(Note: In commemoration of the celebration of the National Flag Day come May 28, I feel that it is but proper to republish this article from "The Far Eastern FREEMASON" 2nd Quarter 2007 edition, with the hope that it will enlighten people who will read it and will pass it to those who are still uninformed. May everyone who reads this enjoy and feel honored and proud of our heritage, withersoever dispersed!)
By : Ill. Reynold S. Fajardo, 33ยบ
PGM, Grand Lodge of the Philippines
Time and again it has been asserted that masonry played an important role in the design of the Philippine flag and that some of its symbols were meant to memorialize the Craft. These assertions are essentially plausible, for the man principally responsible for its design - President Emilio Aguinaldo - was a zealous masonic partisan. In one of his speeches delivered after the Revolution, Aguinaldo said : "The successful Revolution of 1896 was masonically inspired, masonically led, and masonically executed. And I venture to say that the first Philippine Republic of which I was its humble president, was an achievement we owe, largely, to masonry and the freemasons." Speaking of the revolutionists, he added : "With God to illuminate them, and masonry to inspire them, they fought the battle of emancipation and won." During the Revolution, Aguinaldo frequently displayed a marked bias in favor of freemasons and masonry. He made membership in the masonic fraternity an important qualification for appointments to government positions. His nepotism was so pronounced, a critic of masonry denounced it as one of the "evils" of the Revolution. In his Memoirs, Felipe Calderon, the President of the Malolos Congress, claimed that the "sectarian masonic spirit" undermined the insurrection. He also argued that some serious dissensions among Filipinos originated, "more than for anything else, from the mania of Aguinaldo, or rather of his adviser, Mabini, to elevate any person who was a mason". It should not come as a surprise to anyone, therefore, if Aguinaldo decided to extol masonry in the Philippine flag.
Some of the claims made in favor of the masonic link of the Philippine flag, however, are so lavish they strain the reader's credulity. If all are to be accepted at face value, we cannot avoid the conclusion that our national emblem is a clone of the masonic banner and that all the devices and symbols used in it are of masonic origin, from the triangle, to the sun and stars, down to its colors. The lavish claims, however, were made by freemasons, therefore, the possibility of exaggeration or embellishment, owing to over enthusiasm, cannot be discounted. Moreover, Aguinaldo did not make a written affirmation of the masonic connection of the flag. On the contrary, some of his official statements do not jibe with the exceedingly generous assertions of the freemasons. A close scrutiny of the claims in favor of Freemasonry must, therefore, be undertaken. But first let us describe the Filipino flag.
National Painter Fernando Amorsolo's (1892-1972) depiction of the making of the Philippine Flag.
The Hong Kong designed flag that Aguinaldo brought with him from his exile on board the US dispatch boat McCullock, and which became the official flag of the first Philippine Republic, consisted of two horizontal stripes, blue on top and red below. It had a white equilateral triangle at the hoist that is smaller than that in our flag today. Within the triangle, at its center, a mythological sun was depicted with eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth in black, bearing eight rays without any minor rays for each, and three five-pointed stars, one at each angle of the triangle. All these devices were in gold or yellow color.
