User:Cyrusgil/sandbox

Tapar(Babaylan, Native of Panay) Initially adapting Catholicism (Established his own form of heretic religion).

In 1663, a native revolt with religious overtones was led by Tapar in Oton, Iloilo. He was a Visayan Babaylan, native of Panay & sorcerer who was a new convert to Catholicism. He founded a new heretic religion which was a modified form of Christianity. He proclaimed himself "God Almighty" and went around garbed in a woman's dress. Tapar's syncretic religion appropriated Catholic terminologies and ignored the Spanish priests because Tapar believed that they had their own "popes", "bishops", and "priests", as well as "Jesus Christ", "Holy Ghost" and "Trinity" who could minister to them in their own nativistic ways.

The Spanish curate (Friar) assigned to the town of Oton, Friar Frau Francisco de Mesa, tried to persuade the people to go back to Christianity but he was killed in the process. Tapar's group burned the church and the priest's house, and fled to the mountains. Spanish troops were sent to Oton and by employing hired spies, the Spaniards caught up with the principal leaders who, in the process of fighting back, were killed. Their corpses were carried back to the port of Iloilo, and then fastened to bamboo poles in the Halawod (Jalaur) River to be fed on by crocodiles. The woman who was named as the group's "Blessed Virgin Mary" (Maria Santisima) was mercilessly impaled on a bamboo stake and placed strategically at the mouth of the Laglag (now Dueñas) River to be eaten also by crocodiles. By 1664, as claimed by the Spaniards, peace had returned to Oton. (Agoncillo 1979, Zaide 1957).