There was a girl from grade school whom my classmates talked about in hushed voices, mimicking their mothers as they passed one dirty gossip upon another to neighbors. Her name was Eliza, she was in second grade when I was in grade one. There was nothing striking about Eliza. She’s got regular features, plain in a not-ugly kind of way. But what caught my classmates’ interest were the splotches of freckles on Eliza’s face which became more visible as you get closer.
Those freckles were what we were talking about one day when the sun hung in the sky at 4:00 PM. Jocelyn, in one of her adult-like acts whispered to Divina and Lailah as she settled on the ground and crossed her legs, “She’s got it last Lenten season.” Her whisper loud enough for me to hear and asked what is the connection between the Lent and her freckles.
“Her Lola told Nanay that she fried dried fish on a Holy Friday,” Divina interjected as if she made sense to me.
Sensing my incredulity, Analyn whose intelligence was beyond her age lifted her eyes from the book lying open on her lap and turned to me saying, “You are not supposed to fry anything on a Holy Friday. People ought to be fasting or eating simple foods. But because Eliza fried dried fish last Holy Friday, she got the curse…the freckles.”
I did not buy my friends’ stories that time. I was more convinced that Eliza’s freckles came out because she’s nearing puberty, like the pimples I saw on my brother’s face the time he reached 14. When it was already five PM and the classrooms were closing, we picked up our bags and tugged at our skirts thoughts of home heavy in our minds. Eliza and her freckles were forgotten but not until I told my mother her story. Superstition was what she thought of it. I thought so too. Nevertheless, I did not volunteer to fry anything during Holy Fridays since then.
It was not after a few months later, in an actual celebration of Lent, that I stumbled upon another “superstition”—no one should take a bath on a Holy Friday. Fresh and scrubbed I came over to my godmother’s house to play with her grandchildren when I asked if they have also taken a bath. My little friends Arnel and Gina shook their heads. “Why?”
Nanay Rosa, my godmother, who was busy stirring porridge in a clay pot drew me to her and explained, “Because Jesus died in Holy Friday and he wouldn’t be around to watch over and protect people from harm.” I wanted to reason “But Jesus died centuries ago and He’s now watching over us in heaven,” but decided against it or else my Nanay Rosa would get cross and forbid her children to play with me, a young ereje as Torquemada would have called me had he been alive. I saw pictures of the inquisition in my Mother’s book one time with the dungeons and instruments of torture that never failed to arouse terror.
As I gotten older I encountered even more “superstitions” that people adhered to during the Holy Week. Male neighbors, fathers most of them, would sit on stones by the roadside, exchange banter, draw figures on the sand with a twig in order to bring home a point. Noy Oscar, a guy with pink cheeks and golden beard whom I fancied looked a lot like Jesus would start the discussion. “This Friday is a good time for fulfilling the tahas.” Tahas is a Cebuano word that literally meant mission in English. But in the light of faith healing, black magic and supernatural powers, tahas referred to the set of rituals which include going to church during midnight, sleeping in a cemetery at night and going inside the cave that a young apprentice of oracion has to fulfill—sort of a rite of passage. Oracion is a Cebuano corruption of the Latin word for prayer which came to denote a person’s power to cure illnesses and rebuke evil spirits with the recitation of incomprehensible Latin prayers. “Oracion, devocium, seculare, secolorum…” And so it came to be known that Lolo Caciong, my mother’s uncle, visited caves during Holy Week in order to renew his healing powers.
Around this time too, parents fed their kids with stories of snake becoming even more poisonous and menacing so that no one and nothing was left stirring about the place except the leaves and the beetles up the trees.
These and many more superstitions I heard when I was a kid. To the modern and the urbane mind these things bordered from the silly to the preposterous. How many times in my youth had I laughed at and defied these beliefs in order to prove people wrong? For this, there was a time I thought I was way above my peers. I was like the young and over excitable student who stumbled upon a rich source of knowledge known only to a few. In my denunciation of those beliefs as primitive, superstitious and false, I was almost the semantic positivist who believes that the “only language that means anything is language which refers to things, events, and relations in the physical world.” If there is nothing akin to it in the physical world, then, it does not refer to anything and is therefore relegated to the realm of the meaningless and the nonsense. I failed to see that these same beliefs contain what Philip Wheelwright in his The Burning Fountain, A Study in the Language of Symbolism called “a set of depth-meanings with far-reaching significance within a widely shared cultural perspective”.
“Superstitions” are ways of understanding the world reflecting the mind’s efforts at integration where otherwise incomprehensible concepts of space, time, number, quality, cause, and law are fitted into a more flexible and organic manner. Kant propositioned that “all knowledge involves a synthesizing activity of the mind; that in the every act of knowing an object the mind contributes those lines of connection whereby the particulars of sense are combined into an intelligible unity.” Thus, in order for us to understand these “superstitions”, we have to look at them in the context of the place and milieu that engendered them.
Transposing this Kantian principle to existing beliefs, frying and freckles specifically, we know that there is a scientific explanation to freckles, that of photoaging and genetics. But a mind who cannot conceive of the combinations of cells that gave birth to the presence of freckles in some and the absence of such in others, and of the chemical interaction between the sun’s rays and the substances present in the skin, are bound to connect the appearance of freckles to the karmic effect (gaba) of defying the Catholic teaching of fasting, and of the more important teaching of penitence which calls for brief periods of ascetism as one’s offering to God (not taking a bath included). A very plausible explanation indeed more so for Eliza’s case where the appearance of her freckles coincided with the Holy Week providing a perfect timing and reason for people to make intelligible, simplified connections.
As for the poisonous snakes we know that the Holy Week falls on early summer when the earth starts to heat up after a long bout of rain. Naturally, snakes hibernating in ground holes and under tree roots and rocks would come out to cool themselves, to mate, to eat. Unsuspecting kids would be unlucky if they happen to cross path with an alarmed and hungry vermin. But sometimes kids don’t listen to parents’ admonitions. Summer is perfect for tobogganing down the hills anyway. And the wild berries are turning, not to mention the guavas one can pick along the way. But parents found that God inspires awe, reverence and fear among children. And when they used God’s death and words on them, children listen. Parents were only attempting to be good psychologists here, actually. This is culture in action, some of the events and thoughts that exist in our midst find themselves couched within bigger symbols with archetypal meanings. Things that do not make sense to the objective mind do exist and gain meaning within the larger context of culture. As John Middleton Murry remarked to John Clare’s description of the primrose—“crimp and curdled leaf…its little brimming eye…”—“it is surely an accurate description, but an accurate with an accuracy unknown to and unachievable by science.” And our superstitions are also accurate with the accuracy inconceivable to science.
As my young friend Analyn sagaciously commented that afternoon we sat on the Bermuda grass and talked about getting freckles from frying something on a Holy Friday, “It does not matter if you don’t believe it. But you don’t lose a thing if you observe it either.”
