tradition and revolt: the katipunan

The Katipunan as the initiator of the 1896 armed uprising probed how the revolution got its flame fanned from below. The rapidity in which Katipunan gathered fire was on one hand caused by Andres Bonifacio’s manifesto, Kalayaan, which was pasyon-like in its traditional form. While the initiation rites in the Katipunan may have Masonic origins, the group eventually customized them for members—peasant and workmen by class—to be familiarized. Furthermore, the Katipunan movement seemed to analogize their quest for kalayaan with the liberation of Bernardo Carpio, the mythical king of the Tagalogs, whose prison cave in the mountains of San Mateo, Rizal became a pilgrimage site of Bonifacio and other Katipuneros. Other Katipunan documents were coherent in that they helped mold the people’s lakaran into the holy quest for kalayaan that it was.