuliton of Pampanga, there is a network of related indigenous scripts all experiencing a simultaneous awakening right now all at once. And that is not a coincidence. We are going to cover exactly that in the next video. Make sure you're subscribed and you've hit that bell because that one drops soon. And once you see the full map of where these scripts connect, you will look at Southeast Asia completely differently. All right, that is it for today's deep dive into Babayin, the ancient Filipino script that survived colonization, fueled a revolution, and is somehow thriving in the 21st century. Before you close this tab, two things. First, if this video gave you something, a new perspective, a fact you want to text someone, a feeling you weren't expecting, share it. Hit that share button and send it to one person who would care about this story.

[00:29:09]That is the single most powerful thing you can do for this channel. Second, comments. Here is your final question.

[00:29:17]If you were getting one word tattooed in, what would it be and why? I am reading every single answer. Drop it below right now. And two more quick things. If you're new here, welcome. We do this kind of deep dive historical storytelling all the time. So, hit that subscribe button and ring the bell so you never miss an episode. And if you learned something today, which I genuinely hope you did, smash that like button. It takes 2 seconds and it helps this channel more than you know. Every single click matters. We'll see you in the next one. And hey, wherever you are right now, whatever you're carrying today, remember that somebody somewhere wrote your story on bamboo. They couldn't know if it would survive. They wrote it anyway. Salamat.